Parliament, Sovereignty, and the Nature of Civil Liberty

The slow passage from baby to autonomous young adult requires the steady habituation of self-sufficient behavior. A mother gives birth to a newborn, who is then reared and pampered, swaddled and held, nourished in the civilizing milieu of his family while cultivating patterns of restraint and responsibility, until there comes a time for the parents to yield to the teenager’s rebellious spirit of independence. (My eldest daughter is seven; I still have time.)

Theophilus Philadelphus and Richard Price summoned this trendy analogy during the age of the American Revolution in defense of the American colonies’ rebellion against Great Britain: Just as children had the right to break away from their parents upon reaching the age of maturity, the American colonies had the right to declare independence from Britain upon exhibiting their flair for self-government. Philadelphus delivered this argument in his pamphlet, A Sequel to Common Sense, published in Dublin in 1777, which he composed as an extension of Thomas Paine’s broadside Common Sense. Richard Price’s Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, published in 1775, grounded this argument in deeper philosophical principles, holding that just as no one is free who is in servitude to another, no country is free unless it is governed by its own free will. Both tracts infuse their arguments with Lockean logic, still seen as seditious in the mid-1770s. But their shared analogy of the maturing child in fact gives rise to a more tempered conclusion: independence is appropriate for those colonies that have demonstrated the capacity for self-rule. In the end, however, the elements of moderation in the pamphlets are menaced by Philadelphus’s and Price’s dangerous confidence in natural reason’s ability to spread liberty and knowledge throughout the globe, exemplifying the lurking perils of the emerging Enlightenment project in the early modern period.

Addressing Sequel to Common Sense to the British public, the pseudonymous Philadelphus constructs an argument in the tract for American independence animated by the vigorous precepts of Enlightenment political philosophy. Political judgment must derive from first principles and original rights rather than from the stiff maxims of particular nations, singing the melodies of universal rationalism resonant in late eighteenth-century intellectual thought. Men possess the natural right to speak, to write, and to resist unjust authority. The social compact protects the right to life, freedom, and property.

But Philadelphus is still keen on highlighting the special connection between Britons and British Americans, showcasing their shared commitment to a free press as eloquent testimony to their status, “perfectly and without limitation,” as a “free people.” He explains, “…[N]o people now upon earth are possessed of Freedom, in any sense worthy of Men and Christians, but BRITONS,” which included inhabitants of Britain, Ireland, and America.

Using this creed of liberty as a moral compass for American independence, Philadelphus emphasizes two specific themes of the tract, the first of which was the parent-child analogy. The second was that parliaments could not be supreme because they were not infallible. 

Yet Britain treated the Americans like perpetual newborns to be coddled, or, even worse, subjects to be crushed. Kings and ministers, ecclesiastics and nobles, became intoxicated by their own power and prestige, the gaudy camouflage of their sinister motives. This thirst for control imposed a tenacious hold on Britain’s imperial disposition, meddling, regulating, and intervening in internal colonial affairs with casual indiscretion. Britain tyrannized under the pretense of care, outraging the principles of universal morality and justice. Servitude was the price of dependence.

Americans throughout these dark trials, however, displayed the sangfroid and panache necessary for self-rule. The colonies, Philadelphus writes, 

by the persevering exercise of virtue and industry, the melioration of their lands, and the extension of their commerce, added to the capital circumstance of a prodigious, still increasing, population, are authorized by the law of Nature and Providence, the only original binding moral law, to stand on their own legs, and to do for themselves, unconnected feudally or legislatively with the Parent State.

A flourishing commerce and a swelling population confirmed the ingenuity and resilience of the American people, showing they were quite capable of practicing the art of self-government and engendering public prosperity without the need of Britain’s prying fingers. Much as a parent raised a child, the parent nation of Britain reared its infant American colonies to maturity. It followed that these colonies not only had the right to break off from their parent, but they were compelled to do so by the moral law. The Americans, therefore, “may throw off all subjection to the originating parent State, a power derived from God, and authorized by the necessity of things.” A long train of abuses warranted a Lockean appeal to heaven, and then a loading of the cannons. 

Colonies possess not only the right to become independent, Philadelphus maintains, but also the “heaven-imparted” right to become empires, filled with glory and splendor, as long as they do not encroach on the imperial immunities and home property of other countries. But empires and kingdoms collapse into tyranny, so colonization must give way to the spirit of independence. Obstructing this advance would be tantamount to tyranny and a bold defiance of divine Providence. 

