History

Myths of Sovereignty and British Isolation, IX. British connections with Europe from the Stone Age to the Anglo-Saxon Invasion

Barry Stocker History , , , , , , , , , ,

Following on from the last post on post-war Germany and British attitudes to Germany, this post will jump back to the deep history of Britain’s links with Europe, though there will be a return at some point to more recent history and current concerns. There has always been trade and movement between the island of Britain and the mainland of continental Europe going back to the Stone Age.

The dominant Bronze Age peoples are usually grouped together as Celts, as are related peoples, stretching across Europe from Ireland to Anatolia. These peoples had no consciousness of existing as a pan-European civilisation, but communities of Celts overlapped and communicated so that the Druid Celtic culture of Britain was certainly related to that of France, or what was known to the Romans as Gauls. The Druids were the priestly elite of whom we know very little except that they were essential to the structure of self-governing Celtic communities and that the Roman destruction of Druidic power was part of their almost total conquest of the Celtic world. They did not trouble to record the knowledge and culture of the Druids, and associated Celtic elites, and given the lack of literary in the Celtic world they would have had some difficulty in grasping and writing down much of it.

The loosely trans-European aspect of the Celtic world was given much more structure and substance through the Roman Empire, which created an integrated administration and Latin speaking local elites across its large territory. What is now southern England was invaded by Julius Caesar in 55 and 54 BCE, at least partly in response to connections between the Celts of Gaul and the Celts of Britain, also known as Britons, who sent assistance to Gaul against the Romans.

There was no conquest and it is not clear whether or not any was intended, but alliances were formed between Rome and some tribes of Britons, which included taking some sons of the elite to Rome to foster relations and guarantee good behaviour of the families. What was known as Britannia to the Romans was completely incorporated into the Roman system from 43 CE when the Emperor Claudius sent an invasion force, apparently including elephants. The result was the incorporation of all of what is now England, though Cornwall in the extreme southwest was perhaps never fully under Roman control, along with Wales and very variable parts of what is now Scotland.

As with everywhere else in the Roman system, military camps and garrison towns were built on a standard cross-Empire plan, with a Romanised Latin speaking elite created from the Britons to aid in administration and ensure cultural dominance. This lasted until the early fifth century CE. 410 is the traditional date given for withdrawal of Roman legions and the end of Roman rule, but this may have been more of a moment in a process where Roman legions had already largely left Britannia for Gaul to deal with civil war on the mainland and a general weakening of Roman authority fostered by sea raids and incursions from the north.

Anyway that is more than three centuries in which what is now England and Wales was incorporated into Europe by virtue of Roman Imperial authority. Towards the end of that period the senior Emperor, or Augustus, was in Constantinople while the junior Emperor, or Caesar, was in Rome or some city in Italy, so that in principle Britannia was ruled from what is now Istanbul, though that was more a matter of abstract sovereignty than administrative control.

The attacks on Britannia from the northern seas became what is now known as the Anglo-Saxon invasion, with tribes coming over from what is now northwestern Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands. The resistance of the Britons became the source of the King Arthur stories, written in Welsh, English, French and Breton during the Middle Ages. Welsh and Breton are of course Celtic languages. There was a special link between what is now known as Brittany and the Britons, as what was then known as ‘Amorica’ was a place of refuge for Britons fleeing Anglo-Saxons.

The Arthurian stories also mix in elements from Welsh mythology and legends of Roman soldiers, providing a very mixed, multilingual and transnational history for one of the most famous of British stories, retold in many very different ways, across centuries, but still taken as a major source of British identity at various times, particularly when English kings wanted a source of legitimacy distinct from the Normans, were Welsh like the Tudors, or when the national culture became very taken up romanticised Medieval origins as in the nineteenth century. Boudicca, the Briton tribal queen who rebelled against the Romans has also like Arthur, been taken up as a national hero in a nation dominated by Anglo-Saxons.

Myths of Sovereignty and British Isolation, VIII. Germany’s post WWII contribution to market liberalism

Barry Stocker Economics, History, Politics , , , , , , , , , , ,

World War Two was largely won by the United States and the British Empire in alliance with the USSR. The idea of Britain’s place in the world being defined by its relationship with the US, a relationship in which the US is inevitably the leading partner, and is a very popular – even defining – idea for the predominant brand of sovereigntist-Eurosceptism in the UK. There is surely some paradox in holding onto a sovereigntist view, in which national sovereignty is understood in an absolute manner and national life is understood to be highly distinct, and even unique, while giving the dominant role to another country in matters of international relations, diplomacy, foreign policy, defence, intelligence and the unlimited number of areas which these are likely to spill over into, including trade and commerce.

The sovereigntist-Eurosceptic position in Britain tends to portray not only the EU as threatening sovereignty, but Germany as a threat to sovereignty as the strongest country in the EU. However it is clear enough that Germany is less strong than the United States, so what is the problem? The problem might be defined by the Eurosceptics as that the UK has transferred some sovereignty to the EU reducing the role of the British parliament, but if defence and diplomacy policy is dominated by the United States, along with other areas, there is an inevitable loss of effective parliamentary sovereignty. That the loss of sovereignty is not legally defined should not be the issue, and leaves open the possibility of greater loss of sovereignty because it is not defined by laws or treaties.

Returning to the issue of Germany, the standard sovereigntist position in Britain is dominated by those claiming to be small state free market advocates, and claim that an EU which includes Germany is allegedly a mere instrument of German interests, thus posing a threat to the possibility of a less statist Britain in economics and other matters. As the sovereigntist-Eurosceptics are normally for limiting immigration, their claim to superior purity in matters of individual rights and state power is itself lacking in credibility.

Moving back to more strictly economic issues (though of course free market economics requires a free labour market which means open immigration), Germany has not always been seen as more statist than Britain. There was a period in which Britain administered part of Germany, that is during the occupation of Germany by the Allies after World War Two, shared between the UK, USA, France, and the USSR. The occupation zones evolved into the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) in the west and the socialist-communist Soviet satellite state, the German Democratic Republic in the east.

The FRG famously experienced an economic miracle in the post-war period. The main architect was Ludwig Erhard, who was strongly influenced by the Freiburg School of free market economists, itself heavily influenced by the Austrian School of Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. Erhard had a particularly strong connection with the economist Wilhelm Röpke, who was not a member of faculty at Freiburg University, but was close to that school and was linked with it through the journal Ordo.

The economic liberalism of that period is sometimes known as Ordo liberalism, which is one of great moments in the history of market liberalism. It was a moment which came out of struggle with the British and American occupation authorities who enforced price controls, and other statist measures, and were not supportive of Erhard’s moves to liberalise the price mechanism and other aspects of the market. Erdhard had to defy the occupation authorities in announcing the end of price controls in the period in which German self-government was emerging in the period before the FRG was formed.

Erhard and Röpke developed a program in which federal Germany had a ‘social market economy’, meaning a free market economy, accompanied by a social welfare program to establish minimum living standards and the establishment of those institutions and polices thought most likely to promote a functional market economy and social consensus behind the market economy, as an antidote to the economics and politics of totalitarian statism in what had been Nazi Germany and the existing soviet model Germany in the east.

So successful and influential was this, it was a model, at least rhetorically, for the Margaret Thatcher led government elected in Britain in 1979. Thatcher’s major intellectual influence in British politics was Keith Joseph, who promoted the idea of freeing Britain from statism and collectivism by following the German social market economy. This is not something the surviving Thatcherites, and their successors who are prominent in sovereigntist-Eurosceptic circles, like to emphasise at all. This maybe goes back to the time that German unification became a possibility in the late 1980s as the Soviet Union ended its dominance of large parts of central and eastern Europe.

Thatcher as an imperial nostalgia British nationalist was instinctively opposed to a stronger Germany. Ever since Germany has been damned as a malign influence the sovereigntist Europsceptics, eager to bury memories of the long post-war period in which Germany was more of a market liberal country than Britain. They like to portray Germany as such a statist monster in economic decline that many would be surprised to check the tables of national GDP per capita (including tables adjusted for dollar based purchasing power parity) and see that Germany is ahead of Britain by a significant margin. The comparison should also take into account the issue that despite Margaret Thatcher’s nationalist reservations, the German people exercised their right to unify peacefully and democratically, so that the current Federal Republic of Germany carries the weight of eastern regions, which used to be socialist-communist and have yet to overcome the negative consequences for prosperity and enterprise culture. There are certainly some measures by which Germany has a more statist economy now than Britain, including the levels of public spending and the role of banks linked to regional governments, which suggests an inherently robust market economy, stronger than Britain’s in some ways, able to survive the less market liberal aspects of German political economy.

The period in which Margaret Thatcher did introduce more market based economics and public policy in Britain, an admirable achievement despite her less admirable inclinations towards national, social, and cultural conservatism, began with a centre-left government in the FRG, which had been far more market oriented than the centre-left government which preceded Thatcher in Britain. The FRG under Helmut Schmidt, at least towards the end of his term made cuts to public spending and the public deficit, which mean that it made a contribution, if a very moderate one, to the general shift of industrial democracies towards market liberalisation associated with the 1970s in its beginnings and with the 1980s in its strongest phase.

Myths of Sovereignty and British Isolation, VII.

Barry Stocker History, Politics , , , , , , , , ,

This post continues from the last post‘s assessment of early twentieth century British military and foreign policy in Europe, in a series of criticisms of sovereigntist-Eurosceptic assumptions of Britain’s separateness and superiority in relation to mainland continental Europe, and is rather long because bad decisions of the 1930s had consequences in World War Two, making it difficult to split the periods into separate posts. After the Treaty of Lausanne of 1926, the most notable aspect of British foreign policy was appeasement of Nazi Germany from Hitler’s accession to power in 1933 to the German occupation of Czechoslovakia beyond the Sudetenland which Czechoslovakia had been forced to give Germany in autumn of 1938. Spring 1939 represents the point at which Britain (and France) abandoned the policy of Appeasement, which had left Germany rearmed, stronger, and larger, and mobilised for war.

