De Achttiende Eeuw. Jaargang 2005

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Wijnand W. Mijnhardt
The Limits of Present-day Historiography of Republicanism¹

Wijnand W.Mijnhardt has the chair of cultural history at Utrecht University. Since 2001 he is attached to the University of California in Los Angeles for one trimester each academic year as visiting professor of Dutch cultural history. He is currently working on a monograph entitled: An Urban Enlightenment, the Dutch Republic 1640-1815, to be published by AUP/University of Chicago Press. A historical survey of the Netherlands in the long 18th century, to be published by Prometheus, is under preparation.

In present-day historiography early-modern republicanism has a clearly defined character, enabling us to establish quite easily which political ideas and practices of the sixteenth to eighteenth-century Western experience might be incorporated into that tradition and which not. Thus, according to contemporary orthodoxy, dominated by the Cambridge School of John Pocock and Quentin Skinner, experiments with corporative representation in the principality of seventeenth and early eighteenth-century East Frisia or the economic republicanism of lesser ‘philosophes’ in the free cities of the German Empire hardly qualify for a place in its republican hall of fame. The Swiss Confederation might possibly be given a place at the back, but it is questionable if contemporary orthodoxy is prepared to pay much attention to the rural democracy of inner Swiss Schwyz in its historical survey of the Atlantic republican tradition.

Such a fate is not unique. Though the great historians of the Atlantic republican tradition continue to widen the gap between their once almost identical convictions,² they have both found it difficult to incorporate the Dutch experience into their theories and conceptions. Quentin Skinner, in his otherwise brilliant analysis of the right to resist in his Foundations, had marginalized the sixteenth-century Dutch Revolt, even though it was the only successful revolutionary removal of a lawful sovereign before the execution of Charles I. In that sense his survey reads as a prehistory of seventeenth-century English rather than European political radicalism.³ For John Pocock Dutch political philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was equally hard to digest. A seventeenth-century radical republican such as Pieter de la Court to his surprise could not be found to accept James Harrington's version of Machiavellianism and even Spinoza's interest in original republican virtue of a Roman and renaissance character was dubious.⁴ The eighteenth-century Dutch experience

1 Parts of this essay were presented as papers at the conference entitled: ‘L' idea di repubblica nella riflessione storica di Franco Venturi’ in September 2004 in Naples, at the Pestalozzianum in Zürich in November 2004 and at the Early Modern European History Workshop at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in March 2005.

2 For a survey of the history of the idea of Renaissance civic humanism which stands at the origins of both Skinner's and Pocock's interest in the history of modern political thought, cf. J.Hankins, ed., Renaissance Civic Humanism, Reappraisals and Reflections (Cambridge 2000) 1-13.

3 Q. Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (2 vols; Cambridge 1978). In The Political Thought of the Dutch Revolt 1555-1590 (Cambridge 1992) Martin van Gelderen, though supplying an acute and new analysis of the revolutionary pamphlets, has not succeeded in establishing a viable republican perspective on the Revolt. For a more promising approach, Catherine Sécretan: Les Privilèges. Berceau de la Liberté (Paris 1992).

4 J.G.A. Pocock, ‘The problem of political thought in the eighteenth century: patriotism and politeness’, Theoretische Geschiedenis 9(1982) 3-24. Cf. E.H.Kossmann, ‘Dutch Republicanism’ in L'età dei Lumi. Studi storici sul Settecento Europeo in onore di Franco Venturi (2 vols; Naples 1985) 453-486.

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posed similar problems. The full-scale antithesis between patriotism and politeness that Pocock had found permeating the British and American debate was absent from Dutch discussions; a perplexing mixture of both traditions in individual thinkers could be found instead. As a result in his treatment of an Atlantic republican tradition that linked the urban Italy of the Renaissance to the American Revolution of the eighteenth century by means of the English republican interlude of the mid-seventeenth century, he ignored the Dutch experience or reduced it to a curious anecdote at best.

Skinner has since recognized that a simple linear development from the ‘humanist liberty’ of the Renaissance political theorists to the high-minded ideals of the Declaration of Independence as voiced by Thomas Jefferson is very difficult to maintain. The Cambridge historians now present the Renaissance philosophers, and especially Machiavelli, as the defenders of a much more traditional concept of negative liberty, that is freedom from arbitrary power and corruption.⁵ The new perspective, though, does not seem to have affected the fate of Dutch early-modern republican thought. If, for instance, we take the recently published results of the ESF program on European republicanism into account, one can only conclude that Dutch republicanism has failed the test once again. However, the Cambridge School with its precisely circumscribed political languages not only marginalizes the spectacular experiences of the only major early-modern urban, mercantile and maritime Republic that in a very short time succeeded in reaching a never-witnessed level of economic and intellectual greatness, but also a great variety of other remarkable European republican experiments and traditions.⁶

Mightn't it be useful therefore to question, not the validity of much of the brilliant research the Atlantic republican tradition has inspired in the last few decades, but the universality of the concept itself? To a discussion of a part of that problem I will devote the first part of my essay.

5 Q.Skinner, ‘The Republican Idea of Liberty’, in: G.Bock, Q.Skinner and M.Viroli, ed., Machiavelli and Republicanism (Cambridge 1990).

6 Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner, ed., Republicanism. A European Heritage (2 vols; Cambridge 2002). Fortunately not only Dutch republican thought is officially declared irrelevant. Most remarkable about these volumes and their 30-odd contributors is their conceptual confusion. Though the editors speak of a shared European republican heritage, they seem to want to limit their discussion of that legacy to only one strand in this legacy. In their introduction Skinner and Van Gelderen remark: ‘Whatever else it may have meant to be a republican in early-modern Europe, it meant repudiating the age-old belief that monarchy is necessarily the best form of government’, thus choosing once again for the Hans Baron-inspired concept of positive republicanism. Apart from the conceptual difficulties involved in the use of the word republic in its modern sense in the pre-Machiavellian period (on this fundamental issue, see David Wootron, ‘De vera republica’, in: Manuela Albertone ed., L' idea di repubblica nella riflessione storica di Franco Venturi (Naples, Bibliopolis, forthcoming), most contributors limit themselves to discussing the dissemination of this new Florentine republican language. Unfortunately they refrain from documenting its confrontation with the conceptions, ideas, languages as exemplified by other existing languages of the republic, of which there were three at least (in which ‘republic’ stood for legitimate government, state, or mixed constitution). As a result the volumes impose the Florentine model on the varieties of European republican thought, pronouncing some fit for service in the Atlantic republican tradition while discarding others. See also Jonathan Israel, ‘The intellectual origins of modern democratic republicanism (1660-1720)’, in: European Journal of Political Theory 3 (2002) 7-36, a paper that criticized the Atlantic concept and was not incorporated in the volumes. Cf. Israel, Monarchy, Orangism, and Republicanism in the Late Golden Age (2e Gouden-Eeuwlezing, Amsterdam 2004).