Philadelphus in sum issues a vehement endorsement of American independence, vivified by the parent-child analogy and guided by Lockean principles of right and resistance. But a subtle implication peeks through Philadelphus’s argument: Colonies did not have a right to break free from their parent states if they lacked the requisite tempers and conventions for self-government. Emancipation from superiors, he suggests, requires a love of liberty, a proven ability to foster the public welfare, and the moral customs of restraint and responsibility, virtue and probity. The American colonies may not have flaunted all these qualities in the infancy of their development, but by the 1770s their spirit of self-possession had reached a sharp crescendo, rendering any subsequent subservience to their progenitor a violent trespass against God’s will.

Richard Price, the more famous of the two figures, channeled similar lines of reasoning in Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, published two years prior to Sequel to Common Sense. Price is known today for delivering the sermon praising the French Revolution that incited Edmund Burke to write his notorious critique, Reflections on the Revolution in France. But while both Price and Thomas Paine were widely influential defenders of the American cause, only Paine’s legacy has endured to this day. 

These two marks—the image of Price as a foil of Burke and the historical triumph of Paine over Price—do Price a grave disservice. A leading dissenting minister, theologian, and moral philosopher, Price was a prominent actuary in his age whose facility in calculating insurance rates was perhaps the stimulus behind Burke’s attack in the Reflections on the “calculators,” along with the sophisters and oeconomists, of the Enlightenment for spelling the downfall of chivalry.

Ranging from political philosophy to political economy, Price’s Observations generated considerable impact in steering public opinion to support American independence, if for no other reason than it exposed the financial calamities the war was thrusting upon the British Empire. But its principal mission was to persuade readers that the colonial rebellion was mandated by right and justice. Similar to Philadelphus, Price characterizes Britain in the tract as a “parent state,” a devious phrase he admits tempted empires to keep their colonies in perpetual submission. A time comes, however, when children build up enough patterns of independence to snap ties with their parents. “…[T]here is a period,” Price explains, “when, having acquired property, and a capacity of judging for themselves, they become independent agents; and when, for this reason, the authority of their parents ceases, and becomes nothing but the respect and influence due to benefactors.” The growing opulence of the American colonies was a sparkling display of their aptitude for self-rule, yet Britain had not gradually relaxed its authority over these dependencies gasping for liberty.

This vengeful subjugation of the Americans exploded the most cherished canons of Price’s political philosophy. Claiming that these principles were “the same” as those propagated by John Locke and like-minded thinkers, Price insists that, in sharp contrast to Burke, government derived not from heavenly sanction but from the authority of the people. There was no divine right of kings, exercising absolute power; there were the natural rights of persons, mandating limited government. 

These natural rights, according to Price, spawned four types of liberty: physical, moral, religious, and civil. Physical liberty was spontaneous self-determination, and moral liberty was the power to follow one’s sense of right and wrong. Religious liberty was the exercise of religious belief harmonious with one’s own conscience, while civil liberty was the power to practice self-government free from the sway of others. The surrender of civil liberty, and hence of the legislative power, to an external authority would be “inconsistent with the unalienable rights of human nature.” Government itself was a trust between the ruler and the ruled. If the former breached this sacred bond, it was an act of betrayal against the people and a warrant for its dissolution.

Freedom, then, depended on the inviolable autonomy of the will, while external control of the will was the demonic essence of slavery: “…[T]o be free is to be guided by one’s own will; and to be guided by the will of another is the characteristic of Servitude,” Price asserts. He detected a lucid symmetry between the individual and the state: Just as no one who is free is subservient to another, no country is free unless it is governed by its own free will. A “country that is subject to the legislature of another country, in which it has no voice, and over which it has no controul” he states, “cannot be said to be governed by its own will.” The Declaratory Act of 1765, the law engineered in cold blood by Burke and the Rockingham Whigs that reasserted absolute parliamentary authority over the colonies, was a cruel testament to this reality in British North America. Mix together King George III’s corruption of colonial legislatures and the judicial process, not to mention his stringent restrictions on freedom of association, and what emerged in the colonies was a systematic and ruthless attempt to command the American will. Although Price wished for the division of the British Empire into a confederated union rather than for its complete dissolution, this state of subordination, in the American colonies and throughout the world, accorded the people the “right to emancipate themselves as soon as they can.”