There had been an associated appeasement of Fascist Italy, particularly with regard to its invasion of Ethiopia, the one African state which was fully recognised and fully independent at that time. Britain also acted to prevent aid to the Spanish Republic during the Civil War of 1936 to 1939 against the alliance of traditionalist conservatives and fascist Falangists led by Francisco Franco, though Franco received a high level of aid and military assistance from Germany and Italy. It would add too much to this long series of posts to get into the issues round the Spanish Civil War, but being as brief as possible it has to be said that the Civil War came about through extreme polarisation, sometimes violent, between left and right, and was not a simple case of a bunch of fascists overthrowing a model democracy. Nevertheless, the left was in power in 1936 due to elections, and was not in the process of abolishing democracy in Spain, which was abolished by Franco, including the destruction of autonomy of the most distinct regions of Spain, and associated cultural repression. This followed not only the use of military force, but many massacres of prisoners of wars and civilians. This is hardly a glorious moment for British influence in Europe, unless support for far-right dictatorship in preference for a highly stressed but real democracy is glorious, and does not really support any picture of a uniquely moral and beneficial Britain.

The policy in any case backfired in World War Two. Hitler was not willing to offer enough to Franco to tempt him to enter the war on Germany’s side, but in the earlier part of the war, Spain’s embassies and intelligence networks were used to subvert and undermine the British war effort, in addition to which, Franco sent a division of volunteers to fight under German command on the Soviet front. There were more than 150 divisions in the German invasion of the USSR, so this was a small contribution, but nevertheless a contribution to fighting a country then allied with Britain. There was just nothing glorious or admirable about British policy in Spain in the late thirties.

The less than admirable British (in partnership with France) policy towards Germany continued after the declaration of war on Germany, after the latter’s invasion of Poland in September 1939. No help was given to Poland and the only attack on Germany was a brief French assault on the Saarland which was not executed with any real energy, certainly not enough to detract from German aggression in Poland, and troops were withdrawn soon after the Fall of Poland. This was a shared failure of British and French policy, since it came under the Anglo-French Supreme War Council.

Germany was essentially unimpeded in invading Poland, with the USSR joining in after a few weeks. This was followed by the Phoney War, in which Britain and France failed to attack Germany at all though a state of war existed and Poland had been occupied. There was a passive policy of waiting for a German attack on France and other west European countries. The handing over to Germany of all initiative in the war of course had disastrous consequences. I will just mention one significant detail of the Fall of France, illustrating the failure of previous British (and French) policy: many of the better German tanks were in fact Czechoslovak tanks produced in what had become Germany after Britain (and France) abandoned Czechoslovakia in September 1938.

Winston Churchill’s refusal to negotiate with Hitler after the Fall of France was highly admirable and correct, but should not distract us from the reality of joint British and French failure and no sense of superiority over France is appropriate given that the German forces were faced by the natural barrier of the English Channel, and no one doubts that if the German forces could have got directly into southern England then the result would have been a military collapse at least as quick as that of France.

The British government’s refusal to negotiate did lead to the danger of invasion, which was averted by success in the Battle of Britain between the German and British airforces, on the basis of great bravery and determination from the aircrews and moral courage at the political level. The overwhelming majority of British people of all political inclinations take pride in that history and there is not criticism offered here of that attitude.

However, it is possible to take that attitude too far and inevitably the sovereigntist Eurosceptics do. Some individuals on that side might be a bit more careful and cautious about this, but certainly as a whole that attitude draws on the idea that British resistance to Hitler marks it as uniquely heroic and as somehow morally superior to those countries which were so morally weak as to become occupied, and which then collaborated with the Nazis in the sense that one way or another governments acceptable to the Nazis and willing to work with them appeared, and of course no other government could have survived in occupied territory.

The successful resistance of the British owes rather a lot to the seas separating Britain from the European mainland, the North Sea, English Channel, and the Atlantic Ocean. 1940 was probably too soon for Germany to organise a sea born invasion anyway, except though a total destruction of British naval and air forces which was not very likely. There was actually some demobilisation of German forces after the fall of France, and Britain was outproducing Germany in fighter planes, so Hitler was never really focused and committed with regard to an invasion of Britain. Had Hitler continued to concentrate on Britain after aborting a planned invasion in the autumn of 1941, when Herman Göring failed to deliver the promised quick and complete destruction of the Royal Air Force by the Luftwaffe, the situation could have been very different. The decision to invade the Soviet Union in summer 1941 meant that the vast overwhelming majority of armed forces were transferred to the east saved Britain.

Against the chauvinism of the sovereigntist-Eurosceptic approach, it should be noted that a part of Britain, or at least territory closely associated with Britain did fall to the Nazis without fighting and collaborated with German occupation until the general German surrender of May 1945. That is the Channel Islands, which are closer to Normandy in northwestern France than Britain and are not part of the UK, but which nevertheless are under the sovereign power of Britain and have no independence in defence and foreign relations. German forces landed in these islands and occupied them in 1940, because the British government decided they could not be defended and the King took on the duty of telling the islanders to offer no resistance. Local administration collaborated with the Nazis who used slave labour from eastern Europe in the islands. There was no provision land in the islands when the western Allies landed in Normandy in the summer of 1944 and the local collaboration with Nazi occupation went on until the final surrender of Germany.

We should not make light of the difficulties Britain had in defending or liberating small thinly populated islands of little strategic importance outside its coastal waters, but it has to be said that this little story does take some of the plausibility away from chauvinistic sovereigntist-Eurosceptic tendencies to turn World War Two into a story of British superiority over cowardly collaborationist Continentals. The very real suffering of Britain was small compared with the suffering of occupied countries, particularly in eastern Europe, and the courage of those who joined partisan and resistance movements in occupied Europe must command the highest respect, and surely even higher respect than that justly given to British leaders, ordinary people, and soldiers determined to carry on fighting the Nazis after the Fall of France.

Next post, Britain and Europe after Word War Two

Morons of the World Unite!

Jacques Delacroix History , , , , ,

In 1848, before he really had really learned to think, Karl Marx emitted the famous call, “Workers of the World Unite!” That was in the “Communist Manifesto,” communism lite for those who move their lips when they read. The workers of the world never united. They continued enthusiastically to eviscerate one another in war as before. The few times the workers actually came together, mostly but not exclusively on a national basis, they brought tyrants to power. The Communist tyrants proceeded to impoverish them like never before. They also killed many of them, both on purpose and through gross negligence. The remaining Communist countries: China (not communist at all, an amazingly successful Mafia state), North Korea, a deadly operetta permanently set in the fifties, Cuba, barely kept afloat by generous remittances from Cuban emigrants. Incidentally, the open-handed cousins from America mostly reached Florida with the shirts on their backs. They became rich as waiters and parking attendants in Miami while their doctor relatives back in Cuba seldom had enough to eat. You can’t have everything, a socialist paradise and fried chicken on demand.

Since 1848, in the midst of one socialist/communist debacle after another, and unrelated to them, something appalling has happened: Mr Marx’s “workers” evaporated. I mean that it’s completely clear that Marx referred to industrial workers specifically, what we would call today “blue collar” workers. He explicitly did not mean the poor in a general way. On the contrary, he wrote scathing words about the lack of social discipline of the lumpenproletariat, the “poor in rags.” As for the peasantry, still quite numerous in Marx’s day, his followers had to perform intellectual acrobatics to present them as other than natural enemies of the Revolution. Stalin himself spoke eloquently of the “non-antagonistic contradictions” between the working class and the peasantry. That was after he had starved to death millions of the latter to feed the former. He said he had good reasons to do so. (Allegedly “scientific” socialism brought to the world deadly pedantry, a trait seldom before encountered but all around us again as I write. See below.) Anyway, what I wanted to say before I got waylaid is that in the century and half after Marx, the “workers” mostly vanished from advanced countries. In small part, it was because primitive manufacturing moved to poor countries such as China. To an overwhelming extent, it was because of technological progress.: One semi-literate guy half conked out on grass sitting at a machine makes more nails in one day than ten master iron workers made in one month when Marx was writing the Communist Manifesto. (I am sure of this because I watch “How Things Are Made” on TV).

Now, as I have said, I am spending a lot of time at the beach these days, near downtown Santa Cruz. I have almost become one of the Moms there. Speaking of which, a Mom with two little kids addresses me the other day. I am pretty sure she is not hitting on my although there is a dearth of functional males around. I think she is just bored or worried. She is old enough – in her mid thirties- to be used to defer to male authority on how things work. She comments on the fact that the beach where her children and my own granddaughter wade in the water is posted for high E-coli content.* This happens every summer on that beach. (See my moving essay on the topic.) To make a long story short, there are fish in the water and these attract seabirds that do what they must do after they eat. And then, there are the hundred or so resident sea lions. I re-assure the Mom that probably none of these E-coli are of human origin. After two years of drought, there is no running surface water anywhere near the beach. There is no conceivable way for human feces to reach that particular beach, with two exceptions. First, it’s possible to imagine that some homeless, caught short would deposit somewhere on that beach. (Large number of homeless in Santa Cruz, many not quite all there.) In fifteen years frequenting the beaches of Santa Cruz, I have never seen any evidence of such, not once. Toddler with imperfect diapers are another story. But whatever E-coli they leave behind cannot be nearly as bad as, say, your average grocery store shopping cart: I have seen a study (I can’t find it) that said that 75% showed traces of human feces. (I would guess, from adorable toddlers). I point out to the Mom that seagull E-coli would feel uncomfortable in the gut of a child who eats fish once a week at most. She seems unconvinced. Besides, the beach stinks a little at the moment. Offshore winds have brought in a pile of kelp that is allowed to rot slowly nearby. (Myself, I like the smell of marine decomposition, enthusiastic abstract “environmentalists” often less so because they tend to be sissies.)