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The concept of republicanism

The notion of an Atlantic republican tradition, I believe, is another example of a standard fallacy in the writing of history, a fallacy that I call the myopia of post-national history. Though since the 1960's the overriding concern with national histories has been steadily on the decline, the nation has retained important functions, if only as the central organizing principle of most history writing. Moreover, though disguised as universal principles, various historical axioms dating back to the high tide of national history are still in full force. According to conventional wisdom, for instance, in order to become modern, countries need to experience a French as well as an Industrial Revolution. Modernity, as a result, is the reward for having experienced both. The Atlantic republican tradition implicitly functions as such a historical axiom too. In order to be able to embrace modern Republicanism with its corollaries of representative democracy and sovereignty of the people, states and nations need to have accomplished the Atlantic republican trajectory or at least something similar to it.⁷

Shouldn't one question, however, the universality of these axioms and touchstones? Shouldn't these criteria and the norm they imply be interpreted as a product of the writing of national histories too? The grand narratives produced by English and French historians in which both the Industrial and French revolutions served as modernity markers, or those written by British and American historians of the Atlantic republican tradition, originally were intended first of all for national consumption. However, as a result of the previously dominant position of France and England in world politics and the world economy, a role now championed by the USA, these touchstones became part first of a European and later of a Western standard for historical development. Nevertheless, these apparently universal master narratives all had their origins in preconditions that were only present in these dominant countries and they reduced the deviant trajectories of most other European nations to a state of permanent unimportance if not oblivion.

The myopia of post-national historiography is no isolated phenomenon and the Atlantic republican tradition is not an exception. If we take a look, for instance, at much of present-day historiography of science a similar bias can be detected. The contemporary grand narrative of the origins and development of modern science often reduces continental European issues and continental European contributions to mere supporting roles in a history mostly populated by Anglo-American facts, figures and biographies.⁸ The so-called national interpretation of the Enlightenment which has dominated international historiography

7 On deviant trajectories to modernity: W.W. Mijnhardt, Over de moderniteit van de Nederlandse Republiek (Utrecht 2001) and Deborah Silverman, Van Gogh and Gauguin (New York 2001).

8 For example, Science in theistic context, Osiris (Chicago 2003) which limits the discussion on the relationship between science and religion and the discussants to Great Britain and the US.

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for the last two decades is just another example of this myopic tradition.⁹

I believe the work on European republicanism by Franco Venturi can save us from the post-national trap into which an important part of the writing of the history of republicanism has fallen. In his modern classic Utopia and Reform,¹⁰ Venturi endeavored to write a history of republicanism not from a national perspective but based upon a sincere cosmopolitan conviction that was fed by his youthful experience as an intellectual exile, together with his father, the art historian Lionello Venturi, from fascist Italy in the 1930's and 40's. Intellectual cosmopolitanism in his view was the most important contribution of the Enlightenment to the modern world.¹¹ Venturi did not develop his ideas and theories in competition with Skinner and Pocock, but his work can be read as a series of implicit criticisms of the approach they would later take.

Most importantly, to Venturi the European context was central to the development of the modern varieties of republicanism. In his view the real battlefield was the strained relationship between kings and republics. Even though these republics, if only because of their aristocratic leanings and their clinging to their outdated mixed constitutions, were doomed to lose their ongoing battle with the absolutist and centralizing modern states, he assigned them the central role of midwives to the birth of the new republicanism.

In its first stages the new republicanism had strong utopian and moral undertones but it would soon become the ferment of the French and American revolutions and eventually its ideals - political, economic and social - would push Europe into the modern era. Thus, in his view the European republics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were not marginal but central to the development of the modern republican ideology: not only the republics of Renaissance Italy or the seventeenth-century Cromwellian Republic were agents of change, but the Dutch, the Genevan, the Swiss and the Italian republics of the early-modern period were to play an essential role as well.

Equally important as this historical reorientation was Venturi's methodological approach. Unlike his English and American colleagues he considered the emphasis on philosophical treatises and tracts, even if that approach included the work of a host of minor figures, much too narrow. Venturi wanted to study republican culture as a multi-faceted phenomenon and as a result he included all branches of historical knowledge in the effort to establish its meaning. Such an approach involved the new economic history (exemplified in his case by Ernest Labrousse) and the new social history (though he abhorred the French Annales variety for its emphasis on quantitative details to the detriment of qualitative history writing). Venturi emphasized the importance of the social conditions responsible for the creation of authors and their ideas but also for the reception of ideas and their transformation in the process. To Venturi the works of journalists and writers of travelogues, pamphlets and broadsheets were just as important as those of the great philosophers, because their ephemeral texts ofren were much more influential in the creation of informed public opinion. His knowledge of debates in journals and magazines all over Europe as displayed in his magnum opus Settecento Riformatore was breathtaking.¹² Present-day interest in republican visual imagery as a crucial means in conveying and confirming republican messages

9 The foundation of a grear number of national research socieries devoted to the study of local Enlightenment varieties (largely since the second half of the 1970's) is a perfect illustration of the post-national approach, with its first success: R. Porter and M. Teich, The Enlightenment in national context (Cambridge 1981). It is a debatable point if the post-national diagnosis does not relate to the now familiar portrayal of a European continent mainly populared by post-nationalist states troubled by the military assertiveness of the US and its bold projection of national power. It is a fascinating question nevertheless if and how European post-nationalism should be contrasted to the work of the group of conservative American historians exemplified by Gertrude Himmelfarb who interpret the American Enlightenment as the apotheosis of Western modernity, thereby discarding the European contributions. Cf. The Roads to Modernity: The British, French and American Enlightenments (New York 2005). See also her defense of a revitalized nationalism: ‘The illusion of cosmopolitanism’, in: J. Cohen, For Love of Country. Debating the Limits of Patriotism (Boston 1996).

10 Franco Venturi, Utopia and Reform (Cambridge 1971).

11 Giuseppe Ricuperati, ‘The historiographical legacy of Franco Venturi (1914-1994)’, in: Journal of Modern Italian Studies 2 (1997).

