De Achttiende Eeuw. Jaargang 41

[p. 152]

Jonathan Israel and Dutch Patriotism
Wyger R.E. Velema

The month of September 1781 witnessed one of the most spectacular publishing events in Dutch history. In the darkest hours of the night of September 25-26, an anonymous pamphlet entitled To the People of the Netherlands was secretly distributed in a number of Dutch cities. Its content was explosive. The author of the pamphlet, whose identity would not be definitively established as Baron Joan Derk van der Capellen tot den Pol until deep into the nineteenth century, launched an all-out attack on the House of Orange in general and on Stadholder William V in particular. William V, Van der Capellen told his readers, not only was a degenerate, an alcoholic and a sexual pervert in his personal life style, but he had also succeeded in corrupting the entire Dutch Republic and in almost completely extinguishing republican liberty and virtue. He had done so by unscrupulously breaking all known laws of the country, by ruthlessly suppressing public debate and criticism, and by filling every available political position with immoral and servile court flatterers. The main instrument which allowed him to get away with this behaviour and impose his despotic will on the country was a standing army, which was largely composed of foreign mercenaries and of which he was the supreme commander. The message was entirely clear: swift and drastic action against the power of the Orange stadholder had to be taken before the once so proud Dutch Republic would degenerate into a monarchy and its citizens into slaves.

Had Van der Capellen left it at that, his pamphlet would have been a gem of anti-Orangist invective, but nothing really new. For by 1781, the Orange stadholders had been reviled for more than a century in the political writings of the supporters of ‘True Liberty’. The remedies suggested for their perceived monarchical ambitions had varied from curbing their power to getting rid of them altogether, as had been attempted twice during the so-called stadholderless eras, in which the regents succeeded in monopolizing political power. That, however, was not what Van der Capellen had in mind. Instead of arguing for a return to the unrestrained rule of the regents, he appealed, as the title of his pamphlet immediately made clear, to the people. They were, he emphatically proclaimed, the true rulers of the country and they should therefore no longer hesitate to make their political voice heard and regain and subsequently defend their liberty against both regents and the stadholder. They should start doing so, he suggested, by henceforth keeping a close watch over their rulers, by engaging in free public and political debate, and above all by arming themselves - for it was only an armed and thus independent citizen who could be said to be a free and virtuous political agent. Thus Van der Capellen broke out of the limits of the old political opposition between Orangists on the one hand and defenders of ‘True Liberty’ on the other. Indeed, To the People of the Netherlands may be regarded as the first coherent manifesto

[p. 153]

of what was to become an unprecedented mass movement for the reform of the Dutch political system. It was known at the time, and still is, as the Patriot movement.¹

Dutch Patriotism as it developed between the publication of Van der Capellen's pamphlet of 1781 and the ruthless suppression of the movement by the combined Prussian, English, and Orangist forces of counterrevolution in September of 1787, was an extremely complex phenomenon. It is therefore less than surprising that later historians have found themselves in deep disagreement about the proper interpretation of this political movement. To most nineteenth-century Dutch historians, writing in a political and intellectual climate that was nationalist, Orangist and generally hostile to the radicalism of the revolutions of the late eighteenth century, the best way of dealing with the Dutch Patriots seemed simply to ignore their existence. Even after scholarly research into the period somewhat reluctantly got under way around 1900, however, the negative assessment of the Patriots proved to be remarkably persistent. Thus its first serious historian, Herman Colenbrander, chose to describe the Patriot movement with less than flattering, albeit very revealing, theatrical metaphors. In his monumental three-volume work De Patriottentijd, he characterized it as a ‘caricature’, a ‘comedy’ and, referring to the foreign influences at work, a ‘puppet show’.² Some eighty years later the historian Ernst Kossmann preferred a culinary metaphor to express the same distaste. To him, the Patriot era most resembled ‘a bland dish’.³ At the beginning of the twenty-first century, finally, Joost Kloek and Wijnand Mijnhardt showed a predilection for poetical imagery in describing the Patriot movement as the sad ‘swan song of Dutch republicanism’.⁴