In spite of of her mistrust of my explanations, the woman wants to talk. It happens all the time, either because of my still-advantageous physique or because I have a French accent. (Do I sound snarky? Sure thing.) Soon, the conversation drifts, as often happens in conversations between strangers reveling in their idleness; (as happens all the time between women at the beach, I must testify). Somehow, we end up talking about cheese made from milk that has not been pasteurized. I let her know that such cheese is freely available in France though clearly labeled. I also tell her – twice – that several people die in France each year from consuming such cheese. The woman replies by deploring that non-pasteurized dairy products are generally not allowed in the US. She tells me sadly that it’s difficult to eat only “organic” in this country. I begin telling her that the two things are unrelated. Artisan cheese makers of unpasteurized cheese are free to feed their animals irradiated, pesticide laced, genetically modified feed all they want. The products they offer for consumption must simply have been made from raw milk, milk that has not been brought briefly to a high temperature to kill bacteria.

Get it: An adult woman who is nervous about highly diluted bird bacteria in the ocean is craving the guaranteed concentrated bacteria content of a cheese that is medically proven to kill at least some people.

At last I am curious and I want to find out what deep well of ignorance this woman was pulled out of. The answer feels like a big slap in the face: She works in the radiology department at Stanford University Medical Center, a teaching hospital!

Now, my general expectations are low because I was a teacher for thirty years. It’s an occupation that induces a sort of reflexive humility: Listen to your students and measure the immensity of your failure. But what I am facing here is not simple ignorance. It’s a deeply consistent commitment to inconsistency; it’s the aggressive pursuit of disinformation. It’s militant moronism. As I often say – sagely – what makes a moron is not simple ignorance, which can be innocent, or the result of mere laziness – it’s a fierce attachment to one’s ignorance. To be a moron requires demonstrations of spirited ignorance, you might say. And with numbers comes courage, including the courage to believe stupid things openly. But the numbers of the militantly ill-informed are growing thanks to the Internet because, as everybody knows, “If it weren’t true, they wouldn’t put it on the Internet.” (OK here, I am plagiarizing an old TV ad.) And those who lay in fear of everything except cheese and have no basic understanding of how the world works, those who rely blindly on experts, are bound to live like little children who fear monsters under their beds. They want to believe that there is someone looking out for them, if not God then, the Government. So, after its ignominious defeat under the name of Communism, collectivism has not said its last word. It has returned under the guise of ignorant naturalism, the specifically, urban, unlettered belief that nature is benevolent and that it has a Grand Design just for us. The followers want government to force us to live according to the imagined design. Why not try injections of cobra venom, I asked the cheese-loving woman on the beach, it’s completely organic? The black humor went right above her head. Now, I have a vague fear she might propose it to others. Fortunately, cobra venom is hard to come by.

Militant morons are incomparably better interconnected than the working class was in Karl’s time. They are very good at enforcing conformity to their dogma. More importantly, – stay with me here – they stand in as clear relation to the means of communications as the working class stood to the means of production when Marx was freezing his buns in the British Library. Nothing is lost yet. There can be another try. So, one more time, “Morons of the World Unite!”

*I do not deny that bird E-coli can make people sick. I just don’t know. What I know for sure is that any such case of illness would be on the front page of the local, paper, a liberal rag that adores all bad news. There is also the possibility that bird E-coli cause mysterious illnesses that go underground for a long time so that any causal link between them and symptoms is lost to the view. Do you believe this? If you do I have something to sell you.

Myths of Sovereignty and British Isolation, VI. From the 1832 Reform Act to World War One

Barry Stocker History, Politics , , , , , , ,

In this post, a look at comparative growth of democracy in Europe along with Britain’s role in World War One and subsequent European diplomacy.

Britain made some progress towards extending voting rights beyond a very tiny minority in the Reform Act of 1832, which was also a law to make constituency distribution relate to the population of the time, particularly the expansion of the urban population, abolish constituencies of a few voters where the MP was in practice appointed by the local dominant landlord and even out a very inconsistent voting system, reducing the number of people who could vote in at least one case. The overall right to vote was extended from about 5 per cent to about 20 per cent of the population, which did mark a genuine shift of power from the aristocracy and put Britain in a good place in terms of comparative voting rights by the standards of the time. Nevertheless, there was working class disappointment expressed in the Chartist movement which mobilised mass support, but was ignored.

The next major change came in the 1867 Reform Act, which did not introduce universal male suffrage, but did extend voting rights to a significant part of the urban working class. Universal male suffrage at the age of twenty-one did not come until after World War One, alongside suffrage at thirty for women, followed a few years later by voting rights at twenty-one for all women as well as all men. Denmark and Switzerland introduced universal male suffrage with meaningful pluralistic elections in 1848. France reverted to the lost revolutionary republican idea of universal male suffrage, though the meaning of elections was highly constrained by the rise of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte to the presidency, which he transformed into the role of Emperor. Prussia, while reserving a powers to the monarchy and preserving the power of the aristocracy through a weighting of the electoral system to the highest tax payers, did introduce universal male suffrage in 1849.

The 1867 Reform Act in Britain still left it behind these countries, particularly as France became a pluralist democracy after 1870 and a unified Germany appeared in the same year (the events are linked by the Franco-Prussian war of 1870) with universal suffrage, but the same weighting towards the upper class within the Kingdom of Prussia, the largest and most powerful part of the new German Empire, which had a distinct and dominant status within the Empire. As we can see, discussion of the comparative growth of the suffrage and political pluralism soon gets into very complicated details, which also include questions of how much power elected bodies had in relation to hereditary monarchs, so that is the end of the examples.

Anyway, the general pattern is that though Britain was ahead of just about all of Europe outside Switzerland in giving power to elected institutions, there is nothing special or exemplary about the spread of voting rights in Britain. In the nineteenth century it was certainly republics, just Switzerland then France, which established the best situations, which certainly challenges any idea of a special virtue in the British combination of monarchy and parliament. The exemplary monarchical state was Denmark rather than Britain.

Moving onto the First World War, as has already been shown, British entry was not a re-entry into European politics after a complete absence after the Battle of Waterloo. Britain was constantly engaged in European affairs and would not have entered the Great War, if it had not been concerned enough with European politics to establish alliances and have a strong view about German armies invading France and neutral Belgium.

Who to blame for World War One and the question of whether Britain should have taken part are rather divisive questions across political distinctions, so it is difficult to talk about a unified sovereigntist Eurosceptic narrative here, or indeed any political tendency, however defined, having a unified narrative. So it can at least be said that World War One does not add to any claim to the innate superiority of Britain and if Britain was right to intervene, that cannot make it more morally admirable than France and Belgium. The intervention right or wrong certainly reflected British views of its own interests in keeping northwestern Europe, the land mass facing it across the seas, out of the control of a hegemonic European power

It can at least be said that even for those who think on balance Britain was right to come to the full aid of France and Belgium, the continuation of the naval blockade of Germany, part the armistice which ended the war into 1919 was a horrifying policy of suffering imposed on an already defeated and impoverished German population, depriving Britain of any claim to rise morally above the other European powers.  In any case there is no denying that Britain was involved in European politics during the War and after in the Paris peace treaties, the revision of the Treaty of Sèvres, signed with the Ottoman Empire, in the Treaty of Lausanne signed with the Republic of Turkey in 1926.

Next post, World War II

Myths of Sovereignty and British Isolation, V: Britain and European Models

Barry Stocker History, Politics , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The last post looked at how Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws, the biggest classic of Enlightenment political thought, certainly in size and probably in importance, does not offer Britain as the model of liberty for Europe. Rounding off that argument, Germany produced its own important liberty oriented thought at the end of the eighteenth century in the work of Immanuel Kant and Wilhelm von Humboldt, in which they do not offer Britain as a model. Of course at this time Britain stood as an example of liberty, particularly in the exact period from 1792 when the French Revolution had turned highly violent and dictatorial, and European monarchies were tending to become more conservative-authoritarian in reaction.

Nevertheless, the opening phase of the French Revolution developed a much more complete vision of a equal citizens under laws they had made themselves through representative citizens than Britain itself. France was the home of great liberal thinkers such as Benjamin Constant (like Rousseau and Voltaire, Swiss in origin) and Germaine de Stael, who were  horrified by the descent of the French Revolution into state terror and then Bonapartist dictatorship. Switzerland and the variety of German states within the loose structure of an empire (the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation) gave them ideas for liberty.

Going back to Germany itself, there was a strong element of aesthetic liberalism, focused on the cultivation of individuality and individuality sensibility, which drew on the growth of German culture at that time and the history of many different states and state forms, that includes Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, and Friedrich Schlegel that had a European wide influence, including in Britain.

On the level of what was going in European nations during the eighteenth century is should be noted that the death penalty was abolished in the state of Tuscany in northern Italy in the late eighteenth century at a time when Britain was famous for widespread use of the death penalty, not just for murder and treason but for small crimes in property. The French Revolution inspired severe attacks on civil liberties in Britain and one of many rounds of state force to keep the Irish down, when the United Irishmen revolted in 1798 for Irish self-government.

Britain was largely ahead of the rest of Europe at the end of the wars with Revolutionary and Bonapartist France, but that was in large part because Britain had worked very hard to finance and encourage autocratic monarchies to take back control of Europe. Napoleon was no friend of liberty, though some British sovereigntist-Eurosceptics nevertheless celebrate him, as in Andrew Robert’s recent biography Napoleon the Great. Not for the first time a British sovereigntist shows signs of wishing to imitate European nations at times when they seem most aggressively sovereign, while holding to British separateness and superiority.

