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Republican Historiography

In 1985, the American Quarterly devoted an entire issue to the topic of republicanism and in the following year, the William and Mary Quarterly indexed the term for the first time in its ninety-four year history. The addition of the category ‘republicanism’ in these two eminent journals of history and culture reflects the intense interest and often-acrimonious debate orbiting the term since the 1960s. As one critic observed, republicanism was the one concept that could unlock the riddles of American politics and culture.¹ It represented an agreeable substitution for the increasingly pejorative term ‘national’ and a new found interest in language and ideology as an expression of the American political and cultural condition. Yet, for others, it was imbued with vagueness and contradiction:

[t]o insist on the ‘essence’ of republicanism had the effect of driving the term republican into the realm of metaphor and uncertainty, making it vulnerable to a host of alternate and conflicting definitions. It would be available to signify almost anything so long as it was nonmonarchical. It would become rich in overtones, useable in alternate contexts: we find ourselves speaking of republican religion, republican children, republican motherhood.²

By the 1980s republicanism had become a ‘protean concept’, a ‘vocabulary’ and an ‘ideology’, useable for a host of interpretative needs: ‘The recent discovery of republicanism as the reigning social theory of eighteenth-century America has produced a reaction among historians akin to the response of chemists to a new element. Once having been identified, it can be found everywhere.’³ The interest in republicanism represented a sea change in how historians approached revolutionary history and eighteenth-century American culture. The change took place after the Second World War and the coming of the cold war when the values and beliefs that had clarified American political and social culture were being re-evaluated and reformulated in what historians have called a ‘paradigm shift of major proportions’.⁴ Whether viewed as the rhetoric of classical political theory or an explanation of how ideas actually shaped events, the shift revealed that the concept of republicanism is ‘bound up . . . with a complex of theories about language and consciousness . . . and has surreptitiously inserted into our history the conviction that reality is socially constructed’.⁵

In order to grasp the magnitude of this change, a short overview of the prevailing approaches to American history during the interwar and post-war years is useful. Certainly, interpretations of the American Revolution and the early national period have undergone numerous transformations from the beginning when participants began to record their impressions of what was happening to subsequent views of the revolution in the setting of British imperialism. However, in the first half of the twentieth century, ideas, or the intellectual context, of early American culture receded from view and new methodologies emerged to explain the character of the nation. From the socioeconomic theories of Carl Becker and Charles Beard to the liberal consensus model advanced by Louis Hartz, Daniel J. Boorstin and Richard Hofstadter, revolutionary historiography was decidedly anti-ideological. For Progressives, who combined Marxist and Freudian thought to understand the underlying drives and interests that determine social behaviour, the revolution and the formation of the constitution was explained primarily as a conflict between different power groups where ideas were seen as merely rhetorical disguises for some hidden interest, detached from the material conditions that produced them.⁶ In his introduction to An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, Beard claimed that ideas were ‘entities, particularities, or forces, apparently independent of all earthly considerations coming under the head of “economic”’.⁷ In this evaluation, ideas were simply rationalizations modified to suit the needs of the elite and the extravagant language used to express their interests could not be taken seriously. Claims that the Tories were all ‘wretched hirelings, and execrable parricides’; George III, the ‘tyrant of the earth’, a ‘monster in human form’; that British soldiers were a ‘mercenary licentious rabble of banditti’ did not represent reality but merely a form of calculated deception.⁸ Moreover, Americans knew very little about past republics and what they did know was ‘clearly irrelevant to the discussion of the origins of republican institutions in America’. After the restoration in 1660, republican and democratic ideas ‘passed into unpopularity and oblivion . . . not to be revived and re-popularized until the nineteenth century’.⁹ For Progressives, the ideas of the great republican authors of the English Civil War were dead until after the American Revolution. John Locke dominated American thought and the impetus to republicanism emerged with Jefferson only after confederation:

The colonists already had textbooks of revolution in the writings of Englishmen who defended and justified the proceedings of the seventeenth century—above all, John Locke’s writings, wherein was set forth the right of citizens to overthrow government that took their money or their property without consent.¹⁰