Yet over and against such less than generous estimates of their achievements, the Patriots have, in the course of the twentieth century, also found fervent supporters and ardent admirers. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that the Dutch Patriot movement has been completely rehabilitated in the historiography of the last fifty years. This process began with the realization, evident in the work of for instance Pieter Geyl, that the Patriots could in no way be adequately described as mere instruments in the hands of foreign masters.⁵ It continued with the acknowledgement, during the 1960s and 1970s and mainly in the writings of Cor de Wit, that the Patriots were fighting a very real socio-political battle against the established order.⁶ It culminated, from the mid-1980s on, in a substantial new literature on the political culture and

1 There are several modern editions of To the People of the Netherlands. The best one is by Zwitzer: Joan Derk van der Capellen. Aan het Volk van Nederland. On Van der Capellen, the early twentieth-century biography by De Jong Hzn., Joan Derk van der Capellen is still valuable. See also Van Dijk e.a., De wekker van de Nederlandse natie.

2 Colenbrander, De patriottentijd, I, vii, viii and 1.

3 Kossmann, ‘Nabeschouwing’, 135.

4 Kloek and Mijnhardt, 1800. Blauwdrukken voor een samenleving, 556.

5 Geyl, De Patriottenbeweging and idem, Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse stam. Deel III.

6 De Wit, De strijd tussen aristocratie en democratie; De Nederlandse revolutie van de achttiende eeuw and Het ontstaan van het moderne Nederland.

[p. 154]

the political thought of these highly original reformers.⁷ During almost every step of the way in this long and tortuous process of re-evaluation and re-appreciation of Dutch Patriotism, Anglophone scholars have played an important role. In the 1960s, it was Robert Palmer who emphatically pointed out the importance of the Dutch late eighteenth-century revolutionaries for what he called ‘The Age of the Democratic Revolution’.⁸ During the 1970s, I. Leonard Leeb became the first historian ever to write a monograph on the political thought of the Dutch eighteenth century, prominently including the Patriot movement, and the brilliant Simon Schama astonished everybody with his massive Patriots and Liberators.⁹ In the 1980s, the master of the history of early modern political discourse John Pocock asked incisive questions about the nature of Patriot republicanism.¹⁰ And now, to everybody's delight, the eminent historian Jonathan Israel has added his voice to this chorus of Anglophone commentators on Dutch Patriotism. In what follows, I will attempt to assess this latest contribution to what by now has evidently become an exceedingly layered and multidimensional debate.

Relatively straightforward and simple as this task might seem, it in fact immediately poses an intriguing problem. Jonathan Israel is, as we all know, an immensely productive historian, a man who writes faster than God can read. In the case of the Dutch Patriots, his productivity has been of such a prodigious nature that over the past decade he has given us not one, but two interpretations of this movement's political thought. The problem is that they are diametrically opposed. In the chapter he devoted to the Patriot revolution in his monumental The Dutch Republic, first published in 1995, he embraced a highly traditional line of interpretation.¹¹ Following the by then already dated analysis of among others I. Leonard Leeb and largely limiting himself to mainstream Patriot texts, Jonathan Israel depicted the Patriots as essentially backward-looking thinkers obsessed with the Dutch past, whose rhetoric contained a few new elements, but whose program nonetheless ‘was essentially a further development of the tendencies manifest in the movements of 1672, 1702-3, and 1747-8’.¹² Dutch historians such as Niek van Sas, who wished to view Patriotism as part of the genesis of political modernity and as ‘a fundamentally new beginning linked to revolutionary trends elsewhere in the late eighteenth-century western Atlantic world’ had, he insisted, completely failed to understand its deeply traditionalist nature.¹³

Some ten years after his initial analysis of Patriot political thought, Jonathan Is-

7 Grijzenhout e.a., Voor Vaderland en Vrijheid; Th.S.M. van der Zee e.a., 1787; Bots and Mijnhardt, De Droom van de Revolutie; Klein, Patriots Republikanisme; Van Sas, De metamorfose van Nederland; Velema, Republicans.

8 Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution, I, 324-341.