As the nineteenth century unfolded, Britain started as a nation where the existence of an elected parliament, a limited form of monarchy in the process of becoming a purely symbolic monarchy, and strong legal institutions allows a case for saying that Britain was leading the way in liberty, at least for those belonging to the most marginal and dominated parts of the state territory. However, that picture applies less and less after 1830, when the July Revolution put in place a system in France, under the Orléanist monarchy, comparable to that in Britain for promoting law, liberty, and commerce. It must be said that the preceding system introduced after the defeat of Napoleon under the restored Bourbon monarchy was directly modeled on Britain’s, but could not work like the British system, given the different national context. A lesson in the dangers of thinking that liberty can be exported and designed from abroad.

The 1848 cross-European ‘Springtime of the Peoples’ undermined the relative advantages of the British system further as republics and monarchies limited by constitutions were proclaimed in various parts of Europe. There was a big autocratic reaction reversing most but not all of this. Denmark made the most progress, with peaceful demonstrations leading to a constitutional monarchy and an elected national assembly. France reverted to autocracy under the Second Empire of Napoleon III (nephew of the famous Napoleon). However, the Second Empire did have elected bodies and however objectionable Louis-Napoleon’s seizure of sovereign power was, he was a moderate autocrat presiding over a continuing growth of civil and commercial society. If we look at models for liberty in Europe, Britain was certainly important, but so was France. Even under Napoleon III, France was a long way ahead of most of Europe in the liberties of its people and the vibrancy of the economy.

If we look at one of the most important events in nineteenth century Europe, the Risorgimento which turned Italy from multiplicity of more or less autocratic states, including the Austrian armies more of less resting on church domination of society and Austrian armies, into a unified nation; France was important in providing a model of a relatively secular liberal catholic society and in pushing for a more modernist liberal form of government in Italy. Napoleon III’s behaviour was opportunistic and designed to revive French power in Europe, but nevertheless he seems to have had a genuine sentimental attraction  to the idea of a free and unified Italy. Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, as chief minister of Sardinia-Piedmont was the major political architect of a unified Italy was impressed by both the French and British models. The ideological architect of the Risorgimento, Giuseppe Mazzini, largely lived in London and was impressed by the British type of constitutionalism and political culture, but nevertheless was also a republican and European federalist more influenced at the level of political thought by the French revolutionary and republican heritage. The military architect of the Risorgimento, Giuseppe Garibaldi, was popular in Britain, but belonged to the French republican revolutionary heritage, which he worked to spread in South America before returning to Italy.

Next post, Britain and Europe after the Springtime of the Peoples

Myths of Sovereignty and British Isolation, IV: Britain the Enlightenment model for a liberal Europe?

Barry Stocker History, Liberty , , , , , , ,

Following on from last post in this series, focused on the violent formation of the nineteenth century British state, a largely political theory post on how far Britain had a special status as a model of liberalism and then democracy in Europe. Despite all the negative aspects discussed in the last post, there was of course some overall progress in Britain in creating a society and political system based on law, tolerance, individual rights, and a commercial society with prosperity spreading to all, sooner or later, though clearly much later for the afflicted groups discussed in the last post. Now it is certainly true that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and more recently, Britain has been taken as a positive example for those wishing to promote those good things in their own political community.

The trouble with the Eurosceptic-sovereignty view is that these realities are transformed into a belief in a British legal and state community uniquely, and its very essence, prone to liberty under law and all the associated benefits, and recognised such by all Europeans gracious enough to acknowledge British superiority. Let us look at the eighteenth century discussion which is when comparisons of Britain and European states around law, liberty, civil society and so really got started. Strange as it might seem to some, earlier thinkers about liberty like Machiavelli, Grotius, and Pufendorf did not promote the idea of Britain as exemplary. The eighteenth century French Enlightenment certainly did lead to some admiring interest in Britain from that point of view. Maybe the main populariser of Enlightenment, Voltaire, was a great Anglophile. However, the really intellectually important observer in France at that time was Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, author of The Spirit of the Laws, who did visit England (but not the rest of Britain).

Montesquieu could be said to be something of an Anglophile and he has sometimes been taken as the bearer of a British model of liberty throughout Europe, as if he recognised Britain, as superior, of course to France. Though this is a familiar story in terms of the urban myths of history of political thought, it is not really plausible for the more sophisticated reader. Questions of interpretation of Montesquieu of course arise here, but there is proper interpretation of Montesquieu based on a thorough reading which could justify the view of him as possessing a political theory based on Anglophilia.

Montesquieu recognised two kinds of state compatible with liberty and ‘moderate government’, meaning government restrained by law along with a general respect for customs and moral standards. Those two types of government are monarchy and republic. Montesquieu also regarded a republic as less compatible with commercial spirit – which he strong endorsed – than monarchy, though he recognised exceptions and transitional cases. For Montesquieu, republicanism, at least in any pure form, meant some very small homogenous community with laws adopted by the people as a whole or an aristocracy. In both cases, Montesquieu thought that wealth tended to undermine the possibility of a republic, as such a state rests on putting ‘virtue’ (largely meaning patriotism and respect for law) above wealth in a very strong way. A monarchy, he thought, rested on ‘honour’ (largely meaning the search for status through wealth or through high position in the monarchical state). So a commercial society was more likely under monarchy than a republic. Montesquieu had in mind a large modern European state, which showed that to be case, France.

For Montesquieu, Britain was a disguised republic, a quite realistic assessment since political power rested with an aristocratic-oligarchic elite under a crown, which could not raise taxes or go to war without parliamentary approval. Montesquieu recognised that Britain was a great trading and commercial country, but at that time the same could be said for France which had a much larger population and therefore was a more important example of commercial society. Anyway, though Montesquieu had some complimentary things to say about Britain, he regarded it as culturally inferior to France, a view he expressed in his own way partly through complaining that there was less enjoyable social relations between men and women, a sign of backwardness.

Montesquieu was sceptical about the relevance of republics to the modern world except as city states, like Venice, or those German cities which were self-governing, or better for reasons of strength and survival, as federations of city states (or maybe rural communities of similar population), like the Netherlands of the time (known as the United Provinces) and Switzerland. Montesquieu looks at so many perspectives and considers so many examples that there is some difficulty in saying what his model was, but the evidence is for a choice of the French monarchy, emphasising how much power in reality rested in institutions other than the monarchy, such as law courts, town governments, universities, and the church. If he was not arguing for the primacy of the French model, he must have favoured the federated republics of his time. He has more to say in detail about Britain and it had good things about it, but there is no way in which Montesquieu had an Anglophile political theory which legitimates soveriegntist-Eurosceptic assumptions of special, separate, and superior status for Britain in relation to Europe.

Next post some more political theory, but also another broad historical discussion.

Myths of Sovereignty and British Isolation, III: British Superiority?

Barry Stocker History, Politics , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Continuing from my last post, before getting on to the pre-Waterloo history of Britain, some remarks on Britain as an exceptional and model state from the Hanoverian period (rule of the German Hanoverian dynasty who continued to be sovereign princes in Germany, 1714-1837) onwards. Isolating any one period as the one in which modern Britain emerges is inevitably hazardous, but there are precedents for selecting this period such as Linda Colley’s influential book, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (Yale University Press, 1992).

The defeat of the Jacobite Uprising of 1745 provides a good moment for the formation of modern British state, or perhaps better the moment at which a process of formation ends. The Jacobite Uprising was an attempt to restore the Catholic Stuart Dynasty, which had its starting point in the Scottish Highlands. It reached into the Lowlands and then England before being beaten back and then decisively defeated at the Battle of Culloden in 1746 by forces loyal to the Hanoverian dynasty, which was Protestant and was reigning in Britain because it was the closest in line after Catholics were excluded from inheriting the throne.

Not only was it confirmed that Britain would continue to be an officially Protestant country, with a German royal family, harsh and violent measures were taken to crush the social base of Jacobitism in the Highlands. The autonomy of traditional clan chieftains (hereditary local landlord rulers), who were operating a kind of confederal state of often conflicting clans within Britain, was abolished. Soldiers were stationed in the Highlands to enforce an assimilationist state policy in which the Gaelic language was repressed, as was traditional dress and customary laws. The violence and forcible assimilation faded away once British sovereignty in the region was assured, but that does not detract from the way that the British state was stabilised through force and military occupation, not through consent and building on ‘traditional’ liberties. The idea of a British state uniquely founded on consent to institutions in a context of laws and liberties emerging from ‘tradition’ rather than state action is essential to the sovereigntist-Eurosceptic view of Britain and its history under examination here.

The forcible full incorporation of the Scottish Highlands and Western Isles into the British state system comes out of the attempts of the British monarchy to create an integrated Britain out of of the union of English and Scottish dynasties, which goes back to 1603 when James VI of Scotland inherited the throne of England as James I. James wanted a unified, integrated Britain from the beginning, and his wish was granted, if more than one hundred years after his death and the overthrow of his dynasty. The attempts of his son Charles I to impose religious uniformity on Scotland led to a war which was the prelude to the English Civil War. The two wars, and others, are sometimes grouped as the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. The powerful man of state to emerge from these wars was Oliver Cromwell, who incorporated the third kingdom, Ireland, into the British state, in a culmination of a history of war and colonisation going back to the Twelfth Century. This was also a process of forcible land transfer creating a Protestant English landowning class dominating a Gaelic Catholic peasantry. As in the Scottish Highlands and Islands, assimilation into the British state led to the decline of the Gaelic-Celtic languages into very small minority status, so to large degree an old culture was lost.

