Cato’s Letters: Difference between revisions

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According to historian Craig Yirush Cato’s Letters became central to the republican/liberalism debate thanks to Bernard Bailyn’s book [[The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution]].<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Yirush |first1=Craig |title=Bailyn, the Republican Interpretation, and the Future of Revolutionary Scholarship |journal=Eighteenth-Century Studies |date=1967 |volume=50 |issue=3 |pages=321–325 |doi=10.1353/ecs.2017.0015|s2cid=151921186|url=https://www-jstor-org/stable/44630828?seq=1|url-access=subscription }}</ref>

According to historian Craig Yirush Cato’s Letters became central to the republican/liberalism debate thanks to Bernard Bailyn’s book [[The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution]].<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Yirush |first1=Craig |title=Bailyn, the Republican Interpretation, and the Future of Revolutionary Scholarship |journal=Eighteenth-Century Studies |date=1967 |volume=50 |issue=3 |pages=321–325 |doi=10.1353/ecs.2017.0015|s2cid=151921186|url=https://www-jstor-org/stable/44630828?seq=1|url-access=subscription }}</ref>

In a 1976 assessment of [[The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution]] for [[Reason (magazine)|”Reason”]], economist [[Murray Rothbard]] praised Bailyn’s continuing contributions to historiography. Rothbard lauded “the most recent and now dominant school of historiography on the American Revolution—that of Professor Bernard Bailyn—brings radical ideology, and radical ”libertarian” ideology at that, into the forefront of the causes of the Revolution. Against the hostility of both of the older schools of historians, Bailyn has managed, in scarcely a decade, to win his way through to become the leading interpreter of the Revolution. Bailyn’s great contribution was to lay out for the first time the truly dominant role of ideology.” Bailyn, according to Rothbard, had realized that “what some historians have derided as [solely] the ‘paranoia’ of the colonists turns out to be not paranoia at all but an insightful apprehension of reality, an insight that was of course fueled by the colonists’ libertarian understanding of the very nature and essence of state power itself…In the deepest sense, the American Revolution was a conscious majority revolution on behalf of libertarianism and against Power, a libertarian ideology that stressed the conjoined rights of ‘Liberty and Property.‘ “<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Rothbard |first1=Murray |title=America’s Libertarian Revolution |journal=Reason.com |date=1 July 1976 |url=https://reason.com/1976/07/01/americas-liberarian-revolution/?nab=1}}</ref>

In a 1976 [[Reason (magazine)|”Reason”]], economist [[Murray Rothbard]] that Bailyn in the ” ” the of to the American .<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Rothbard |first1=Murray |title=America’s Libertarian Revolution |journal=Reason.com |date=1 July 1976 |url=https://reason.com/1976/07/01/americas-liberarian-revolution/?nab=1}}</ref>

Two years later, in “Bailyn’s Crucial Breakthrough”, a section of his essay “Modern Historians Confront the American Revolution”, Rothbard repeated that “Bailyn discovered that Americans were indeed influenced, on a massive scale, by these [commonwealthmen] libertarian articles and pamphlets…The most important shaper of this libertarian viewpoint was ”Cato’s Letters”.” He clarified that “Trenchard and Gordon, and the other libertarian writers, transmuted John Locke’s abstract and often guarded political philosophy into a trenchant, hard-hitting, and radical libertarian creed.”<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Rothbard |first1=Murray |last2=McDonald |first2=Forrest |title=Literature of Liberty, January/March 1978, vol. 1, No. 1 {{!}} Online Library of Liberty |journal=oll.libertyfund.org |date=1978 |volume=1 |issue=1 |url=https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/liggio-literature-of-liberty-january-march-1978-vol-1-no-1}}</ref>

Two years later, in “Bailyn’s Crucial Breakthrough”, a section of his essay “Modern Historians Confront the American Revolution”, Rothbard repeated that “Bailyn discovered that Americans were indeed influenced, on a massive scale, by these [commonwealthmen] libertarian articles and pamphlets…The most important shaper of this libertarian viewpoint was ”Cato’s Letters”.” He clarified that “Trenchard and Gordon, and the other libertarian writers, transmuted John Locke’s abstract and often guarded political philosophy into a trenchant, hard-hitting, and radical libertarian creed.”<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Rothbard |first1=Murray |last2=McDonald |first2=Forrest |title=Literature of Liberty, January/March 1978, vol. 1, No. 1 {{!}} Online Library of Liberty |journal=oll.libertyfund.org |date=1978 |volume=1 |issue=1 |url=https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/liggio-literature-of-liberty-january-march-1978-vol-1-no-1}}</ref>

Essays by John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon

Cato’s Letters were essays by British writers John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, first published from 1720 to 1723 under the pseudonym of Cato (95–46 BC), the implacable foe of Julius Caesar and a famously stalwart champion of Roman traditionalism (mos maiorum).