12 7 vols; 3 of which have been translared into English. 79

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and leanings - a method initiated by Swiss researchers commemorating the 700th anniversary of the founding of the Swiss republic, in which the symbols of republican freedom throughout Europe were analyzed on a comparative basis - is a logical consequence of this multi-faceted approach.¹³

The Venturi perspective has been immensely helpful in interpreting the Dutch early-modern republican experience, though it took some time before its results became visible. In 1981 Margaret Jacob proposed a new interpretation of the European Enlightenment that underscored Venturi's findings.¹⁴ In her view the origin of the Enlightenment definitively shifted from France to revolutionary England of the mid seventeenth-century and the Dutch Republic of the first half of the eighteenth century. Its center turned out to be not Paris but London and ‘Randstad’, the region made up by Amsterdam, Utrecht, Rotterdam and The Hague. Here, intellectual circles, including French and English refugees and Dutch literati disenchanted with Dutch politics and religion, joined forces to develop radical new views on man, nature, and society. It is in this milieu that pantheist and republican ideas would be developed that preceded French thought by more than fifty years. Margaret Jacob's bold findings were responsible for vehement debates, but when, at the turn of the decade, the dust had settled, her work had contributed to a fundamental change in the approach to Dutch intellectual history of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.¹⁵

To a brief analysis of the new perspectives that so well underscore the significance of Venturi's methods and interpretations and question those of the Anglo-American tradition, I will devote the next part of my essay.

13 Zeichen der Freiheit (Bern 1991).

14 M.C. Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment (London 1981).

15 I mention just a few: Theo Verbeek, Descartes and the Dutch (Carbondale 1992); Wiep van Bunge, From Stevin to Spinoza: an essay on philosophy in the seventeenth century Dutch Republic (Leiden/Bosron 2001); Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment. Philosophy and the making of modernity, 1650-1750 (Oxford 2001).

New perspectives

As early as the seventeenth century contemporaries had great difficulty understanding the nature of Dutch society. Of course they envied the United Provinces' wealth and power, but they were remarkably unsuccessful in explaining it. A shrewd diplomat like Sir William Temple, for instance, was amazed at the fact that the Dutch had turned upside down the orders by which in the seventeenth century a nation's strength could be measured: ‘Small in territories at land [and] weak in number of native subjects, but mighty in riches and trade’.¹⁶

As modern economic history has shown, the key to this remarkable achievement was the extraordinary level of urbanization. Around 1800, when the country was past its early-modern urbanization wave, as much as 35% of the population lived in towns. France, with only 12% of its population urbanized at the time, cut a poor figure in comparison, and not even England could touch these numbers. Urbanization alone though does not suffice as an explanation. Equally important is that in the Republic the countryside as early as the later sixteenth century had lost its crucial role in the food supply and therewith its economic and political significance which it would retain in all other European states until far into the nineteenth century. The extensive grain imports allowing this exceptional urban independence were financed by large-scale commercial and industrial activities.

16 W. Temple, ‘Observations upon the United Provinces of the Netherlands’, in Works (4 vols; London 1757) I, 114.

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Despite its amazing ascendancy the Dutch Republic of the seventeenth century was a young and very unstable state, tormented by a series of grave political issues that would only be resolved at the end of the eighteenth century, especially problems of sovereignty and of political participation.¹⁷ Two pretenders to sovereignty prevailed: on the one hand the provinces and the almost sovereign towns that constituted the core of most Provincial Estates and which saw themselves as descendants of the Roman city state tradition, and on the other the stadholders, the former lieutenants of the Spanish king in the provinces. The main bone of contention was the States General. No one intended the States General or one of its organs to be elevated to a sovereign position but both the stadholder and the province of Holland, which supplied almost 60% of the state's national income, tried to extend the powers of the States General in order to increase their own influence. As only temporary solutions were reached, sovereignty in the Dutch Republic remained in permanent flux.

No definitive solution to the issue of political participation was reached either.¹⁸ After the deposition of the king in 1581, political power in the cities was often contested. Corporative local institutions such as the guilds and the militias claimed a part in local government, now that its power and authority had been greatly increased. Though most city councils managed to thwart efforts to achieve formal corporative influence, they had to accept many direct and indirect forms of participatory democracy, notably the petition. Most of the cities' legislation resulted from petitions and the lengthy debate and consultation practices that came with them. Its overall result was a fundamentally unstable political structure that could only kept in balance by seeking compromises acceptable to an ever changing majority of local interests without pushing matters to an extreme. None of these compromises, however, could be moulded into the forms of the later nineteenth century rights of men. Modern rights only existed as realizable options within a fluid governmental practice, dominated by compromise.

Remarkably, the Dutch political elite was never staunchly republican. Dutch political theory, moreover, apart from a few exceptions, was essentially academic, Aristotelian and humanist with some Calvinist constitutionalist overtones.¹⁹ At Leiden University it even was monarchical. The influential propagator of this view, the Leiden professor Franco Burgersdijck (1590-1635), in his Idea Politica (1635) praised monarchy as the original form of government, even though in his view a mixed constitution best suited the Republic. As Ernst Kossmann has phrased it, Dutch elites never saw the advent of the Republic itself as a moment of triumph, they just showed resigned acceptance of a no longer disputable fact.²⁰

In the 1650's all these tensions came to a climax in a protracted series of intellectual debates accompanied by abusive pamphlet wars about the constitutional future of the Republic. 1650 was a watershed. The long and extremely costly 80-year war was over. After a misfired attack on Amsterdam in order to enhance his power, stadholder William II had died. His only son, William III who would become king of England after 1688, was born one

17 G. de Bruin, ‘De soevereiniteit in de Republiek: een machtsprobleem’, BMGN 4 (1979) 27-40. Wijnand W. Mijnhardt, ‘The Dutch Republic as a town’ Eighteenth-Century Studies 31 (1997-1998) 345-349.

18 D.J. Roorda, Partij en Factie (Groningen 1961); Henk van Nierop, ‘Popular participation in politics in the Dutch Republic’, in: P. Blickle, ed., Resistance, representation and community (Cambridge 1997) 272-290.

19 H. Wansink, Politieke Wetenschappen aan de Leidse Universiteit (1575-1650) (Utrecht 1975); E.P. Bos and H.A. Krop, eds., Franco Burgersdijk (1590-1635) (Amsterdam 1993).