However, after the Second World War, this progressive interpretation of the early national period came under assault. The shift from what has been called a Beardian paradigm to a liberal interpretation occurred just as the nation moved from political isolationism to the international arena, from the rhetoric of national exceptionalism and the concentration on social movements to the asocial politics of consensus. No longer seen as a struggle between economic interests, for liberal consensus historians American history was, and always had been, dominated by class harmony centred on self-interest. Louis Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought since the Revolution, Daniel Boorstin’s The Genius of American Politics (1953) and The Americans: The Colonial Experience (1958), and Richard Hofstadter’s The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington outlined the new liberal interpretation for a post-war generation. To these post-Progressives, American thought was Lockean in its marrow:‘Locke dominates American political thought, as no thinker anywhere dominates the political thought of a nation. He is a massive national cliché.’¹¹ Americans took to Locke, they argued, because American society was individualistic, ambitious, protocapitalist or, in a word, ‘liberal’.¹² The ubiquity of Locke’s theories of the sanctity of property and of self-regarding individuals voluntarily restraining their passions in the face of a multiplicity of interests helped to explain the reasonableness of the revolution. As Hofstadter wrote, Locke represented ‘the legalistic, moderate, nonregicidal, and largely nonterroristic character of the American Revolution’.¹³ The revolution was not an accumulation of seething class conflicts but a moderate and rational compromise where all demonstrations of conflict short of a Jacobin or Bolshevist revolution vanished in an all-pervasive liberal consensus.¹⁴

At the same time that liberal historians were working to modify the view of early American history, another form of revision was taking shape. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, a series of essays began to challenge the primacy of the consensual mode of history by exploring the influence of English libertarian thought on the American revolutionaries. For these historians, neither Beard’s economics nor Hartz’s Lockean individualism were the driving force behind the revolution and the early national period. Instead, they argued that colonial Americans drew their political and social attitudes from the libertarian thought of the English ‘commonwealth’ or ‘country’ polemicists of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain. In 1947, Caroline Robbins looked towards Sidney’s Discourses rather than Locke’s Essays as a significant influence on American thought.¹⁵ Acknowledging the contemporary ignorance of Sidney’s writings and the frequent coupling of his name with Locke’s, Robbins set out to uncover the nature of his influence during the revolutionary years. She revealed that like many of his contemporaries, Sidney voiced a popular theory of government against the divine right of any ruler or form of government. In his Discourses Concerning Government, Sidney suggested:

As impostors seldom make lies to pass in the world, without putting false names upon things, such as our author endeavour to persuade the people they ought not to defend their liberties, by giving the name of rebellion to the most just and honourable actions that have been performed for the preservation of them; and to aggravate the matter, fear not to tell us that rebellion is like the sin of witchcraft. But those who seek after truth, will easily find, that there can be no such thing in the world as the rebellion of a nation against its own magistrates, and that rebellion is not always evil.¹⁶

Unlike the ‘principles of the wise and moderate Mr. Locke’, Sidney justified rebellion and conspiracy in the face of tyranny and authoritarianism: ‘For the radical, rebel, or revolutionary, the passionate and partisan Discourses provides an inspiration lacking in Locke’s more temperate Essays.’ Moreover, Robbins’s essay revealed that while Sidney’s inspiration faded in England after the revolution, in America his stature only increased. Conceived of as a seventeenth-century hero and martyr, his motto was adopted by various states, his story was retold in popular history books and his Discourses became one of the political textbooks along with the works of Milton, Harrington, Ludlow, Marvell and Locke, among others. Robbins suggests that the lack of interest in commonwealth doctrine in the contemporary ‘post-Marxian world’ occurred because the writings of these men did not bring about any significant constitutional change in eighteenth-century Britain, nor were they interested in issues of social and economic equality. For post-war Progressives and Liberals alike, Sidney’s writings did not fulfil an interpretative need and therefore were largely ignored.¹⁷

Continuing her assessment of the influence of English reformers on America, Robbins followed her essay on Sidney with an examination of the republican bibliophile and philanthropist, Thomas Hollis. Another largely forgotten figure in post-war historiography, Hollis spent his life defending the seventeenth-century republican tradition and dedicated himself to the private service of English liberty. According to Robbins, Hollis ‘became the most persistent and one of the most effective propagandists for radical Whig doctrines operating in the British Empire in the 1760’s’.¹⁸ While Samuel Johnson’s Tory circle described him as a ‘bigotted Whig or Republican’, and a spreader of ‘“Combustibles” of sedition’, Robbins uncovered his importance to eminent Americans such as Benjamin Franklin who commended Hollis’s service to the cause of American liberty:

Good, not only to his own nation, and to his contemporaries, but to distant Countries, and to late Posterity; for such must be the effect of his multiplying and distributing copies of the Works of our best English writers on Subjects the most important to the Welfare of our Society.¹⁹

For Hollis, the American colonists represented true revolutionary principles, the faith of the real Whigs, and his benefactions of books, coins and illustrations to Harvard University reflected his support of their fight for an American Bill of Rights.²⁰

Robbins’s contribution to an understanding of the transmission and influence of libertarian thought to America propelled a series of essays that helped focus attention on an intellectual and ideological approach to American revolutionary thought and society.²¹ While these nascent works often failed to offer an obvious relationship between English and American ideas or to define republicanism in an American context, they each helped to erode the orthodox view that ideas, particularly republican ideas, played no part in the revolution or the formation of the constitution. The turning point for republican historiography came with the publication of Robbins’s 1959 groundbreaking work The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthmen, the first detailed attempt to describe the English libertarian heritage that Americans drew upon. From the ideas of the Commonwealthmen, Robbins revealed the libertarian drive responsible for keeping alive the ideas of the ‘Real Whigs’, Harrington, Nedham, Milton, Ludlow, Sidney and Marvell who, while believing in the English constitution, also supported the separation of powers, freedom of thought and the sovereignty of the people in the face of increasing corruption and tyranny. As Robbins demonstrated, it was through the ideas of these ‘Real Whigs’, filtered through the writings of Robert Molesworth, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, that Americans developed a profound distrust of power and a fear of usurpation of liberty from the people.²²

Following Robbins’s work, the republican paradigm was fully realized with the publication of three landmark texts: Bernard Bailyn’s Pamphlets of the American Revolution: 1750–1776, Gordon S. Wood’s The Creation of the American Republic: 1776–1787, and J. G. A. Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment.²³ These volumes each contended that the breach between Britain and the colonies was to be explained primarily by understanding the circumstances as the participants perceived them. According to Pocock:

in tracing history in terms of contemporary self-understanding – which is what the history of ideology really amounts to – one is not playing a barren game of pitting one cause against another cause, or one factor against another factor; one is exploring the contemporary perception of possibilities and impossibilities, and the limitations of that perception.²⁴

Labelled the ‘neo-Whig’ or ‘idealist’ approach, these historians clarified the influence of English dissenting thought in America and the implications for American society on the intellectual life of the revolution. More significantly, they outlined the language and conceptual framework of republicanism and revealed the inherent concerns of the revolutionary generation which progressive and liberal historiography had tried to dismiss or contain. The revolution was not a smooth transition to republicanism, they argued, but an experiment punctuated by fear and despair. In this context, the classical dialects of virtue/corruption, liberty/tyranny, past/progress and authenticity/deception became the key terms to unlocking the meaning of eighteenth-century thought. For the neo-Whig historians, one solution to understanding this critical period is an awareness of the differences in political and social principle between the anti-Federalists and Federalists and, in particular, the dispute over the degree of balance between equality and the authority of the central government. Certainly, it was a generation deeply divided over its definition of social and political life. However, more important than the rivalries between opposing political parties was the fascination of the revolutionary generation with political ideology and, specifically, the ideology of republicanism. These historians viewed the whole revolutionary era as a continuing effort by the American people to decide exactly what republicanism meant to them. Arguments between Federalists and anti-Federalists were not to do with whether to have a republic, but rather what type of republic they envisioned and two modes of thought competed strenuously for the establishment of republican liberty: Protestantism and American legal thought. The oppositional rhetoric of clergymen provided revolutionary Americans with a forceful moral dimension to the nation’s fight against the British Empire, while the idea of law, reworked for an American republic from English common law and the legal treatise of the European Enlightenment, ‘defined the events and capped its directions’.²⁵ Although individuals as diverse in political orientation as Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and John Taylor may have differed over the specifics of political theory, they nonetheless shared a common body of assumptions about republican political society. At its most basic level, all agreed that republicanism implied an absence of both a monarchy and an English-style aristocracy and the establishment of a government directed by the will of the people. But this usage of the term was always vague and ambiguous. It appears only once in the constitution, and in The Federalist, James Madison offered only a general meaning:‘we may define a republic to be, or at least may bestow that name on, a government which derives all its powers directly or indirectly from the body of the people; and is administered by persons holding their offices during pleasure, for an unlimited period, or during good behaviour’.²⁶ The term also encompassed a whole range of ideas regarding republican government which influenced the nation’s manners and institutions. The first was that all republics were dependent on a broad distribution of virtue among its citizens. In the classical republican tradition, man was by nature a political being, and public or political liberty meant participation in government. However, liberty was only achieved when citizens were virtuous – that is, willing to sacrifice their private interests in favour of the public good.‘What is called a republic’, wrote Thomas Paine, means the ‘public good’, or the good of the whole, compared with a despotic form, which makes the good of the sovereign or of one man the only object of government.‘Every government that does not act on the principle of a Republic, or in other words, that does not make the res-publica its whole and sole object, is not a good government.’²⁷ The eighteenth-century classical values of public or civic virtue were not only American conceptions: virtue, and other values such as honour and sincerity that accompanied it,