Purpose

The Letters were written in response to the South Sea Bubble and are considered a seminal work in the tradition of the Commonwealth men, being seen as an example of “extreme libertarianism“.

They condemned corruption and lack of morality within the British political system and warned against standing armies, tyrannical rule and abuse of power. For instance “all History affords but few Instances of Men trusted with great Power without abusing it, when with Security they could.”^[3]

Publication

Trenchard and Gordon had already collaborated in producing the Country Party newsletter The Independent Whig.^[4] The 144 essays were published originally beginning in 1720 until Trenchard’s death in 1723^[5] within the London Journal, later in the British Journal. The Letters were collected and printed in bound form in 1734 as Essays on Liberty, Civil and Religious.^[6] A measure of their influence is attested by six editions printed by 1755.

Influence

A generation later their arguments immensely influenced the ideals of the American Revolution. According to Peter Karsten’s Patriot-Heroes in England and America, Cato’s Letters were the most common holdings on the bookcases of the founding fathers.^[7]

These letters also provided inspiration and ideals for the American Revolutionary generation. The essays were distributed widely across the Thirteen Colonies, and frequently quoted in newspapers from Boston to Savannah, Georgia. Many private libraries in colonial America contained bound volumes of Cato’s Letters,^[9] and there are some estimates that half the private libraries in the American Colonies held bound volumes of Cato’s Letters on their shelves. This has been shown as showing a preferences for “English” rights over John Locke‘s natural rights.

The Cato Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank founded by Edward H. Crane in 1977, takes its name from Cato’s Letters.^[12]

Historiography

According to historian Craig Yirush Cato’s Letters became central to the republican/liberalism debate thanks to Bernard Bailyn’s book The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution.^[13]

In a 1976 article in Reason, economist Murray Rothbard said that Bailyn had found in the Cato Letters a “missing ingredient” in the transmission of libertarian thought to the American Revolutuion.^[14]

Two years later, in “Bailyn’s Crucial Breakthrough”, a section of his essay “Modern Historians Confront the American Revolution”, Rothbard repeated that “Bailyn discovered that Americans were indeed influenced, on a massive scale, by these [commonwealthmen] libertarian articles and pamphlets…The most important shaper of this libertarian viewpoint was Cato’s Letters.” He clarified that “Trenchard and Gordon, and the other libertarian writers, transmuted John Locke’s abstract and often guarded political philosophy into a trenchant, hard-hitting, and radical libertarian creed.”^[15]

Forrest McDonald joined Rothbard in the maiden issue of Literature of Liberty, published by the Cato Institute. The first issue only featured essays by Rothbard and McDonald. In 1973, both men served as dual senior lecturers on the economic history of the United States for an Institute for Humane Studies seminar at Cornell University. McDonald echoed his partner’s plaudits, adding that, “without exception, the major British politcal writers who carried the English libertarian tradition through the eighteenth century were gentrymen who were writing in fierce opposition to the new financial order.” This new order had been created by mercantile bankers invested in monetary policy over broader fiscal concerns that included real estate, mostly under the Walpole ministry. In emphasizing the fiscal dimensions of real estate, McDonald averred, “Americans had evolved a set of advanced ideas and institutions regarding the rights of individuals to hold unfettered title to real property; indeed, they had developed the quite radical practice of treating land as an actual commodity, to be bought and sold at will…Thus the Americans absorbed the poison of antifinance capitalism with their mother’s milk of liberty.” McDonald pointed out, however, that “the Americans” periodically failed to collapse or conflate dual branches of a given dichotomy. For example, “the British writers and their American readers distinguished between liberty and licentiousness, the one resting upon virtue [in government], and the other upon depravity. But the distinction was scarcely one to satisfy any true libertarian.” In 1990, McDonald appropriated his own review on Faces of the Revolution to extol Bailyn’s thesis. Bailyn, opined McDonald, “made an unassailable case that the English opposition was central to the thinking of American Revolutionary leaders, anti-Federalists and Jeffersonians.”^[16][17][18]

References

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