20 E.H. Kossmann, Political Thought in the Dutch Republic. Three studies (Amsterdam 2003) 175.

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month later and could thus be easily pushed aside. For a moment it seemed that all options were open again and that the real debate on the constitutional and religious establishment of the Republic could finally begin. Roughly three positions in the debates could be distinguished. The orthodox Calvinists tried to introduce a theocracy under the protection of a godly stadholder, a role for which they had young William in mind. The regents opted for an aristocratic republic and the moderates, mostly those with an Arminian background, hoped for a tolerant state. They were prepared to embrace the mixed constitution, provided that the stadholder would play his role as champion of the freedom of thought. In this fierce debate Dutch philosophical radicals intervened, using an idiosyncratic Cartesianism which had been taught freely at Dutch universities since the 1640's, almost had been assimilated into street language and as a tool soon came to be reinforced by an eclectic Spinozism.

They did so against the background of a public opinion that had achieved an unrivalled level of freedom - at least from a European perspective. The Republic almost from its infancy was a very literate society, permeated by commercial values and abilities, and with a flood of printing coming from the many cheap presses.²¹ The spectacular international book trade, which made Dutch printing famous, nevertheless was a hazardous and economically often overrated enterprise. Even in its commercial heyday it was heavily dependent on and financed by the large profits made on the extensive home market for books in the vernacular.²² The Republic boasted large and fluctuating audiences that were interested in politics and all questions of religion. Though Dutch newspapers (including those published in other languages) were read and praised all over Europe, the literate audiences of the Republic thrived on the production and distribution of large quantities of anonymous pamphlets covering internal and external politics and religious affairs, often garnished with biting political commentary, in times of peace as well as war.²³ This politicized literate audience did not shrink from enjoying scientific and scholarly matters too, as can be shown from the fact that a good part of Latin university orations and disputations were translated into Dutch.²⁴ Moreover, news traveled fast in a small Republic with excellent and regular connections, a key position in the international urban network, and a well-integrated interregional economy. The absolute icon of the Dutch culture of public debate was the Schuitpraatje, i.e. Barge talk, the most popular variety of the pamphlet culture. Barges were frequent, very reliable, also democratic, but slow and therefore gave ample opportunity to discuss politics, philosophy and religion.

Dutch literary authors, as has been recently shown, openly demonstrated in their novels and magazine stories a new and unashamed money-inspired urban ethic. Human behavior, they claimed, was determined by physical factors such as money and economic relations and social practices therefore could not be inspired by moral philosophy. The hard truths and

21 For a comparison of the Dutch Republic with other European commercial centres: Margaret Spufford, ‘Literacy, trade and religion in the commercial centres of Europe’, in: C.A. Davids a.o.,eds., A Miracle Mirrored (Cambridge 1996) 229-283.

22 R. Chartier, ‘Magasin de l'univers ou magasin de la République? Le commerce du livre néerlandais aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècle', in: C. Berkvens-Stevelinck a.o, eds., Le Magasin de l'univers. The Dutch Republic as the Centre of the European Booktrade (Leiden 1992) 289-308.

23 G.de Bruin, Geheimhouding en Verraad. De geheimhouding van staatszaken ten tijde van de Republiek (1600-1750) (The Hague 1991) 77-92; Craig E.Harline, Pamphlets, Printing and Political Culture in the Early Dutch Republic (The Hague 1987).

24 For Dutch seventeenth-century translation culture, C.L.Thijssen-Schoute, Uit de Republiek der Letteren: Elf Studiën op het Gebied der Ideeëngeschiedenis van de Gouden Eeuw (The Hague 1967). C.W.Schoneveld, Intertraffic of the Mind (Leiden 1985)

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pragmatic rules of the city life prevail. For instance, the Dutch prostitute is proud of her status as an ambitious business woman, and she is not ashamed of making a living in prostitution: ‘Although some fastidious people can scold those who make profit with that part of their body, I don't think they are right, because the fists are made of the same flesh as the arse’.²⁵

In such a context it is not surprising that the Dutch political radicals departed from the classical republican ideal of the virtuous citizen. They equally rejected the ideal of a regimen mixtum, the type of republican government the Dutch political elites had contented themselves with in the period prior to 1650. In their writings they developed three explicit goals. First, they wanted to found a rational science of politics. Second, rational political analysis would show that a viable republic was nearer to a democracy than to an oligarchy. Finally, it would also bring out that such a republic was the only form of state agreeable with a commercial society. These radicals do not fit the language of Atlantic republicanism in which the present orthodoxy of the history of political thought has been so fond of locating its authors. They do fit, however, the Venturi perspective of modern republican speculation resulting from the political and religious issues that confronted these writers. Not only the English commonwealth men, but also the Dutch seventeenth-century radicals with their abhorrence of aristocratic government were extremely important in fomenting the libertarian republican heritage that would live on into the European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century.²⁶

Franciscus van den Enden, Pieter and Johan de la Court and Spinoza must rank as the chief spokesmen and sources of inspiration of these radicals. Their emphasis on the role of the passions and on self-interest - as was argued a few years ago by Hans Blom - enabled them to arrive at a solution for the pressing problem of reconciling social mobility based on education and achievement with political stability and civic concord in a rapidly expanding commercial society. According to De la Court the subjection of a people made it impossible for a society to realize its full potential. Therefore the only option in a state was the promotion of an active and prosperous population, since only then will the magistrates out of their own interest be forced to care for the public interest. Also for Spinoza setting free the potential of the masses was the central principle of politics. By accepting the natural economic character of society, and by coining a new language of self-interest and individualism, these commentators were struggling to redefine, if only hesitantly, virtue as a political concept in order to make it compatible with commerce. To these Dutch radicals the ‘naturalness of rights’ was commonplace, just as the racial equality of mankind with its concomitant broad democracy and its revolutionary philosophy of education was central, and its universal relevance self-evident.²⁷

25 D'Openhertige juffrouw, of d'ontdekte geveinsdheid (Amsterdam: Weduwe Gijsbert de Groot, 1699) Dl. I 46. Geciteerd in Inger Leemans, Het woord is aan de onderkant. Radicale ideeën in Nederlandse pornografische romans (Nijmegen 2002) 133.

26 Kosmann, Political Thought, passim E.O.G.Haitsma Mulier, The myth of Venice and Dutch republican thought in the seventeenth century (Assen 1980); E.O.G. Haitsma Mulier, ‘The language of seventeenth-century republicanism in the United Provinces: Dutch or European’, in: Anthony Pagden, The languages of political theory in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge 1987) 179-196. W.Klever, Franciscus van den Enden Vrije Politijke Stellingen (Amsterdam 1992).