The forcible incorporation of Ireland into the British state system culminated in 1800 with the Act of Union, which created the United Kingdom, in abolishing the Irish parliament (not much of a loss, it only represented Protestant landlords) so that the Westminster Parliament (or crown in Parliament) had unlimited sovereignty through the islands of Britain and Ireland. The process did not bring clear benefits to the Irish before of after the Act of Union. The Great Famine of 1845 to 1852, when the British imposed a landholding system in Ireland and the whole British state system failed to prevent hunger and starvation for a large part of the Irish population and could be held to be at least in some measure responsible for the famine, is well known. Less well known is the Irish Famine of 1740 to 1741, which led to the deaths of an even higher proportion of the population than the Great Famine. I do not think that the Irish peasants of the eighteenth and nineteenth century felt lucky to be part of the British state system, or would have recognised it as some unique force for good in the Europe and the world.

The troubles of the Gaelic peasants of the Scottish Highlands did not end with the state reaction to the Jacobite Uprising. The disruption of traditional customs and restraints enabled the clan chieftains to forcibly remove peasants from land that had been theirs for centuries, starting a process of emigration to other parts of the British Empire. A situation in which the British state had abolished the power of chieftains to resist it while taking away traditional restraints on their power over the peasantry, led to an intensified period (“Highland Clearances”) in which peasants were sometimes taken straight from their customary homes to boats leaving Scotland for the Empire. In the later Nineteenth century, legal reforms were undertaken to improve the rights of Scottish and Irish peasants, but any discussion of the merits and otherwise of the British state system in relation to the rest of Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, must take into account horrors of calculated state violence combined with laws and property rights biased towards a landowning class close to the state, that led to sufferings as great as any encountered in any European state of that era.

Next post, Britain as a supposed model European state after Waterloo, comparisons

Myths of Sovereignty and British Isolation, II: After Waterloo

Barry Stocker History, Liberty, Politics , , , , , , , ,

The sovereigntist mythology of British history is in any case caught in a rather awkward place in claiming both a unique British role in resisting pan-European tyranny and a separation between Britain and mainland Europe. It is hard to see how both claims  can be completely true. The sovereigntist attempt to finesse this awkwardness is partly to claim that Britain played this unique role against Napoleon (well maybe Russia, Prussia, Austria and Spanish insurgents helped a little) is that Britain was in Europe to do the job and was then out again until destiny called on us to be in Europe again to beat back the Kaiser in 1914.

There is rather a lot wrong with this picture. As mentioned above, Britain shared royal dynasty with the German state of Hanover at the time of Waterloo. It had done so since 1714, when it acquired as king a Hanoverian prince who spoke almost no English. The Hanoverians continued to reign in Britain until 1837, when Princess Victoria was able to become British Queen but was not able to inherit in Hanover due to the exclusion of women from the succession. Anyway, she kept up the German link by marrying Albert of Saxe-Coburg with whom she spoke German at home. William II, the German Kaiser who was the national enemy/European hegemon of 1914, was one of her grandchildren and was apparently very attached to her.

Of course by this time, the royal family reigned in Britain rather than ruling, though Albert was rather keen on the ruling and things could have become very interesting on this issue if he had not died rather young. Anyway, even excluding the royal family, Britain was very involved with the rest of Europe after 1815. This involvement included:

  • possession of Gibraltar on the southern tip of Spain, going back to 1713, and still a British territory;
  • the island of Malta became British during the Napoleonic Wars and continued to be so until the 1960s;
  • the Ionian Islands were transferred to Britain from Napoleonic France, which had recently acquired them as part of a takeover of the Republic of Venice, and the islands remained British until transfer to Greece in the 1860s;
  • Cyprus became de facto British in 1878 with continuing de jure but not very meaningful Ottoman sovereignty until 1914 when the island was annexed, becoming independent in 1960, but even so containing two small parts of Britain in the form of two sovereign military bases.

So Gibraltar and two bases on Cyprus were still British, along with the nineteenth century presence in all of Malta and part of what is now Greece. This is surely rather a lot of European involvement for a country that supposedly experienced a radical separation from Europe after winning the Battle of Waterloo, according to the sovereigntist Eurosceptic narrative.

But that’s not all for nineteenth century British involvement in the rest of Europe. Combined British and French pressure on the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (i.e southern Italy and Sicily) played a large role in weakening and isolating the state, so that it accepted absorption into the new state of Italy during the Risorgimento. The Crimean War took a British army via Ottoman Varna (now in Bulgaria) to fight against Russia, in alliance with the Ottoman Empire, France, and Piedmont-Sardinia from 1853 to 1856. Of course Britain was sometimes at war with the Ottoman Empire, so that in 1829 the British, French, and Russian navies defeated an Ottoman fleet at Navarino, a major event in Greek Independence. A remarkably brutal Independence War had been going on since 1821, and the Battle of Navarino marks the decision of the Great Powers, including Britain, to arrange a settlement according to their wishes and convenience, with a German king imposed on the new Greek state (which was initially a republic). Presumably the British government believed that if they had a German monarchy so should everyone else. Britain of course continued to be involved in the lengthy process in which the Ottoman state was bit by bit separated from its European possessions, though often tilting towards the Ottomans to pin back the Russians, as in the Crimean War. Anyway, this all amounts to a very busy time in Europe for a country that had supposedly separated itself from Europe, and I’ve only covered the highlights.

The other side of the sovereigntist-Eurosceptic narrative of Britain after Waterloo is that Britain somehow stood alone as a country of liberty, progress towards democracy, law, prosperity and the like, showing the backward Europeans the way. There is some truth in this, on the whole Britain was ahead, but there are so many qualifications to be made that this can only be treated as like being slightly ahead rather than putting Britain in a class of its own, but more on that in the next post.

Myths of Sovereignty and British Isolation, I: Waterloo

Barry Stocker History, Politics , , , , , , , ,

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is now in the run up to a referendum on ‘renegotiated’ membership of the European Union which will supposedly return some sovereignty to UK political institutions. The date of the referendum and the details of the ‘renegotiation’, which in all likelihood will consist of changes of a secondary kind particularly since changes to the relevant treaties would trigger referendums in other EU member states with unpredictable consequence. The Conservative government is also making gestures towards repealing the Human Rights Act, which incorporates the European Convention on Human Rights into British law, and replacing it with a ‘British Bill of Rights’, and at the extreme may withdraw from the European Convention, leaving the UK as the only European nation apart from Belarus in that situation.

It looks like the Prime Minister David Cameron is happy to stay in the EU after minor changes and to keep the Human Rights Act and that he is not at all aiming to withdraw from the ECHR. I say this because he is an extreme pragmatist who does not aim for big shifts in Britain’s constitutional arrangements and relations with Europe, though as an extreme pragmatist he appears to send different signals to different people, so there may be some with a different impression.

I introduce these issues in current British politics in order to discuss the ideas of national sovereignty, laws, and institutions at stake along with the understanding of Britain’s historical relation with Europe. These are not necessarily at the centre of all political debate on the matters introduced above, but they are part of the debate and the ‘Eurosceptics’ – who both want to reduce Britain’s connection with European institutions and promote an idea of absolute national sovereignty – are already on the offensive with their vision of history. Two historical anniversaries have been used for this agenda: the two hundred year anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo and the nine eight hundred year anniversary of Magna Carta. More on Magna Carta when I get onto issues of law and institutions in this series of posts. First a few post posts about the general history.

What is partly as stake here is a debate between two wings of the liberty movement. The Eurosceptics in Britain have a strong element of conservative-libertarian fusionism while the Europhiles have an element of more cosmopolitan culturally pluralist libertarianism. The most obvious issue after European institutions dividing these two groups is immigration, with cosmo-Europhile libertarians much more inclined to open immigration than the sovereigntist-Eurosceptic libertarians. There are of course grey areas, overlaps and exceptions, but the overall pattern is very clear. Strictly speaking Eurosceptic and Europhile here refer to attitudes towards cross-European institutions, not other Europeans, but it cannot be denied that behind the more tolerant sounding version of Euroscepticism there are a lot of resentful people who don’t like foreigners, Europeans and people who are not like us, and think of democracy as preserving majority cultures and communities as dominant and unchanging. The sovereigntist-Eurosceptics tend to be very influenced by conservative-libertarian circles in the USA and to promote an ‘Anglosphere’ idea in which Britain is essentially part of a community with the USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (i.e. white majority countries which used to be part of the British Empire), and is essentially not European.

What I present in today’s post is a critical response to the sovereigntist-Eurosceptic version of British history. The Waterloo anniversary for Eurosceptics is commemorated for being a moment when Britain played a decisive role in undermining the claims of autocratic rulers to dominate Europe. In the late sixteenth century it was Philip II of Spain, in the early eighteenth century it was Louis XIV of France, in the early twentieth century it was William II, Emperor of Germany, King of Prussia, and in the mid-twentieth century it was Adolf Hitler, Führer of National Socialist Germany. There is some truth in this. Britain’s place as a powerful offshore part of Europe has suited it to hold out against a continental hegemon and provide a focus for turning back the hegemon’s power; nevertheless the sovereigntist-Eurosceptic version of this is bombastic and evasive.

Focusing on Waterloo, since that is the key anniversary of the moment, it was not a single-handed victory by Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington (who was born and brought up in what is now the Republic of Ireland) and a British army. The battle was only won because of the arrival of a Prussian-German army led by Marshall Blücher, who has a claim to be a commander of greater vision and imagination than Wellesley (though it should be said that he was superlative in all other aspects of command). The majority of Wellesley’s army was Dutch, Belgian or German (even excluding soldiers from Hanover which at that time shared its royal family with Britain) and many of the ‘British’ were, like Wellesley, from what is now the Republic of Ireland. While Wellesley and the British soldiers at Waterloo undoubtedly showed the greatest courage and determination in the battle, the image of Britain defeating the returning European hegemon, Napoleon Bonaparte, is false, if a falsity that became a major part of the more mythical aspects of British history.