lay at the heart of all prescriptions for political leadership in the eighteenth-century English speaking world. Throughout the century Englishmen of all political persuasions – whigs and tories alike – struggled to find the ideal virtuous leader amid the rising and swirling currents of financial and commercial interests that threatened to engulf their society.²⁸

In the American context, public virtue or disinterestedness combined with the private virtues of industry, simplicity and sincerity to define the dimensions of republicanism; and it is because republics required such moral sacrifice that they are fragile polities, vulnerable to corruption and decay. The revolution had tested and refined the power of American virtue, but by the 1790s, when the crisis was over, men reverted to their naturally selfish, ambitious and extravagant ways. The greatest danger to virtue, both private and public, was commonly recognized as wealth and luxury, passion and competition, and with the return to prosperity after the economic disorder of the revolution, virtue was under threat. Profoundly aware of the historical fact that republican government never lasted for long, and challenged by the rapidly expanding commercial culture, American revolutionaries worried that the moral prerequisites of a republican order were difficult if not impossible to maintain. From their readings of both ancient and contemporary texts, they knew that all republics were vulnerable and impermanent; outside of a few European principalities, no other republican government prevailed at the time of the American Revolution. Because republican political society is characterized by individual liberty and the absence of a dominating authority, they were vulnerable to hostile attacks from without, and corruption and decay from within.

Another central idea was that the spirit and principle of a genuine republic was the promotion of equality of property among its citizens. Equality meant that no individual should be dependent on the will of another, and property made this independence possible. Americans concluded that they were naturally fit for republicanism precisely because they were ‘a people of property; almost every man is a freeholder’.²⁹ But it was equally true that ‘Power follows property’, and as wealth increased, so too the tendency for power to consolidate in the hands of the few. The growing aristocracy of wealth led to the problem of faction, the internal rupture of society into competing political groups. As John Howe observes, ‘Faction was virtue’s opposite’, and in the resulting struggles, ‘passions were further aroused, internal divisions deepened and ultimately civil conflict was brought on. Such was the deadly spiral into which republican government too often fell.’³⁰ These fundamental assumptions reveal that rather than sunny optimism, American revolutionaries were preoccupied with fears of tyranny, corruption and national degeneration. The truth was that the once great and illustrious ancient republics were no more and Americans studied and used this knowledge to diagnose the problems of eighteenth-century England, as well as to prevent their own burgeoning nation from succumbing to a similar fate.

One of the first works to detect the pessimistic strain underlying eighteenth-century republican discourse was Bernard Bailyn’s groundbreaking Pamphlets of the American Revolution. For Bailyn what was original about the revolution was not its social disruption but the alteration of American values, the way they looked at themselves and each other. From the agencies of newspapers, books, pamphlets, correspondence, as well as pan-Atlantic interest groups, the flow of information between Europe and the colonies was continuous, and for Bailyn the most important of these were the writings of the English dissenters:

In every colony and in every legislature there were people who knew Locke and Beccaria, Montesquieu and Voltaire; but perhaps more important, there was in every village of every colony someone who knew such transmitters of English nonconformist thought as Watts, Neal, and Burgh; later Priestly and Price . . . In the bitterly contentious pamphlet literature of mid eighteenth-century American politics, the most frequently cited authority on matters of principle and theory was not Locke or Montesquieu but Cato’s Letters.³¹