9 Leeb, The Ideological Origins of the Batavian Revolution; Schama, Patriots and Liberators.

10 Pocock, ‘The problem of political thought in the eighteenth century’.

11 Israel, The Dutch Republic, 1098-1112.

12 Ibidem, 1105.

13 Ibidem.

[p. 155]

rael returned to the same topic in his Royal Library lecture of 21 June 2007 entitled ‘Failed Enlightenment’. Spinoza's Legacy and the Netherlands (1670-1800).¹⁴ Apparently having adopted the liberating maxim that consistency is an overrated virtue, he now presented his audience with an entirely different and refreshingly new view of the true nature of Dutch Patriotism. It was completely wrong, he argued this time, to view the Patriots as traditionalists, hopelessly stuck in endless and futile ruminations about the glories of the Dutch national past. Admittedly their discourse contained some elements of ancient constitutionalism, but these were to be seen as no more than empty rhetoric, intended to draw the less enlightened segments of the population to their revolutionary cause.¹⁵ In order properly to understand the significance of Dutch Patriotism, he continued, one could do no better than to view it in its ‘true international and trans-Atlantic context’, a perspective all previous historians had mysteriously failed to adopt.¹⁶ This true context consisted mainly of the Enlightenment. Not, of course, the Enlightenment in general, but the special variety of it so powerfully evoked in Radical Enlightenment and Enlightenment Contested.¹⁷ Indeed, with its doctrine of popular sovereignty, its embrace of democracy, its espousal of the civil equality of all religions, its hatred of aristocracy, and finally its passionate defence of a universal freedom of thought, of speech, and of the press, the political agenda of the Dutch Patriots embodied the link between the Radical Enlightenment and the late eighteenth-century Western revolutions in a singularly felicitous and remarkably precocious way.¹⁸ The Patriots, evidently, were unambiguous moderns, deriving their political vision not from eighteenth-century English and American political thought, nor from the arch-conservative Montesquieu, nor even from the explosive treatises of Rousseau, but from French nouveaux Spinosistes such as Diderot and d'Holbach, and ultimately from the founding fathers of the Radical Enlightenment itself, the great Spinoza and his circle.¹⁹

The question that now forces itself upon us is an obvious one: who is right, Jonathan Israel the First or Jonathan Israel the Second? It would seem to me that the more recent of these two diametrically opposed interpretations clearly deserves our preference. In the light of the massive scholarship of the past decades, it has become impossible still convincingly to maintain that the political discourse of the Dutch Patriots consisted of little more than the traditionalist language of ancient constitutionalism. Jonathan Israel's 2007 analysis, by contrast, is impressive, intellectually stimulating, and clearly has much to recommend it. It takes the ideas of the Patriots seriously, it analyzes them in an international context, it incorporates the profound and crucially important changes brought to Western culture by the Enlightenment,

14 Israel, ‘Failed Enlightenment’. A Dutch translation appeared as In strijd met Spinoza.

15 Israel, ‘Failed Enlightenment’, 13.

16 Ibidem, 42.

17 Israel, Radical Enlightenment; idem, Enlightenment Contested.

18 Israel, ‘Failed Enlightenment’, 13-15.

19 Ibidem, 50-53.

[p. 156]

and it challenges us to reflect upon the role of Patriot political thought in the genesis of Western modernity. This new interpretation, in short, is in all respects vastly superior to the views Jonathan Israel previously held about the Dutch Patriots. This is not to say, however, that it is also right. Indeed one could well argue, as I am about to do, that in many respects it fails to do justice to the demonstrable content of Patriot political thought. For it seems to me that the Dutch Patriots of the 1780s were not mainly inspired by political radicalism of a Spinozist variety, that they did not derive their theories primarily from the nouveaux Spinosistes of the French late eighteenth century, and finally that they were not unambiguously modern in their political views.

It is Jonathan Israel's contention that the language of modern democratic republicanism espoused by the adherents of the Radical Enlightenment, and ultimately - after a French detour - also by the Dutch Patriots, originated in the writings of Spinoza and his circle and above all in the works of the brothers De la Court, Johan in particular. Now it is undeniably true that Johan de la Court's Consideratien van Staat, first published in 1660 and according to Jonathan Israel ‘the founding document of Dutch democratic republicanism’, was a remarkable and important book.²⁰ It departed from a bleak view of human nature and continued to discuss politics and the state in a thoroughly disenchanted vein. In good seventeenth-century fashion, it tore apart the pieties of classical political humanism and, inspired by Cartesian psychology, replaced them with a language of passions and of interests. It entirely discarded the classical concept of political virtue and insisted that the only realistic way to arrive at good government was to make the inevitable human self-interest promote the common good. The form of government which best succeeded in doing so was a democracy.²¹ This does indeed sound surprisingly modern. But it does not at all sound like Dutch late eighteenth-century Patriotism. It is easy to explain why. The Dutch Patriots did not speak the language of interest, but the Enlightenment language of inalienable natural rights and above all the classical language of political virtue. They did so because they were participants in the by now thoroughly researched revival of classical republican thought the entire Western world witnessed during the eighteenth century and which had very little to do with the Radical Enlightenment, if only because its sources were some two millennia older.²² This renewed eighteenth-century fascination with the classical language of politics, in which virtue, the capacity and duty of human beings to rise above their own interests and to serve the common good, played a key role, may be followed in a great variety of contemporary sources: not only in the writings of the