Coming next: Britain before and after Waterloo

Milton on Free Political Institutions: ‘The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates’ (1649), ‘A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Courts’ (1659), ‘The Ready and Easy way to Establish a Free commonwealth’ (1660)

Barry Stocker History, Liberty, Philosophy , , , , , , , , ,

“He was, as every truly great poet has ever been, a good man; but finding it impossible to realize his own aspirations, either in religion or politics, or society, he gave up his heart to the living spirit and light within him, and avenged himself on the world by enriching it with this record of his own transcendental ideal.” (Comment on John Milton by the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1772-1834)

For my introduction to Milton see here, for my post on freedom of the press in Milton see here.

Milton made important arguments for the kind of political institutions which would serve liberty, as well as discussing to goal of freedom in discussion of opinion. Though there are two basic Milton texts identified here, I will not attempt to distinguish them here, let alone take into consideration every possibly relevant text by Milton. This is a period of rapid change in political institutions in England (also applying but unevenly and differently in Ireland and Scotland; at this time Wales has to be considered part of England), of experimentation including the execution of King Charles I just before the publication of the first essay identified was published and the institution of a Commonwealth and Free State, in that year, and of reaction in the sense of royal Restoration in the year that the last essay identified was published. Context matters and so does change, but I think for the purposes of this post as opposed to a blog about the details of Milton’s life as a man of letters and politics, this will be mostly an overview rather than a tracking of Milton’s evolution.

As with his views on free speech, Milton’s views on political institutions mix religious commitments with knowledge of English history and great scholarship of ancient texts. The knowledge of ancient texts to some degree overlaps with the knowledge of religious texts, which is one reason why intensified study of the Bible in the sixteenth and seventeenth century tended to serve general cultural development and liberty.

Milton’s objections to monarchy are partly established through his reading of the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible where he argues that God warned the ancient Jews against adopting the institution of monarchy. Anyone interested in following up which parts of Hebrew scripture Milton is using here should start with the First Book of Samuel, Chapter 8. Disasters that befall the Biblical Jews are in some measure the consequence of ignoring God’s counsel in this matter. Of course, many have seen the Bible as justifying not just monarchy, but absolute monarchy so Milton goes to some effort to argue that monarchy was a second best institution for the Jews from God’s point of view and that the Jews never gave their monarchs absolute power.

The view that Milton has then, of the rights and powers of kings, is that they are established by covenant with the community and not a divine authority which the community must obey. The idea of covenant is important in Christianity, with regard to the view that the ancient Jews had a covenant with God as his chosen people and that Christ offered a new covenant for all humans willing to follow him as the son of God. These covenants were very much emphasised in the Protestant culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which thought it was returning to a relation with God obscured by centuries of Catholic interposition of church hierarchy between believer and divine word.

The idea of covenant moved quite quickly from theology to political and legal thought in Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), a Dutch theologian and legal-political thinker who was one of the major shapers of modern thought in these matters. Milton does not emphasise him in these essays, but he was certainly an influence. For Grotius, the covenant is at the centre of theology, and influences his view of the obligation to obey law and government, though he does not use the language of covenant greatly in that context. The point being in political terms that in some way laws and political institutions rest on some choice of the community to obey them. In Grotius’s thinking, this is more about the reason for obedience than an incitement to rebellion where laws and institutions lack popular backing, but the latter aspect is necessary outcome. This ambiguity carries on into the Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes (1551) which takes a foundational social covenant (defined more in legalistic than theological terms) as the basis of absolute obedience to the sovereign, but certainly influences the view of John Locke’s Essay Concerning Civil Government (1690) according to which ‘the people’ (in practice Locke meant the upper classes reğresented in Parliament) the right to overthrow government.

So Milton precedes Locke’s view that rebellion against unjust government is lawful, even admirable, and that laws are uniquely made by ‘the people’ in Parliament and never by a monarch. Milton himself draws on earlier historical precedent for this view of government as based on contract and the right of rebellion against government which ignores that contract. Particularly important is the Dutch Revolt of the late Sixteenth Century, in which merchant towns rebelled for political, commercial, and religious reasons against the absolutist Catholic monarchy of Spain which had acquired them for rather accidental dynastic reasons in recent history. Final agreement with Spain took a long time, but the new Dutch Republic quickly established the possibility of a mercantile republic in modern Protestant Europe and offered support to those who considered republics to be more Protestant than monarchies. Milton draws further on recent Scottish history, pointing out that a Protestant Scottish parliament had deposed Mary, Queen of Scots, in the preceding century. In general, Milton argues that the idea of monarch contradicts the idea of an ordinary human with an ordinary body, with legal accountability like anyone else, and so can never be incorporated properly into a state of free citizens.

Though monarchy which obeys such agreements is allowable from Milton’s point, it is not ideal and is very likely to decay into outright tyranny. Nevertheless he offers examples of how great monarchs of European history, including Roman Emperors, accepted that their power was only justified by serving law and the good of the community. As Milton emphases the last great Roman Emperor Justinian (ruling from Constantinople towards the end of the period during which any Roman Emperor controlled much territory beyond Anatolia and the Balkans) produced the greatest codification of Roman law, making himself the servant of law, not god on Earth. In any case is monarchy might be just about tolerable in many societies for Milton, the proper practice of Protestant Christianity certainly required a freedom from the religious and institutional church authority demanded by kings. Protestant ideas of free discussion of religious ideas and self-governing groups of believers could not thrive under a king (which was a reasonable estimate since Protestant Dissenters were not really equal citizens until the nineteenth century when the monarchy had become largely ceremonial, and indeed the last monarch who really struggled for a more than figurehead role, George III, was en enemy of religious emancipation).

Milton developed a view of how a republic, or commonwealth, might survive over the long term, certainly a longer term than the period it lasted in England, in its purest form only from 1649-52, and then the Lord Protectorship of Oliver Cromwell until 1658 and his heir Richard Cromwell until 1660. He thought that while the country might need a new parliament in 1660, once elected it should serve permanently, replacing dead or absent members through its own method. What Milton seems to advocate here though is not a permanent republican law, but something necessary to institute a permanent republic. Milton thinks of the beginnings of  a republic as embattled and as needing to act more like an army than a fully stabilised and secure civil republic should. Both the chance for election and eligibility to vote can be restricted while the republic secures itself against selfish internal a faction and external danger. Here Milton runs into the problem Niccoló Machiavelli, an ardent republican despite frequent misrepresentations, encountered in The Prince, how to get a people that is not very republican and maybe not very ready for a republic to the point where civic virtue and understanding of public good are strong enough for a workable republic.

Milton’s life and public service under the take over of the English republic by the quasi-monarch Oliver Cromwell, followed by his life and exile from public life under the restored monarchy, is the context for the quotation from Coleridge at the head of this post. For Milton, republicanism and associated ideals, became more and more associated with some better and other world. After the Restoration Milton certainly became the author of poetry rather than political essays, producing in particular Paradise Lost, a religious epic which places him just below Shakespeare in general evaluation of English literature. We could look there for a more ‘transcendental’ exploration of republicanism and liberty, and I had hoped to do so. However, this task will be deferred as I think a responsible investigation of republicanism in Milton’s poetry, though a recognised area of discussion, is just too big and different to incorporate into this sequence of posts. Later I hope.

Bernard Lewis, Edward Said, Facts, Ideology, and the Middle East

Brandon Christensen History, Links , , , , , , ,

I recently came across an excellent interview conducted by Evan Goldstein, who is the editor of Arts & Letters Daily and the Chronicle of Higher Education, with Bernard Lewis, who is an eminent historian of the Middle East from Princeton. There were three things that stood out to me in the interview: 1) the potential for ideological rigidity in academia, 2) the importance of history for analysis of recent events, and 3) the astonishing, obstinate ignorance of foreign policy ideologues when it comes to understanding enemies. Three excerpts from Goldstein’s interview with Lewis can best illustrate my points.

On the potential for ideological rigidity, Lewis – who I first came across from reading Edward Said’s infamous postmodern polemic Orientalism – has much to tell us:

Age has not mellowed Lewis, especially on the topic of the late Edward Said, whose 1978 polemic, Orientalism, upended Middle East studies and placed Lewis in the position of having to defend his scholarship against charges of racism and imperialism. Lewis vividly remembers reading Orientalism for the first time. “Apart from Said’s ill will,” he says, “I was appalled by his ignorance.” […] Lewis and Said met only once, in 1986, for a debate at the annual conference of the Middle East Studies Association. Dubbed the “shoot-out at the MESA corral,” the event drew 3,000 spectators. Whether or not Lewis thinks he won that day’s battle, however, he seems to be under no illusion that he lost the war.

“Middle Eastern studies in this country is dominated by the Saidians,” he says, his voice rising in indignation. “The situation is very bad. Saidianism has become an orthodoxy that is enforced with a rigor unknown in the Western world since the Middle Ages.” This groupthink, he says, taints everything: jobs, promotions, book reviews. “If you buck the Saidian orthodoxy, you’re making life very difficult for yourself.”

In 2007, Lewis and some like-minded scholars, including Fouad Ajami, of the Johns Hopkins University, founded the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa. The idea, Lewis says, was to create space for opinions that deviate from the MESA mainstream, “to maintain an independent academic integrity in Middle Eastern studies.”