27 Hans W. Blom, Morality and Causality in Politics. The Rise of Naturalism in Dutch Seventeenth-Century Political Thought (s.l. 1995) 178. G.O. van de Klashorst, H.W.Blom and E.O.G. Haitsma Mulier, A Bibliography of Dutch Seventeenth-Century Political Thought: An Annotated Inventory (Amsterdam 1986).

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Dutch republican models

Dutch republicanism may have been idiosyncratic, but its influence was much more extensive than hitherto known. European interest in the Dutch model is less surprising if we realize that Dutch republicanism had three distinctive varieties on offer. First of all the mixed regime variety for which Venice and its myth of uncontaminated political stability had served as an example and which had more or less characterized the Dutch system up to 1650, dependent as it was upon both the Provincial Estates and the stadholder. Secondly, the radical republican variety which, due to the translations of the works of Johan and Pieter de la Court and the availability of Latin versions of the ideas of Spinoza, circulated freely in the European world of politics and letters. Finally, the aristocratic republican variety that dominated Dutch politics in the 1650-1672 period and which, at least superficially, was very much influenced by the political writings of Thomas Hobbes. There can be no doubt that those Dutch regents who adhered to the aristocratic model appreciated his radical ideas of an undivided sovereignty because they could be put to good use in their quarrels with the stadholder and with those (i.e. the Calvinists) who saw the princes of Orange as the cornerstone of their theocratic vision. It is difficult to imagine, however, that the small republican city state these politicians had in mind, was anything like the territorial res publica Hobbes was writing about.

What we need is an analysis of the international trajectories of these Dutch republican models, moderate as well as radical, not as republican curiosities that are difficult to understand in terms of the received political languages, but as inspiring examples that make us aware that the European republican conversation was much more diverse than accepted historiographical wisdom has it. There is a hardly any literature on the subject,²⁸ though the number of studies documenting the Dutch influence in the German-speaking countries of early-modern Europe is growing. Only very recently David Luebke discussed republican practices in East-Frisia in the perspective of tensions between centralizing kings and princes on the one hand and republican dreams exemplified by the adjoining Dutch Republic on the other. Similar new departures have been tried by Mary Lindemann and Katherine Aaslestad for the case of republican Hamburg. Even more illustrative is the recent study by Thomas Maissen who analyzed the export capacity of the Dutch ideal of the mixed constitution. In the context of forging the crusade against Louis XIV, the Dutch ambassador in Switzerland, Petrus Valckenier, succeeded in transforming the antimonarchism that was the cement of the anti-French coalition into a republican ideology.²⁹ In this essay I want to explore the outlines of the Anglo-American trajectory.

The importance of the Dutch example for the Anglo-American republican tradition has been hardly researched up to now. Two possible transmission channels stand out. The first is the Dutch-British route through which Locke got much of his inspiration if not some of

28 Fot the influence of the Dutch model in 17^th century Italy, see S. Mastellone, ‘Holland as a political model in Italy in the 17^th Century’, Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden 98 (1983) 568-582.

29 Fot the influence in the North-Getman ciry-states, Petet Uwe Hohendahl, ed., Patriotism, Cosmopolitanism and National Culture. Public Culture in Hamburg 1700-1933 (Amsterdam/Atlanta 2003); for the Swiss Confedetation around 1700 cf Thomas Maissen, ‘Petrus Valkeniets republikanische Sendung. Die niederländische Prägung des neuzeitlichen schweizerischen Staatsverständnisses', Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Geschichte 48 (1998) 149-176; for republican practices and Dutch dreams in early 18^th century East Frisia: David Luebke, ‘Of Liberty and the Upstalsboom: Symbolic Continuity and Discontinuity in Eighteenth-Century Territorial Politics’, unpublished paper Panel Varieties of Republican Practice. German Studies Association, Washington DC, October 2004.

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his ideas. The type of toleration John Locke was to propose in his Letters shows a remarkable resemblance to the ideas circulating since the 1620's in circles of Dutch Arminians. It is precisely in these coteries that Locke found his intellectual refugium in the 1680's, while in exile in the Dutch Republic.³⁰ Equally important is Bernard Mandeville who, due to his Dutch background, was completely immersed in Dutch philosophical radicalism and continued to draw upon Dutch literature and examples even after moving to London, and who tried to teach the English politicians, just as John Toland did, to ‘govern all men by the spring of their own passions.’³¹

Even more fascinating is the American connection. The study of this relationship already has a history itself. Between the 1860's and 1920's a small movement of historians sought to reassess the importance of the Dutch intellectual heritage for an understanding of American culture and identity.³² Central figures in this movement were John Lothrop Motley (1814-1877) and William Elliott Griffis (1843-1928). Motley's Rise of the Dutch Republic (1855) offered an interpretation of the freedom wars against Spain, and his subsequent History of the United Netherlands (1868) sought to give an explanation for the Republic's seventeenth-century ascendancy. Motley's writings, immensely popular for their color and drama, contained a double message. First of all, he provided a vivid picture of the liberty loving Dutch and their ingenuity, moral rectitude and bravery in their struggle for independence against Habsburg tyranny. Secondly, he tried to convince his readers that America, by adopting the Dutch freedom struggle and the ensuing policies of tolerance, freedom and equality as its revolutionary model, had embarked on a course to world power similar to that of the Dutch in the seventeenth century.³³

While Motley was praising the Dutch, Griffis sought to reduce the significance attributed to the English heritage. Griffis wrote a series of books and pamphlets in which he tried to establish the importance of Dutch religious and political influences for American freedoms.³⁴ He published condensed versions of Motley's work and edited his collected writings. A central theme for these revisionist historians was the parallel development of Dutch and American history. Both countries had gone through similar phases of foreign suppres-

30 J.I.Istael, ‘The intellectual debate about toletation in the Dutch Republic’ in: C.M.Berkvens-Stevelinck a.o., The Emergence of Toleration in the Dutch Republic (Leiden 1997) 3-36. E.H.Kossmann, ‘Freedom in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Thought and Practice’, in: J.I.Israel, ed., The Anglo-Dutch Moment (Cambridge 1991) 281-298; Wijnand W.Mijnhardt, ‘Tolerantie als politiek probleem’, Rekenschap (1996) 121-128.

31 Harold J.Cook, ‘Bernard Mandeville and the Therapy of the “Clever Politician”, Journal of the History of Ideas 60 (1999) 123. For Mandeville's extensive knowledge of the Dutch libertine novels which he translated and adapted to the English market, cf. Leemans, Het woord is aan de onderkant, 267-273.