20 Israel, Enlightenment Contested, 251.

21 An excellent brief discussion of the political thought of the brothers De la Court may be found in Kossmann, Politieke theorie, 36-50.

22 Rawson, The Spartan Tradition; Roberts, Athens on Trial; Millar, The Roman Republic; Venturi, Utopia and Reform; Richard, The Founders and the Classics; Sellers, American Republicanism; Parker, The Cult of Antiquity; Mossé, L'Antiquité dans la Révolution française.

[p. 157]

Anglo-American civic humanists, but also, for instance, in the works of such French thinkers as Montesquieu, Rousseau and Mably and in those of the Dutch theorist De Beaufort.²³ It was this classical political language, revolving around the dichotomies of virtue and corruption, frugality and luxury, and free citizenship and political slavery, which came to occupy an essential place in most major eighteenth-century political debates. Indeed, it was out of the complicated interaction of this revived classical heritage with various forms of Enlightenment discourse that the Western revolutions of the late eighteenth century, of which the Dutch Patriots were the early harbingers, arose. Yet Jonathan Israel virtually ignores this theme in his most recent interpretation of Dutch Patriotism.

To demonstrate how this neglect of the revived classical tradition and the attendant overestimation of the importance of the Spinozist Radical Enlightenment prevent us from understanding what Patriotism was all about, it is perhaps best to turn to a concrete example. On December 11, 1784, the future statesman Rutger Jan Schimmelpenninck defended his thesis De imperio populari caute temperato at Leiden University.²⁴ The next year, a Dutch translation appeared under the title Verhandeling over eene wel ingerigte Volksregering.²⁵ This short treatise is now generally regarded as one of the most important statements of the political doctrines of the Patriots. Jonathan Israel has described Schimmelpenninck as a ‘key theorist among the Patriots’.²⁶ In his Royal Library lecture, he discussed him as a leading representative of ‘the later Dutch democratic and Spinozistic Enlightenment’, whose political arguments ‘resonated unmistakably with echoes of the Brothers De la Court and Spinoza who, however, are never named’.²⁷ This formulation is, it seems to me, highly revealing. Schimmelpenninck, like many other Patriots, is incorporated into the Spinozist Radical Enlightenment on the basis of extremely vague resemblances between his political language and that of his presumed seventeenth-century predecessors, whose work he never mentions, nor in fact shows any sign of knowing. Both common sense and a diligent study of his dissertation, however, suggest a simple reason for Schimmelpenninck's failure to mention the leading representatives of the Radical Enlightenment: he had no use for them. His verifiable intellectual predecessors were not Spinoza and the brothers De la Court, but Cicero, Livy and Sallust among the ancients, and Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Mably, Price and Priestley among the moderns.²⁸ Not only did he generously

23 Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment; Baker, Inventing the French Revolution; Shklar, Men and Citizens; Wright, A Classical Republican in Eighteenth-Century France; Velema, Republicans, 56-64.

24 Schimmelpenninck, De imperio populari caute temperato.

25 Schimmelpenninck, Verhandeling over eene wel ingerigte volksregering.

26 Israel, Dutch Republic, 1104.

27 Israel, ‘Failed Enlightenment’, 53 and 18.

28 Each and all authors closely linked to the classical republican tradition. Schimmelpenninck's use of modern sources alone obviously makes it impossible to regard him as a representative of the Radical Enlightenment as defined by Jonathan Israel. The author Schimmelpenninck cites most is the later Rousseau, who according to Israel does not belong to the Radical Enlightenment (Enlightenment Contested, 11). His other French favourite is Montesquieu, a writer who, if we are to believe Israel, primarily appealed to ‘conservative Orangists’ (‘Failed Enlightenment’, 9). These two are followed by Price and Priestley, whose importance for Dutch Patriotism Israel tries to downplay throughout his lecture (e.g. ‘Failed Enlightenment’, 50).