Believing the American Revolution to be an ideological and constitutional struggle, Bailyn expected to find the influence of Enlightenment theology, common law, classical literature, as well as a certain amount of rhetoric and propaganda embedded in revolutionary writing. What he did not expect to find were those strands of thought that many historians had traditionally denounced as irrelevant, nonexistent or simply ‘obtuse secularism’.³² The first of these patterns of ideas was the pervasive influence of European Enlightenment theory and theology on the revolutionary generation. Not only were these influences relevant, he claimed, they revealed that ‘[c]itations, respectful borrowings from, or at least references to, the eighteenth-century European illuminati are everywhere in the pamphlets of Revolutionary America’. The ideas and writings of reformers such as Locke, Voltaire, Rousseau and Beccaria, as well as conservative thinkers such as Montesquieu, were ‘quoted everywhere in the colonies, by everyone who claimed a broad awareness’.³³ The second discovery was a pattern of ideas and attitudes that flowed directly from the British tradition of radical social and political thought transmitted to the colonists by libertarians, disaffected politicians and religious dissenters whose anti-authoritarianism was bred in the upheaval of the English Civil War. Nourished by the seventeenth-century political writings of John Milton and Algernon Sidney, early eighteenth-century libertarians such as John Trenchard, Thomas Gordon, Benjamin Hoadly and Robert Molesworth, and the contemporary writings of Richard Price, Joseph Priestly and Thomas Paine, the revolutionary pamphleteers revealed an astonishing engagement with the language of radical and anti-establishment thought. This tradition, Bailyn noted, had never been applied to the origins of the American Revolution, and it was in the context of identifying and classifying these references and sources that he saw new meanings in the language of revolutionary literature. What Bailyn discovered was a lexicon of fear and suspicion, a ‘vivid vocabulary’ of ‘slavery’, ‘corruption’, ‘conspiracy’, expressed over and over in the profusion of arguments, replies, rebuttals and counter-rebuttals that made up the literature of the revolutionary period. This language was not merely the propaganda of completing interests groups, but represented a genuine fear of rising tyranny and corruption:

These inflammatory words were used so forcefully by pamphleteers of so great a variety of social statuses, political positions, and religious persuasions; they fitted so logically into the pattern of radical and opposition thought; and they reflected so clearly the realities of life in an age in which monarchical autocracy flourished, in which the stability and freedom of England’s ‘mixed’ constitution was a recent and remarkable achievement, and in which the fear of conspiracy against constituted authority was built into the very structure of politics, that I began to suspect that they meant something very real to both the writers and their readers; that there were real fears, real anxieties, a sense of real danger behind these phrases, and not merely the desire to influence by rhetoric and propaganda the inert minds of an otherwise passive populace.³⁴

For the colonists, the real danger to America was the violation of those principles upon which freedom rested. By 1763, Britain’s ‘mixed constitution’, the balance of social and governmental forces was seen to be under threat by ‘Jacobite remnants’, ‘effeminising luxury’ and ‘festering corruption’. In addition, there appeared to be evidence that ‘nothing less than a deliberate conspiracy launched surreptitiously by plotters against liberty’ was being perpetrated against America.

While conspiratorial fears were latent throughout colonial history, beginning with the Nonconformist’s suspicion of the Church of England’s ‘formal design to root out Presbyterianism’, the smouldering belief in a hidden plot directed against American liberties ignited with the institution of British policies in civil affairs: the passage of the Stamp Act, the Townsend Duties, the weakening of the judiciary and, especially, the implementation of standing armies, viewed by many as the keystone of arbitrary government, all confirmed for the colonists that the constitution was being undermined by what John Adams called the ‘serpentine wiles’ of the English administration. In the wake of the Boston Tea Party, Parliament ‘threw off the mask’ of legality and initiated a series of acts, intended to cripple the economic base of Massachusetts: the Administration of Justice Act, the Massachusetts Government Act, the Quebec Act and the Quartering Act. Once this interpretation of events took hold in the minds of the colonists, ‘it could not be easily dispelled: denial only confirmed it, since what conspirators profess is not what they believe; the ostensible, for them, is not the real; and the real is deliberately malign’. It was this belief, according to Bailyn, that transformed the colonists’ struggle and that in the end propelled them into revolution.³⁵