This is an important argument. I minored in MENAS at UCLA, which has one of the most prestigious MENAS programs in the world, and was never required to read the work of Bernard Lewis. How can this be, especially given Lewis’ towering influence on MENAS in the scholarly world? The answer is, of course, orthodoxy. Dogma. What is most disturbing about orthodoxies that gain a monopoly in a field of study is that truth becomes a political agenda rather than an aim for scholarly research. Those who, as Lewis notes, dedicate their lives to answering questions as best they can are necessarily at odds with the dogmas of the field. Postmodern Saidians have imposed the worst sort of orthodoxy, too: If you are not from the Middle East, or if you are not Muslim, then you are by default an agent – willing or otherwise – of imperial aggression and Western chauvinism. Those who question, or dismiss, Saidian insights into the Middle East and North Africa are “being political” while those who do not question Saidian insights are performing scholarly research. Can anybody else see the fallacy here?

This orthodoxy dominates MENAS scholarship. While interacting with my professors at UCLA I was given plenty of opportunities to subtly acknowledge my adherence to Saidism. I did not. I did not question Saidianism, either. I only expressed an innocent desire to gain insights into the work of the guy called out so often in Orientalism, Bernard Lewis. I was told, on numerous occasions, that Lewis had not been read, though of course it never hurts to gain the other side’s perspective. Could the orthodoxy Lewis identifies and assails be any clearer? (Here is the website to Lewis’ Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa, by the way.)

Aside from vehemently disagreeing with the patron saint of MENAS, Lewis has also gained notoriety for his connection to the second Bush administration’s illegal invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq. I don’t want to get into the details of his participation here (Goldstein does a good job of that in the interview itself, and I actually lost a little bit of respect for Lewis because of his evasive answers to Goldstein’s questions about his relationship with the Bush administration), but his insights into how the Middle East actually works should be of particular interest to libertarians and especially libertarians who sometimes read me for my quirky (even by libertarian standards) take on American foreign policy. Careful readers can hopefully recognize my overall argument in Lewis’ intricate understanding of the Middle East:

His disagreement with the Bush administration, he explains with a sigh, was not over the goal (regime change), but the tactic (full-scale invasion). Lewis says he argued for recognizing the leadership in northern Iraq as the country’s legitimate government and arming those forces if necessary. In the decade since the first Persian Gulf war, he says, Kurds and Arabs had managed to build a nascent democracy under the protection of the no-fly zone.

“That was the way to do it,” he says. “Simply to invade was the wrong way to do it, and I thought so and said so at the time.” Why didn’t he speak out before the invasion? “I didn’t feel at that crucial moment that it was right to take a public stance against the war.”

Aside from his inability to own up to his mistaken support for the Bush administration (or making his opposition to its policies public), Lewis is spot on. Look at what he is saying, and remember that his analysis is sharpened by a lifetime of prestigious scholarship on the Middle East: the West should have recognized that the illegitimate borders of Iraq had produced differing modes of governance in different regions, and that it would be morally acceptable to recognize the claims of sovereignty then being shouted out by the peoples of northern Iraq.

I am not even in the same ballpark as Lewis when it comes to understanding the Middle East. He is a retired-but-prestigious historian from Princeton; I am a potential graduate student with a B.A. from UCLA; yet he and I have come to the same conclusion, and it’s not hard to see why (it is also worth asking yourself the following question: Is Lewis right?):

  1. The Middle East is a region of the world with lots of different cultures (this is a truth that many foreign policy experts flatly ignore).
  2. The borders drawn up by the victors of World War I do not line up with these cultures anywhere in the Middle East, save perhaps Saudi Arabia.
  3. These artificial borders, and the international governing institutions that sanctify them, make necessary the presence of a strong man to keep these borders from collapsing.
  4. Since strong men are bad, and bottom-up institutions are good, it makes perfect sense – from a realist perspective and from an idealist perspective – for the West to recognize and incorporate the claims of sovereignty made by these bottom-up, nascent states.
  5. Invading and occupying a country, with the goal of molding it into a democracy, is a stupid idea because…
  6. …democracy cannot do for artificial states what strong men can: namely, keep borders in place without affecting the regional balance of power.

Yet the power balancers, and the realists who think that strong men serve Western interests better than democracies do, cannot adequately explain why these same strong men are so hard to control, and indeed often end up as enemies of the West (Saddam Hussein, anyone?). Lewis’ scholarship explains this well. The ideologues – the Western chauvinists and the postmodern Saidians – cannot explain this or, more likely, are unable to explain this because it flatly debunks their dogmas.

Speaking of dogmas, I have given too much attention to the orthodoxy currently strangling MENAS programs around the world, and not enough to those harbored by Western chauvinists. Goldstein reports:

Lewis pulls a Russian book off the shelf and slowly reads his name, in Cyrillic, on the cover. He smiles. His books have been translated into 29 languages. The Middle East and the West, published in 1964, was even translated into Arabic by the Muslim Brotherhood. Lewis is particularly fond of that edition’s preface: “I don’t know who this person is,” the translator wrote, “but one thing is clear. He is, from our point of view, either a candid friend or an honest enemy, and in any case one who disdains to distort the truth.” Lewis chuckles at that.

There is a common trope in many conservative Western circles that Islamists are so beholden to ideology and hatred of all things Western that they are incapable of understanding other modes of thought. Yet it is very clear from this excerpt that Islamists are interested in understanding other ideologies. Islamists, like socialists in the West, are more interested in molding better human beings than in making us freer. Instead of acknowledging this, many experts in foreign policy circles simply pretend that their opponents are savages and incapable of thinking like a true civilized individual. This mindset, too, contributes to the ongoing violence in the Middle East.

The West has a role to play in the Middle East. If it wants to reduce violence and raise standards of living, then policymakers in Washington and Brussels need to accept the fact that their conceptions of the Middle East have largely been shaped by dogma. Muslims are capable of doing bad things. So are Westerners. The West needs to support bottom-up decentralization in the Middle East until it is no longer possible to distinguish a West from a Middle East or, at least, until the West and the Middle East are as similar as Texas and California (or Germany and France). Until policymakers realize that the Middle East’s autocrats are a direct result of central planning efforts made elsewhere, and until MENAS scholars own up to the fact that their dogmas do more harm than good, peace and prosperity will elude the region.

Milton on Freedom of Printing: Areopagitica

Barry Stocker History, Liberty, Religion , , , , , , , , , ,

Areopagitica 

A Speech of Mr John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing to the Parliament of England (1644).

(For my general introduction to Milton, click here)

‘We turn for a short time from the topics of the day, to commemorate, in all love and reverence, the genius and virtues of John Milton, the poet, the statesman, the philosopher, the glory of English literature, the champion and martyr of English liberty’, Thomas Babington Macaulay (Whig-Liberal historian, writer and government minister), 1825.

The digitised text of Areopagitica can be found at the Online Library of Liberty here.

The strange sounding title is a reference to one of the key institutions of ancient republican and democratic Athens, the court of Areopagus. Appropriately, as we are looking at an essay on politics by a great poet, the Areopagus and its mythical foundation was celebrated as the core of Athenian justice in Aeschylus’ tragic trilogy, the Oresteia. The Areopagus was itself an aristocratic institution preceding democracy in Athens and as such can be seen as what balanced the changeable majorities of the citizens’ assembly with enduring standards of justice, which have meaning in all ways of constituting political institutions.

What Milton looks for in this great institution of early experiments in constituting liberty is a standard for freedom of publication and finds that it offered a very tolerant standard, at least in the context of the seventeenth century. Milton suggests that the only restrictions the Areopagus placed on books of the time (all handwritten manuscripts of course) was with regard to atheism and libel. We are not going to look back at Milton or the Areopagus now as the most advanced instances of liberty when they prohibit expressions of atheism, but these are times when the idea that a good and rational person could not be an atheist were all pervasive and the assumption can still be found later in the seventeenth century in John Locke, one of the general heroes of modern thinking about liberty.

The restraint on libel applies in all societies and all political thinking I am aware of, but one should never discount the possibility of an interesting exception. Leaving aside possible interesting radical alternatives, there is nothing repressive by the standards of general thinking about liberty in restraining libel. Milton’s interest in the standards of pagan Greece is itself a tribute to a spirit of pluralism and open mindedness in someone generally inclined to take moral and political guidance from the religious traditions of Hebrew Scripture and the Gospels, along with the writings of early Christians, and the Protestant thinkers of the sixteenth century Reformation.

The Reformation, as Milton himself emphasises, relied on the printed word, and it is no coincidence that Protestantism emerged soon after Europe discovered printing (after the Chinese of course), as a weapon against the institutional authority of the Catholic Church and its hierarchy. The structure of the Catholic Church was not just a matter of church offering a choice to people seeking a faith-based life, it was connected with state power and pushed onto societies as the only allowable life philosophy. The politics of religion comes up in Milton’s essay, including the issue of the relation of the state to the church hierarchy.

While England had a Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century (England including Wales, but excluding Scotland which had its own distinct Reformation before union with England), it had retained a state church, the Church of England, with Bishops. Milton, like many on the side of Parliament in the Civil War, was against Bishops, referred to as prelates, as part of the old Catholic hierarchy in which the ‘truth’ was given from above to the mass of believers.

Inspired by the pamphlets of and books of Protestant reformers, Milton argues that truth can have many forms and that while Christianity may require acceptance of central truths, they can be expressed in more ways than the Catholic hierarchical state-backed tradition allows. State backing, of course, included the imprisonment, torture, and burning to death of ‘heretics’ by the Inquisition.

Milton refers to the last pagan Roman Emperor, Julian ‘the Apostate’ (reigned 361-363) with regard to his policy of banning Christians from pagan education. Milton argues that this was the biggest possible blow to Christianity, because it deprived believers of the intellectual capacity and credibility to influence pagan inhabitants of the Empire. Christian truth could only be convincingly understood, communicated, and taught if it drew on all areas of learning including what had been produced by pagans.