[p. 158]

acknowledge this fact in his abundant footnotes, but he also made it absolutely clear by the entire nature of his argument, for his dissertation was a sustained meditation on the meaning of classical republicanism for the modern world. Indeed, it is precisely Schimmelpenninck's intellectual struggle to reconcile the demands of classical virtuous citizenship with those of modern representative democracy which makes his dissertation into a document entirely characteristic of Patriot political thought.²⁹

Let me come to a conclusion. After a long period of unjustified neglect, the Dutch Patriots have over the past decades been rediscovered as vigorous political reformers and sophisticated political thinkers. They no longer regarded the real or imagined ancient constitutional arrangements of their own country as the only relevant standard in political argument. Instead, they freely appropriated various elements from radical, although not necessarily Spinozist, Enlightenment thought, as is clear from their adoption of the concepts of inalienable natural rights, popular sovereignty, and representative democracy.³⁰ But they were also steeped in and obsessed with the classical language of political virtue. This evidently means that we cannot possibly regard them as unambiguously modern. Jonathan Israel is, of course, absolutely right in pointing out that Dutch Patriot political thought, with its emphasis on the rights of the people and on popular sovereignty, its espousal of the civil equality of all religions, its hatred of aristocracy, and its defence of the freedom of thought, of speech and of the press, contained much that seems familiar to us today. Yet these very same Patriots also passionately believed that the independent and virtuous citizen needed to be a propertied male bearer of arms, ready and willing to die for his Fatherland; that the political nation self-evidently could not include women or the poor; that parties were the bane of political life; that a politics based on the clash of interests instead of on disinterested virtue equalled total corruption; and that luxury constituted the greatest imaginable threat to free republics. It is precisely this ambiguity, this mix of the old and the new, which makes the Dutch Patriots so fascinating and which gives them their own unique place in the history of political thought. Their political discourse is no longer ours and neither are their intellectual struggles. Does this mean that they have no lessons to offer us? It emphatically does not. For as Quentin Skinner has convincingly argued, it is only by studying past political thought in its very difference from the present that we learn to appreciate the contingent nature of our own political convictions.³¹

29 Much the same conclusion is reached in Klein, ‘Republikanisme en patriottisme’.

30 Klein, Patriots Republikanisme; Van Sas, Metamorfose van Nederland; Velema, Republicans.

31 Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism, 109-120 and idem, Visions of Politics, I, 5-7.

[p. 159]

About the author

Wyger R.E. Velema is Senior Lecturer in early modern history and Jan Romein Professor at the University of Amsterdam. He has published widely on the history of eighteenth-century Dutch political thought, most recently Republicans. Studies on Eighteenth-Century Dutch Political Thought (Leiden and Boston 2007). He is currently co-director of the NWO research program The First Dutch Democracy. The Political World of the Batavian Republic, 1795-1801.

Sources and Literature

Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the French Revolution. Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge 1990).

Joan Derk van der Capellen, Aan het Volk van Nederland. Het patriottisch program uit 1781, H.L. Zwitser (ed.) (Amsterdam 1987).

H.T. Colenbrander, De patriottentijd hoofdzakelijk naar buitenlandse bescheiden. 3 delen. (The Hague 1897-1899).

E.A. van Dijk, J. Trijsburg, W.F. Wertheim en A.H. Wertheim-Gijse Weenink, (ed). De wekker van de Nederlandse natie. Joan Derk van der Capellen 1741-1784 (Zwolle 1984).

P. Geyl, De Patriottenbeweging 1780-1787 (Amsterdam 1947).

P. Geyl, Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse stam. Deel III (1751-1798) (Amsterdam and Antwerp 1959).

F. Grijzenhout, W.W. Mijnhardt en N.C.F. van Sas, (ed). Voor Vaderland en Vrijheid. De revolutie van de patriotten (Amsterdam 1987).

Jonathan I. Israel, The Dutch Republic. Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall 1477-1806 (Oxford, 1995).

Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment. Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750 (Oxford 2001).

Jonathan I. Israel, Enlightenment Contested. Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670-1752 (Oxford 2006).