32 See Annette Stott, Holland Mania, The unknown Dutch period in American Art and Culture (Boston 1998) for a first analysis of this movement, chiefly from the perspective of art history. The historiographical enterprise was supported by a massive visual crusade organized by no fewer than six different American artist colonies on Dutch soil and by an advertising industry that had begun to market a stunning variety of so-called Holland goods. Together with a series of successful children's books, led by Mary Elizabeth Mapes Dodge's (1831-1905) Hans Brinker or the Silver Skates, they succeeded in creating an image of the Dutch as an essentially rural, brave, righteous, God-fearing nation that still lived according to the morals and customs of the 16^th and 17^th century freedom-loving Protestant Republic and which was held up as a continuous source of inspiration to American citizens.

33 A few years before his death Motley published the third episode of his rrilogy: The life and death of John of Barneveld, advocare of Holland; with a view of the primary causes and movements of the thirty years' war (New York 1874).

34 William E.Griffis, The influence of the Netherlands in the Making of the English Commonwealth and the American Republic (Boston 1891); idem, The Dutch of the Netherlands in the making of America (Boston 1921); idem, Brave little Holland, and what she taught us (Boston 1894). Cf. William Elliot Griffis Collection in the Rutgers Special Collections and University Archives.

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sion culminating in revolution. The crucial moment for both nations was when they had to declare their independence.³⁵ This vision inspired the first American translation of the Dutch Act of Abjuration.³⁶ Characteristically, the Act of Abjuration was re-baptized as the Dutch Declaration of Independence, a name the document has kept in the American-speaking world ever since.³⁷

In the 1920's the fascination for everything Dutch lost its edge. The small group of historians advocating the reinterpretation of the English settlement and the American Revolution had failed to make any lasting impact on received British-oriented historiography. The publication of Carl Becker's Declaration of Independence in 1922, which not even acknowledged the Dutch perspective, seems to have sealed the fate of the revisionist movement. Its scholarly harvest was limited. Though many claims had been made, hardly any of them had been substantiated by new research.³⁸

However, it is questionable whether the almost complete silence on the significance of the Dutch legacy for the Declaration is justified. Let me review the available facts and interpretations. Admittedly, there was much ambivalence towards the Dutch Republic amongst American elites in the age of Revolution.³⁹ Tom Paine, for instance, in his Common Sense admired the Republic: ‘Holland without a king hath enjoyed more peace in the last century than any of the monarchical governments in Europe’. But even Paine had doubts about the political system of the Republic.⁴⁰ Other Americans were much more critical and their views can be fairly summarized in the judgment of the reverend pamphleteer from Salem, Samuel Williams: ‘Holland has got the forms if she has lost the spirit of a free country’.⁴¹

The quickly fading appeal of the contemporary Dutch political model can be easily shown from the constitutional debates. The Articles of Confederation, the first American Constitution of 1776, show a very strong resemblance to the founding document of the Dutch Republic, the Union of Utrecht of 1579 that served as its constitution for more than two centuries. To well-established eighteenth-century Dutch legal scholars such as Pieter Paulus (1754-1796) and Gerhard Dumbar (1743-1802), who had made an extensive study of all rele-

35 Tiemen de Vries, Dutch History, Art and Literature for Americans (Grand Rapids 1912).

36 The Dutch declaration of independence. The declaration of the States General of the United Provinces, setting forth that Philip the Second had forfeited his right of sovereignty over the said provinces. At The Hague, 26 July, 1581 (Boston 1896). In the middle of the 18th century an English translation, originating in the circle of Lord Somers, a central figure in William III's English government, was published: Somers' Tracts. A Collection of Scarce and Valuable Tracts on the Most Interesting and Entertaining Subjects (16 vols; London 1748-1751) vol. 14, 417-424; the most recent English translation, in: E.H.Kosmann and A.F.Mellink, ed., Texts concerning the Revolt of the Netherlands (Cambridge 1974) 425 ff.

37 The translation was included, in: Oliver J. Thatcher, ed., The Library of Original Sources (Milwaukee 1907), Vol. V: 9th to 16th Centuries, pp. 189-197. Since Paul Halsall in 1998 made this text part of his Internet Modern History Sourcebook the renamed Dutch title has become almost universally accepted.

38 It would seem that one of the few academie fruits was Friedrich Edler, The Dutch Republic and the American Revolution (Baltimore 1911). Though Griffis assisted in the preparing of this PhD thesis and Edler in his introduction referred to the ongoing Dutch debate, Edler refrained from taking on the central question of the extent to which the governmental system of the United States was derived from Dutch sources and limited himself to diplomatic history, Edler, Dutch Republic, vii-viii.

39 Cf. J.W.Schulte Nordholt's excellent survey entitled, ‘The Example of the Dutch Republic for American Federalism’, Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden 94 (1979) 437-449 to which I am much indebted.

40 Daniel E.Wheeler, ed., The Life and Writings of Tom Paine, vol II (New York 1908) 13. For Chesterfield's 1745 memoir on the Republic, knowledge of which was widespread, see Philip Dormer Stanhope, Lord Chesterfield, ‘Some Account of the Republic of the Seven United Provinces’, in: B.Dobrée, Letters, vol. III (London 1932) 605-612.

41 Samuel Williams, ‘A Discourse on the Love of our Country’ (Salem 1775), in: Bernard Bailyn, ed., Pamphlets of the American Revolution 1750-1776, I (Cambridge Mass. 1965) 82.

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vant documents, the parallels were obvious. In their view the Americans had simply espoused the arrangements of the Union of Utrecht.⁴² However, it is difficult to find American witnesses unequivocally acknowledging such an adoption, nor is it easy to establish precisely what Dutch sources were available to them.⁴³

Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that the participants in the debates leading up to the American Constitution of 1787 and its ratification quickly grew disenchanted with the Dutch example. They appreciated the Dutch defense of local liberties, they could concur in the Dutch abhorrence of a strong centralized state, but they also saw free men abandoning the basic principles of a free republic by giving up their privileges of election and surrendering their liberties to a rich aristocracy.⁴⁴ Most of all they saw endless internal dissension and the Republic's inability to reform itself. It was James Madison who summarized these opinions. In the Federalist of December 11, 1787, after a careful assessment of the political system of the Republic and informed by its most recent failure to reform itself, he wrote: ‘This unhappy people seem to be now suffering from popular convulsions, from dissensions among the States, and from the actual invasion of foreign arms, the crisis of their destiny.’⁴⁵