Although Bailyn’s work does not use the term republicanism directly, it emphasized the transatlantic influences on American institutions and employed the key terms by which republicanism would come to be identified. It was Bailyn’s student Gordon Wood who would advance the view of a developing republican ideology in revolutionary America. Wood’s The Creation of the American Republic, while less deterministic than Bailyn’s Pamphlets, registered a similar note of surprise at the patterns of thought and conceptual language of the American patriots:

my reading opened up an intellectual world I had scarcely known existed. Beneath the variety and idiosyncrasies of American opinion there emerged a general pattern of beliefs about the social process—a set of common assumptions about history, society, politics that connected and made significant seemingly discrete and unrelated ideas.³⁶

Following Bailyn’s description of revolutionary language meaning something ‘very real’ to both writers and readers, Wood also interprets the words of the generation not as hyperbole and propaganda but as genuine fears rooted in their culture and education. For Americans,

the Revolution meant nothing less than a reordering of eighteenth-century society and politics . . . a reordering that was summed up by the conception of republicanism . . . Republicanism meant more for Americans than simply the elimination of a king and the institution of an elective system. It added a moral dimension, a utopian depth, to the political separation from England—a depth that involved the very character of their society.

According to Wood, the one source of republican inspiration acknowledged by all Whigs, English and American alike, was classical antiquity where all the great republics had flourished. The profusion of classical allusions, references, iconography and language that ran through the colonists’ public and private writings revealed their investiture in creating an American neo-classical age. From their readings, Americans conceived of the ideal republic as one that avoided the downfall of the first and the sacrifice of individual interests to the greater good of the whole formed the essence of republicanism and the idealistic goal of their revolution. This ideology came to represent a final or even desperate attempt ‘to realize the traditional Commonwealth ideal of a corporate society, in which the common good would be the only objective of government’.³⁷ Its most exact English equivalent was commonwealth, or a state belonging to the whole people rather than the crown. The people were a homogenous body, linked organically to the state and while the state was viewed as one moral whole, any clashing interests or factions were regarded as perversions and signs of sickness in the body politic.³⁸ Republicanism, in Wood’s view, was profoundly traditional, embodying the ideal of the good society from antiquity through to the eighteenth century. Individual liberty and the public good were reconcilable because in Whig ideology liberty was public or political emphasizing not private rights against the general will but, more importantly, the public right against the interests of their rulers. This willingness to sacrifice private interests for the public good, this patriotism or nationalism was in the eighteenth century termed ‘public virtue’.³⁹ Republics were vulnerable because in a polity that rested solely on the authority of the people, an extraordinary moral character was required. It was every man’s duty to be benevolent, to subordinate their individual loves to the greater good of the whole. However, there existed an inherent conflict in this theory. Liberty means the security of property, but the security of property also begets wealth, and wealth is the source of luxury and degeneration; therefore, any attempt to regulate wealth is to restrict liberty. It is this conundrum, according to Wood, which is at the centre of republican ideology.

Wood also contends that the failure of the revolutionaries to identify a natural aristocracy resulted in the federal crisis of the 1780s and the ‘end to classical politics’. The vocabulary that animated the revolutionaries in 1776, he claims, did not possess a timeless quality, and by 1787 the meaning of terms such as liberty, democracy, virtue or republicanism had undergone fundamental change:‘The Americans of the Revolutionary generation had not simply constructed a new form of government, but an entirely new conception of politics, a conception that took them out of an essentially classical and medieval world of political discussion into one that was recognizably modern’.⁴⁰ It was a shift, in other words, from republicanism to liberalism, from the classical theory of the individual as civic or active to one where the individual is primarily concerned with his own interests. According to Wood, as Federalist theory moved away from the paradigm of virtue toward self-interest, it abandoned the rhetoric of republicanism:

Once the people were thought to be composed of various interests in opposition to one another, all sense of a graduated organic chain in the social hierarchy became irrelevant, symbolized by the increasing emphasis on the image of a social contract. The people were not an order organically tied together by their unity of interest but rather an agglomeration of hostile individuals coming together for their mutual benefit to construct a society.⁴¹