Jonathan Israel, ‘Failed Enlightenment’. Spinoza's Legacy and the Netherlands (Wassenaar, 2007). Translated into Dutch as In strijd met Spinoza. Het failliet van de Nederlandse Verlichting (1670-1800) (Amsterdam 2007).

M. de Jong Hzn., Joan Derk van der Capellen. Staatkundig levensbeeld uit de wordingstijd van de moderne democratie in Nederland (Groningen and The Hague 1921).

S.R.E. Klein, ‘Republikanisme en patriottisme. Rutger Jan Schimmelpenninck en de klassieke wortels van het republikeinse denken (1784-1785),’ Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 106 (1993) 179-207.

S.R.E. Klein, Patriots Republikanisme. Politieke cultuur in Nederland (1766-1787) (Amsterdam 1995).

Joost Kloek and Wijnand Mijnhardt, 1800. Blauwdrukken voor een samenleving (The Hague 2001).

E.H. Kossmann, Politieke theorie in het zeventiende-eeuwse Nederland (Amsterdam 1960).

E.H. Kossmann, ‘Nabeschouwing’, in: H. Bots and W.W. Mijnhardt, (ed). De Droom van de Revolutie. Nieuwe benaderingen van het Patriottisme (Amsterdam 1988).

I. Leonard Leeb, The Ideological Origins of the Batavian Revolution. History and Politics in the Dutch Republic 1747-1800 (The Hague 1973).

[p. 160]

Fergus Millar, The Roman Republic in Political Thought (Hanover and London 2002).

Claude Mossé, L'Antiquité dans la Révolution française (Paris 1989).

R.R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution. A Political History of Europe and America, 1760-1800. 2 vols. (Princeton 1959-1964).

H.T. Parker, The Cult of Antiquity and the French Revolutionaries. A Study in the Development of the Revolutionary Spirit (Chicago 1937).

J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment. Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton 1975).

J.G.A. Pocock, ‘The problem of political thought in the eighteenth century: patriotism and politeness (with comments by E.O.G. Haitsma Mulier and E.H. Kossmann)’, Theoretische Geschiedenis 9 (1982) 3-36.

Elizabeth Rawson, The Spartan Tradition in European Thought (Oxford 1969).

Jennifer Tolbert Roberts, Athens on Trial. The Anti-Democratic Tradition in Western Thought (Princeton 1994).

Carl J. Richard, The Founders and the Classics. Greece, Rome, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass. and London 1994).

N.C.F. van Sas, De metamorfose van Nederland. Van oude orde naar moderniteit, 1750-1900 (Amsterdam 2004).

Simon Schama, Patriots and Liberators. Revolution in the Netherlands 1780-1813 (New York 1977).

R.J. Schimmelpenninck, Disputatio iuris publici inauguralis de imperio populari caute temperato (Leiden 1784).

R.J. Schimmelpenninck, Verhandeling over eene wel ingerigte volksregering. Uit het Latyn vertaald door Mr. A.B. Swart (Leiden 1785).

M.N.S. Sellers, American Republicanism. Roman Ideology and the United States Constitution (Houndmills and London 1994).

Judith N. Shklar, Men and Citizens. A Study of Rousseau's Social Theory (Cambridge 1969).

Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge 1998).

Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics. Volume I. Regarding Method (Cambridge 2002).

Wyger R.E. Velema, Republicans. Essays on Eighteenth-Century Dutch Political Thought (Leiden and Boston 2007).

Franco Venturi, Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment (Cambridge 1971).

C.H.E. de Wit, De strijd tussen aristocratie en democratie in Nederland 1780-1848. Herwaardering van een periode (Heerlen 1965).

C.H.E. de Wit, De Nederlandse revolutie van de achttiende eeuw 1780-1787. Oligarchie en proletariaat (Oirsbeek 1974).

C.H.E. de Wit, Het ontstaan van het moderne Nederland 1780-1848 en zijn geschiedschrijving (Oirsbeek 1978).

Johnson Kent Wright, A Classical Republican in Eighteenth-Century France. The Political Thought of Mably (Stanford 1997).

Th.S.M. van der Zee, J.G.M.M. Rosendaal and P.G.B. Thissen, (ed). 1787. De Nederlandse revolutie? (Amsterdam 1988).