These harsh judgments on contemporary Dutch politics stood in sharp contrast to the appreciation of the Dutch Revolt of the sixteenth century. At the end of the eighteenth century such admiration was widespread on both sides of the Atlantic. In Europe Goethe's drama Egmont and Schiller's famous Abfall der Vereinigten Niederlande bear testimony to that sentiment and Americans made no exception. According to Noah Webster (1758-1843), no other people since Leonidas' Spartans had fought with more bravery and perseverance to preserve their rights.⁴⁶ Benjamin Franklin was very fond of drawing parallels between the Dutch and American Revolutions: Holland, he often said, ‘and its love of liberty and bravery in defence of it’ had been the great example.⁴⁷ John Adams, the first American Ambassador to the United Provinces, claimed ‘that the originals of the two Republics are so much alike that the history of the one seems but a transcript of the other.’⁴⁸ In his Autobiography, Jefferson had remarked that the example of the Dutch Revolt convinced the Second Continental Congress that a revolution in the American Colonies could likewise succeed.⁴⁹ The central documents underpinning the parallel according to Adams were the Declarations of Independence of

42 Pieter Paulus in his Verklaring der Unie van Utrecht (3 vols.; Utrecht 1775-177) remarked: ‘It is surprising and to the credit of our ancestors, that these inhabitants, after a lapse of some two centuries adopted practically the same measures and atrangements as they did when drafting the Union of Utrecht’, III, 242-253; for the translation of Paulus, see Schulte Nordholt, ‘Dutch Republic as Example’, 443. Cf. Gerhard Dumbar, De oude en de nieuwe Constitutie der Vereenigde Staten van Amerika (3 vols; Amsterdam 1793-1796). See also Herbert Rowen, ‘The Union of Utrecht and the Articles of Confederation, the Batavian Constitution and the American Constitution: a double parallel’, in: R.Vierhaus, ed., Herrschaftsverträge, Wahlkapitulationen, Fundamentalgesetze (Göttingen 1977) 281-93.

43 For an (incomplete) overview of American knowledge of Holland, cf. William H.Riker, ‘Dutch and American Federalism’, Journal of the History of Ideas 18 (1957) 495-526.

44 See ‘Giles Hickory’ in the American Magazine, in: B. Bailyn, ed., Debate on the Constitution, vol. 2 (New York 1993) 309. Cf. Schulre Nordholt, ‘Dutch Republic as Example’, 442.

45 The Federalist, Jacob E. Cooke, ed. (Cleveland 1965) nr. 20, 124-129, nr. 37, 238.

46 The American Magazine, February 1788, in: Bailyn, Debates, 309. Cf. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge Mass. 1967) 66 and Pauline Maier, From Resistance to Revolution (New York 1973) 213.

47 Cf. Leonard Labaree, The Papers of Benjamin Franklin (New Haven 1959-), vols. 9:90-91; 15:191; 17: 269-70,380. Cited by Stephen Lucas, ‘The Rhetorical Ancestry of the Declaration of Independence’, Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 1 (1998) 166.

48 ‘Memorial to their High Mightinesses, the States-General of the United Provinces of the Low Countries’, April 19, 1781, in: Charles F. Adams ed., Works of John Adams (Boston 1850-1857) vol. 7: 399-400.

49 Thomas Jefferson: Writings, Merrill D. Peterson, ed. (New York 1984) 16.

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both countries: ‘the analogy between the means by which the two republics arrived at independency...will infallibly draw them together’.

The Dutch Act of Abjuration of 1581 is often presented as the first statement of the rights of man as drawn up by an early-modern representative assembly and as such the basis of modern republican and constitutional government.⁵⁰ The Abjuration Act, though of eminent political importance, was a sober document. Unlike Jefferson's eloquent Declaration it was not produced in the splendid isolation of a scholar's study but emerged from the complicated negotiating process in the meeting rooms of a great many representative bodies. It claimed that the Dutch political order was designed to preserve liberty by means of a constitutional framework, the fundamental components of which were the privileges and the States as representatives of the people. The office of the prince was ordained for the sake of his subjects, to govern them according to right and reason. His sovereignty derived from the constitutional contract to which each prince had to swear an oath of allegiance on the day of his inauguration. The States as the guardians of liberty had the duty to uphold the privileges. If the prince violated the privileges, he broke his contract and legally forfeited his sovereignty.

At first sight the resemblances between the two documents are striking.⁵¹ Both declarations are characterized by sweeping preambles that claim that kings and princes can lawfully demand obedience as long as they protect the rights and privileges of their subjects. Both documents contain similarly structured catalogues of almost identical grievances against the tyrant kings Philip II and George III, which in both cases take up about two-thirds of the text. The parallels between the two documents are indeed so remarkable that at least one historian has defended the thesis that the Act of Abjuration was a model for the declaration that Jefferson and his Committee of Five had been requested to prepare. In a fascinating article the American historian Stephen Lucas has analyzed the abounding rhetorical parallels between the two documents. Moreover, he has demonstrated convincingly that this type of emulation had nothing to do with plagiarism and was not at all unusual in late eighteenth-century practices of rhetoric.⁵²

Just as in the case of the Articles of Confederation no explicit confirmation of the use of the Dutch models can be documented. Members of both draft committees maintained a complete silence on the subject, although, as we have seen, they were well acquainted with the history of the Dutch Revolt. Though the texts of the Union of Utrecht and the Act of Abjuration were available in the Colonies, no physical connection between the documents and the various committees and their members has yet been established. It might, however, be useful to rephrase the question. Is it conceivable, in a period in which historical parallel and legal

50 M.E.H.N.Mout, Plakkaat van Verlatinge 1581, Facsimile, Inleiding Transcriptie en Vertaling (The Hague 1979). J.P.A.Coopmans, ‘De herkomst van het Plakkaat van Verlatinge’, in: G. van Dievoet, ed., Justicie ende Gerechticheyt. Handelingen van het zevende Belgisch-Nederlandse rechtshistorisch colloquium (Antwerpen 1983) 36-52. For a modern analysis of this and other Dutch revolutionary texts, Martin van Gelderen, The Political Thought of the Dutch Revolt 1555-1590 (Cambridge 1992). For a translation of other relevant documents, see Van Gelderen, The Dutch Revolt (Cambridge 1993), especially ‘A Brief Discourse’ (1579) and ‘Political Education’ (1582), trearises that provide the philosophical background to the ideas presented in the Act of Abjuration.