Truth benefits from being tested in argument and contestation, something undermined by state-enforced church power as well as by the monarchical institution of courts full of sycophants and yes-sayers. Political liberty requires republican representative institutions and truth, including the truths of religion, require testing in conditions of liberty.

Unfortunately, Milton supported legal discrimination against Catholics, but as with prohibitions on expressions of atheism, this was part of the general understanding of a just state at the time, and Milton was more tolerant than many on the Protestant as well as Catholic sides. His arguments make up a part of the general movement to tolerance and freedom of speech, making very powerful points on behalf of liberty, enabling us to take them beyond the limits within which he constrained them.

Next post, Milton on political institutions

Harrington, Commonwealth of Oceana, and A System of Politics (Expanding the Liberty Canon): Second of Two Parts

Barry Stocker History, Liberty , , , , , , , , ,

Oceana is a long piece of ‘utopian’ political fiction writing, which does not really work as an exercise in literary fiction as far as I can see and barely keeps up the pretence. Oceana refers to a thinly disguised version of Britain and a lightly fictionalised account of its history, as a means for expounding Harrington’s thoughts about the best political system. A System of Politics is a more concise and economical account of Harrington’s thought than Oceana though its list form tells you something about Harrington’s limits as a writer.

Harrington is in a friendly dialogue with a major sixteenth century writer, the Florentine republican Niccoló Machiavelli and sometimes in the  earlier part of Oceana in a critical dialogue with a major English writer, Thomas Hobbes, from his own time. The idea that sometimes still circulates of a liberal England/Britain versus an absolutist continental Europe is rather challenged by this. One of the most influential advocates of liberty in British history was inspired by an Italian against an English writer. Though Harrington does refer favourably to Hobbes’ own mentor, Francis Bacon, philosopher, chief minister to the monarchy, jurist, and writer of utopian political fiction. Harrington does not mention the Hobbes-Bacon relation, and his his use of Bacon’s thought suggests a fascination with the kind of monarchism advocated by Bacon which mixes legalism with the application of scientific method to the prudential art of government. Harrington, it appears, wanted republicanism to incorporate such aspects, creating some distance from ancient republicanism in which law comes from tradition and wise individuals rather than the kind of centralised accumulation of new laws and a judicial apparatus to apply them which is what Bacon was dealing with and which also influenced Hobbes. Harrington’s interest in what well run monarchies with some respect for law can teach republics also expresses itself in remarks on the Ottoman Empire and on the famous chief minister of the French monarchy, Cardinal Richelieu, one of the key figures in the development of the modern state and modern statecraft. Harrington regrets lack of knowledge of the principles underlying Richelieu’s formidable achievements in promoting peace within France and taking France above Spain as the leading European power of the time.

When Harrington is focused on republics strictly speaking, he has two main concerns: land distribution, formation of the right kind of aristocracy. These concerns overlap as questions of concentration of land are also questions of what kind of aristocracy might exist. Harrington resists what he regards as the too extreme devotion of the Ancient Athenians to democracy, which did not allow an effective aristocracy to form. As with early modern attitudes to Plato, his preference for Sparta is rather against modern sensibility. However, that preference ran up to the American Revolution and the Constitution of the United States which was deliberately designed to prevent the ‘excesses’ of Athenian democracy and promote a ‘balanced’ republic like those of Rome or Sparta which had a long life based on reserving some powers for the aristocratic parts of the political system.

Harrington’s thoughts about aristocracy are directed towards forming a changing open class of people who provide political leadership and resist the wilder extremes and instability of popular opinion. This is more or less a project for the formation of an effective version of what is now generally referred to as a political class or a political elite. Harrington’s belief that the aristocracy should change in composition and exist in balance with the preferences of the common people lead him to oppose land distribution of a kind which created a rigid permanent oligarchy aristocracy of the richest landowners. Laws to prevent this are referred to by Harrington as ‘the agrarian’, with consideration of examples from antiquity and from his own time. He argues against primogeniture (land going to the eldest son) and in favour of equal division of land between the children of landowners which he suggests as well as having political benefits will reduce loveless marriages designed to get propertyless daughters of the aristocracy married to a major landowner. In a rather more general way, he seems sympathetic to schemes to prevent concentrations of landed property. Such apparent interference with property rights may look at odds with how ideas of liberty develop in the classical liberal and libertarian tradition, but Harrington was living at a time when it was very difficult to disassociate land ownership and political power, and more generally difficult to disassociate economic status and political rights.

It takes the continuous  greater development of commercial society which Locke reacts to at the end of the seventeenth century to see that property ownership should be seen in terms of transferable rights and the public benefits of land owned by whoever being part of a commercial system in which its products are traded to everyone’s benefit. The other side of Harrington’s assumption, highly normal for the time, that political power comes from land ownership, is that servants and the economically dependent cannot have full political rights and are not part of the democratic political system. The democratic system that elects an open changing aristocracy in some form of senate along with a a very complex series of other elections of public officials advocated by Harrington. This was enough to make Harrington seem like a fanatic for extreme democracy until democracy did begin to appear in the British political system, with the extension of the franchise in the late nineteenth century following on (but not immediately at all) from earlier agitation on the part of the new industrial working class. His writing is bit frustrating and can seem a bit remote from current ideas of liberty, but in historical context he made a major contribution to the growth of law and liberty in Britain. He deserves to be read by anyone who wishes for a really deep understanding of the development of ideas of government constrained by law and liberty.

Harrington, Commonwealth of Oceana, and A System of Politics (Expanding the Liberty Canon): First of Two Parts

Barry Stocker History, Liberty , , , , , ,

James Harrington (1611-1677) was synonymous with the idea of democracy in Britain for centuries, but is not much read now beyond the ranks of those with strong interest in seventeenth century British history or the history of republican thought. Republicanism was the word used for thought about a political system under law and in which power is shared, with some protection of individual liberty, until the word liberal started being used in the eighteen century, with more emphasis though on the idea of liberty of trade and commerce. The republican tradition certainly stretches back to Aristotle in ancient Greece and can be taken back to his teacher Plato, though that often troubles modern readers for whom Plato seems disturbingly indifferent to individual rights and hostile to change. That will be a topic for another post, but for now it is enough to say that Aristotle is likely to seem relevant to ideas of individual liberty for the contemporary reader in ways that Plato may not and Aristotle’s own criticisms of his teacher are likely to seem appropriate to such a reader.

Harrington’s texts are not an easy read in that their structure is not clear and he does not have much in the way of literary style. This explains to a large degree why he is not a familiar name now along perhaps with the appearance of more recent writers in English concerned with liberty and democracy who are both more readable and more concerned with liberal democracy as it has developed since the late eighteenth century, particularly John Stuart Mill. In comparison Harrington seems stuck in early modern idea of democracy and republicanism which are expressed through a knowledge of texts which though not forgotten now are less obviously known to the educated reader. That is the texts of the ancient Greeks and Romans and the Bible. The educated in Harrington’s time were likely to read Latin and often read Greek as well, with major classical texts forming a common frame of reference. The Bible was widely known in the seventeenth century because Christianity was a very dominant force, and Harrington was writing at a time when the Protestant Reformation which led to the translation of the Bible into modern languages and encouragement to the faithful to read the Bible carefully and frequent was still a very living force. Catholics of course read the Bible, but the Catholic authorities resisted translating the Bible into modern languages before the Reformation and gave comparatively less importance to the individual study of it than the Protestant churches. So in short, Harrington’s writing comes from a  time of intimate and shared knowledge of ancient and religious texts, and his way of writing is not too suited to expressing itself to those not acquainted with that culture.

In addition Harrington, assumes some familiarity with the British and European politics of his time, though much of it is of lasting interest with regard to understanding of the formation of modern European states and ideas about the most just form of politics for those states. Venice is a very important example of a republic for Harrington, reflecting its status as the longest lived and most powerful republic known to Europeans at that time. The formation of the Dutch Republic in the late sixteenth century promoted a possibly stronger republic, but Harrington regards it as a loose assembly of city and regional republics, so still leaving Venice as the most powerful republic with a  unified sovereignty. Italy was not united politically at that time and Venice had existed since the eight century as an aristocratic republic in which aristocratic government combined with merchant wealth to an extent that made Venice a leading trading and naval power in the eastern Mediterranean. The Ottoman Empire appears fleetingly as the model of monarchy, an image which dissipated in the eighteenth century when the Ottomans began to seem backward and despotic, and to be at the head of a declining power. The power and the sophistication of the Ottoman state applying a system of laws and justice across a large and diverse territory made a rather different impression in a seventeenth century Europe suffering from religious wars and internal conflict even within powerful states.

Harrington himself lived through the English Civil War (1642-1651), also known as the The English Civil Wars (because it was a series of wars), the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (because it comprised separate conflicts in England, Scotland, and Ireland), and the English Revolution (because it resulted in the execution of King Charles I along with a period of constitutional innovation in the commonwealth and lord protector systems), which included religious conflict between different forms of Protestantism and political conflict between crown and parliament. Harrington was himself part of the section of the gentry supporting parliament against the king, though he also appears to have had friendly relations with Charles I while he was detained by parliamentary forces.

Oceana was originally banned while being printed during the Lord Protector phase in which the head of the parliamentary armies, Oliver Cromwell had become something close to a king. The book was legally published after negotiations between the Lord Protector’s government and Harrington’s family, with a dedication to Cromwell. Harrington was however accused of treason after the restoration of the monarch and though he was released after a short period of punishment never recovered in mind or body. So Harrington’s life and publication history is itself marked with the historical traumas of the time and the failure to establish enduring republican institutions.