Price’s heavy emphasis on free will distinguishes Observations from Philadelphus’s Sequel to Common Sense. But it also indicates Price’s quiet movement from Locke’s conception of liberty as freedom from arbitrary rule to Rousseau’s notion of the General Will, laying bare the radical implications of his political thought. These thinkers generally held that government should promote the utility of the people. For Locke, however, government was to achieve this aim by protecting the interests of the people, namely their natural rights to life, liberty, and estate. Yet for Price, as for Rousseau and leading French revolutionaries, government was to advance the common interest by expressing the distilled will of the people. He explains: 

Government is an institution for the benefit of the people governed, which they have power to model as they please; and to say, that they can have too much of this power, is to say, that there ought to be a power in the state superior to that which gives it being, and from which all jurisdiction in it is derived.

Price feared kings, nobles, and clergy, but here he betrays no fear of the people themselves. The “power to model” government “as they please” carried rebellious democratic undertones, lending no appreciation of the role that custom and hierarchy might play in granting legitimacy to existing forms of government. For if just government derived solely from the collective authority of the people, as Price held, then the presence of any higher authority in the state, or of any traditional modes of governing that did not depend on the popular will, would transgress this principle and shred the foundations of political justice.

Yet even Price wavers in Observations when stretching this point to its logical outcome, unchecked democracy, which would appear in later forms as Rousseau’s brand of participatory government and the French Revolution’s unicameral National Assembly. For Price concedes that a state can be free by exercising either its free will or the will of a representative body. Furthermore, he acknowledges, “In order to form the most perfect constitution of government,” it might be wise to establish a hereditary council and a supreme executive magistrate to calm the possible excesses of the legislative branch. Price here releases a flare of radical Enlightenment thought, only to then redirect its trajectory before it erupts into the kind of supernova of social destruction that would ignite in France a few short years later.

Accordingly, Philadelphus’s and Price’s tracts issue zealous calls for American independence enlivened by metaphor and pathos. But their emphatic support for reason, natural rights, and freedom signal a subversive confidence in the power of Enlightenment principles to extend the blessings of liberty throughout the globe. For Philadelphus, the “sense and will of Heaven may be clearly made out from the plainest deductions of reason and common sense, which in many intricate and doubtful cases are our only guides, and the only infallible standard men have upon earth, in penetrating the art and disguise of things…” And the “unrestrained powers of reflection, and the natural good sense of mankind, will take the lead of habit, fashion and prejudice…” Starting in British North America, “Civil and Religious Liberty, light and knowledge, will spread over all the nations of the world…”

For Price, enlightened peoples were witnessing a “new opening in human affairs beginning, among the descendants of Englishmen, in a new world; A rising empire, extended over an immense continent, without bishops, without nobles, and without kings.” The dispute over the scope of Americans’ civil liberties should depend not on charter and precedent but on “reason and equity” and the “rights of humanity.” Philadelphus’s and Price’s spurts of unbounded optimism, of starry-eyed faith in the ability of the radiance of nature and reason to blind the most committed dogmatists of tradition, signified the rupture of European civilization from its religious and moral roots. Prejudice could not coexist with reason; it had to be eradicated. Custom could not discipline the excesses of liberty; it had to be crushed. The established clergy and nobility could not be reformed; they had to be defeated. Natural rights could not be modified depending on circumstance; they had to be celebrated regardless of circumstance. Inheritance could not be venerated; it had to be conquered.

Such Pelagian pretenses, representative of elite intellectual thought in the late 1700s, planted the explosive seeds for the rise of ideology in modernity, fed by its secularizing and levelling impulses. It was perhaps fortuitous for Philadelphus and Price that the Americans, once they did reach the age of maturity to declare independence, did not fully subscribe to these mutinous conclusions but rather retained healthy doses of their inherited religious, ethical, and legal traditions, unlike their French counterparts thirteen years later. A young adult can break away from his family, but the paradox of emancipation is a maxim of independence: The preservation of one’s free status, both as an individual and as a nation, may require acquiescence to at least some tenets of wisdom bequeathed by unenlightened parents.