51 J.P.A.Coopmans, ‘Het Plakkaat van Verlatinghe (1581) en de Declaration of Independence’, Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden 98 (1983) 540-567.

52 Stephen Lucas, ‘The Rhetorical Ancestry of the Declaration of Independence’; idem, Portents of Rebellion. Rhetoric and Revolution in Philadelphia, 1765-1776 (Philadelphia 1976).

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precedent played so dominant a role in daily life as well as in political practice, that these pertinent models would have been ignored? After all, when conftonted with the task of drafting a constitution for such a rare and hardly respectable commodity as a republic, legislators could point to only a few ‘living’ examples, amongst which the Dutch Republic was the most prominent. And when faced with the mission of legitimizing the almost unique and rather ominous political act of deposing a lawful king, would Jefferson exclusively have consulted the two available English examples of deposition while neglecting the only continental example of early-modern times?

But even if we concede that the Declaration of Independence belongs to a small and exclusive written tradition of king disposal of which the Dutch Act of Abjuration was the beginning, and even if we agree that Jefferson made extensive rhetorical use of the Dutch model while improving its literary qualities,⁵³ all that does not minimize in any sense the revolutionary novelty of the American Declaration. Though the political discourse surrounding the Dutch Abjuration Act was radically innovative in its time, Jefferson's Declaration included some fundamental breaks with that past. For instance, Jefferson abandoned the idea of a contract between prince and the representatives of the people, so central in the Act of Abjuration, and replaced it by the notion of the full sovereignty of the people. Secondly, Jefferson's concept of liberty is comprehensive in a sense the Dutch declaration never was. Characteristically, Jefferson's Declaration does not discuss freedom of conscience or freedom of religion as separate issues. The Dutch Act on the contrary tended to limit liberty to freedom of religion.⁵⁴ Most important, however, is the universal character of the Declaration. The concept of rights of the Act of Abjuration was particular and provincial: rights belonged to corporations rather than individuals, to precisely circumscribed geographical regions rather than large territories. Jefferson's Declaration was the first document that claimed the fundamental equality, universality and naturalness of rights.⁵⁵

In the relevant literature - ranging from Becker through Bailyn and Wood to Pocock, Wills, Appleby and Zuckert, to name only a few⁵⁶ - this fundamental transformation is by and large associated with English sources and English debates from the Civil War to the American Revolution. Claims of Dutch influence are almost non-existent. Only Michael Zuckert in his revision of the origins of American republicanism has reserved a pivotal place for Grotius, who conceived of a fully functional human society unaided by religion and based upon natural rights, the most important of which was self-preservation. But even Grotian philosophy only reached America mediated by Locke's Two Treatises of Government.⁵⁷

However, if we assess the evidence now available, a fascinating hypothesis presents itself. The vocabulary Locke was using for his concept of tolerance originated in Dutch Arminian discourse of the early seventeenth century; Locke's basic ideas on government had their ori-

53 Becker, Declaration of Independence, chap v.

54 Van Gelderen, Political Thought of the Dutch Revolt.

55 Lynn Hunt, ‘The Paradoxical Origins of Human Rights’, in: Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Lynn Hunt, and Marilyn B. Young, ed., Human Rights and Revolutions (Lanham 2000) 7. Cf. Lynn Hunt, The French Revolution and Human Rights (New York 1996).

56 Bernard Bailyn, The ideological origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge Mass. 1967); Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic (Chapel Hill 1969); John G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment. Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton 1975); Garry Wills, Inventing America. Jefferson's Declaration of Independence (London 1978); Joyce Appleby, Liberalism and Republicanism in the historical imagination (Cambridge Mass 1992); Michael P. Zuckert, Natural Rights and the New Republicanism (Princeton 1994).

57 Zuckert, Natural Rights and the New Republicanism, 216-246.

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gins in Grotian natural rights theories and the Mandevillian materialism which was a major source of Adam Smith's liberalism was equally conceived in the commercial atmosphere of the Dutch city. And, as Joyce Appleby has been arguing for the last decade, liberalism of a Smithian and Mandevillian stamp did play a much more extensive role in the political climate of the middle colonies leading up to the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence than the received Anglo-American tradition is prepared to accept.⁵⁸ Seen from this perspective, England was crucial as an intellectual staple market, but the goods came from the Dutch Republic.

There is another Dutch legacy that may help to explain the fundamental shift from the historical to the rational, from the corporate to the individual and from the particular to the universal: the legacy I discussed above and which was grounded in the urban radical republicanism of the seventeenth-century Republic, exemplified by writers such as the brothers De la Court, Franciscus van den Enden, Balthasar Bekker, Spinoza and their followers. America was not only the place where Dutch enlightened radicals such as Van den Enden and Cornelis Plockhoy planned to establish a utopian society in which all of their ideals would be realized, it also functioned as a receptacle for Dutch ideas, especially those of De la Court and Spinoza, who advocated a dynamic political behavior congruent with the demands of the liberal marketplace. Research in this field is close to non-existent but a first exploration has proved promising. It showed for instance that disputes over Balthasar Bekker's attack on witchcraft were well known in the Middle Colonies. References to Spinoza abounded. Cotton Mather knew of his work and he was very familiar with Bekker's writings. Even more surprising is that the Mather family had a penchant for Dutch materialist and egalitarian pornography.⁵⁹ Though the material available is not yet conclusive, if only because just a few historians have taken the trouble to ask these questions, one might surmise that Dutch republican models were an important force in the American Revolution and the creation of an American republican tradition.

The examples of republican theories and practices I have discussed in this essay show that there were multiple routes to modern republicanism. Some of these were unusual, definitely not Atlantic, but not ineffective. And even the Atlantic republican tradition may well have been shaped by many ideas and writings that have not found a place in the pantheon of modern orthodoxy. All these varieties shared European problems, intellectual traditions and languages, but they originated in distinctly local structures of society. I believe that in this context the future writing of the history of republicanism needs to be situated.

58 Joyce Appleby, ‘The Social Origins of American Revolutionary Ideology’, Journal of American History, 64 (1978) 937 and idem, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790's (New York 1984). Another fascinating counter-example is provided by Gary Nash. In his The Urban Crucible. The Northern Seaports and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge Mass. 1975), a book that fits into the E.P.Thompson and Christopher Hill tradition of the writing of history, stresses the unique importance of the urban context for the American Revolution.

59 John Dixon, ‘Desperately Seeking Spinoza: or whatever happened to the Radical Enlightenment in America’, Unpublished graduate paper, UCLA, 2002.