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Civic Humanism and Parliamentary Reform: The Case of the Society of the Friends of the People

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2014

Iain Hampsher-Monk
Iain Hampsher-Monk*
Affiliation:
University of Exeter
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Extract

The tradition of thought known as civic humanism has recently occupied the attention of a number of commentators. Not only has it been examined in the place of its birth, Renaissance Italy, and more especially Florence, but in a recent work J. G. A. Pocock has traced the influence of the tradition in seventeenth and eighteenth-century England, and finally in the New World. The question considered here is the particular use to which civic modes of thought and argument were put by a group of moderate reformers in the debates on parliamentary reform in the last two decades of the eighteenth century. Although this period has received attention from social and constitutional historians, it has not been discussed by historians of ideas.

Civic humanism is both an analysis of a political problem and a range of recommendations as to how the problem is best to be solved. The problem is defined in terms of the deleterious effects of time on political organization. Human organizations rely on the ordered and rule-governed behavior of individuals. Such behavior exhibits, over time, a constant tendency to disintegrate into selfish action. Political and legal institutions provide the immediate incentives to prevent this happening. Yet how can these institutions themselves be safeguarded or rendered self-regulating?

The solution to the problem of achieving political stability through time is seen essentially as a moral solution, that is to say it is seen to lie in the creation of a particular set of attitudes towards political life amongst the citizens of the polity.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 18 , Issue 2 , Spring 1979 , pp. 70 - 89
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1979

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References

1. A number of the essays in Pocock's, J. G. A.Politics, Language and Time (New York, 1971)Google Scholar explore this current of thought, and the notion of tradition in general. Major studies on the tradition in Renaissance Italy have been Baron, H., The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance (Princeton, 1966)Google Scholar, and Garin, E., Italian Humanism: Philosophy and Civic Life in the Renaissance (New York, 1965)Google Scholar. Seminal to the study of English civic humanism was Fink, Z. S., The Classical Republicans (Evanston, 1945)Google Scholar; recent interest in the field was largely stimulated by Raab, F., The English Face of Machiavelli (London, 1964)Google Scholar. Use of the tradition in eighteenth-century England is discussed in Kramnick, I., Bolingbroke and his Circle: the Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole (Cambridge, 1968)Google Scholar, and in America most notably by Bailyn, B., The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, 1967)Google Scholar.

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26. Tierney to Grey, 20 Oct. 1792. Quoted in Trevelyan, G. M., Lord Grey of the Reform Bill (London, 1929), p. 60Google Scholar.

27. Wyvill, , Papers, III, (appendix), 156Google Scholar.

28. For the insistence, much emphasized by subsequent thinkers, on the need to return to first principles, see Machiavelli, , Discourses, III, iGoogle Scholar. In the example quoted here, the first principles seem to refer to the trusteeship between governor and governed; this was often claimed on the authority of Locke, Two Treatises of Government, II, 240Google Scholar.

29. A Defence of Dr. Price and the Reformers of England, Wyvill, , Papers, III, (appendix), 25–26Google Scholar.

30. Wyvill, , Papers, III, (appendix), 269–70Google Scholar; earlier, during the ‘county movement’, Wyvill and his associated Yorkshiremen had expressed an even more explicitly neo-Harringtonian account of English history:

The balance of our Constitution had been wisely placed by our forefathers in the hands of the counties and principal cities and towns; but by the caprice and partiality of our Kings, from Henry VI down to Charles II it was gradually withdrawn from them … irregular exercise of Royal authority have been farther increased by the silent operation of time.

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34. See Isaac Kramnick's excellent study of Bolingbroke from this perspective, Bolingbroke and his Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole.

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46. A Letter, Wyvill, , Papers, IV, 562Google Scholar; see also The Plan, ibid., V, xvii.

47. A Letter, ibid., IV, 564, 565.

48. A Defence …, ibid., III, (appendix), 76.

49. Ibid., 26.

50. The Plan for a Reform, ibid., V, xx.

51. Ibid., xxi.

52. Ibid., xxii.

53. Ibid., xix.

54. Ibid.

55. Ibid., xx.

56. Reflections on the Revolution in France (Harmondsworth, 1968), p. 150Google Scholar.

57. John Thelwall attempted to explain how natural rights might still be calculated and distributed in a developed society and went some way to explaining the historical processes by which a laboring class might hope to become aware and organize itself. See his Rights of Nature against the Usurpations of Establishments (London, 1796)Google Scholar, Letter II, passim; Letter I, 19.

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