histofthought1

Bibliographical essay 521Locke and the LevellersA pioneering and indispensable work on the libertarian Commonwealthmenof the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Britain is Caroline Robbins,The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman (Cambridge, Mass.: HarvardUniversity Press, 1959). Directly inspired by Robbins was the outstandingwork on the predominant influence of English libertarian thought on theAmerican Revolution, Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins ofthe AmericanRevolution (1967, Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard UniversityPress, 1992).Unfortunately, emphasis on the libertarian nature of Lockean influence onthe American Revolution quickly became deflected by the 'Pocock thesis',which created an artificial distinction between allegedly 'modern' radicalindividualists, believers in private property and the free market, as againstadmirers of 'classical republican virtue' who were basically statists andcommunitarians who harked back to ancient models. Actually, there is noreason why radical libertarians and free marketers cannot also be opponentsof government expenditure and 'corruption'; indeed, the two views usuallygo together. The major Pocockian work is J.G.A. Pocock, The MachiavellianMoment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975). For critiques ofPocock, in addition to the works of Isaac Kramnick and Joyce Appleby, seein particular the refutation of Pocock's main case: the alleged 'classicalvirtue' rather than libertarianism of the largest single influence on the Americanrevolutionaries: John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon's impressive seriesof London newspaper articles in the early 1720s: Cato s Letters. On Cato'sLetters as libertarian rather than Pocockian, see Ronald Hamowy, 'Cato'sLetters: John Locke and the Republican Paradigm', History of PoliticalThought, II (1990), pp. 273-94.The Levellers are presented in collections of their tracts, such as in Don M.Wolfe (ed.), Leveller Manifestoes of the Puritan Revolution (1944, NewYork: Humanities Press, 1967). Also see the editor's lengthy introduction tothose tracts. A full treatment of the Levellers is H.N. Brailsford, The Levellersand the English Revolution (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press,1961). One of the best summaries of Leveller doctrine is in C.B. Macpherson,The Political Theory ofPossessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford:The Clarendon Press, 1962), pp. 137-59.Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Lockes Two Treatises ofGovernment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986) is excellent onLocke's radicalism and his connection with Leveller ideas. Ashcraft alsoprovides the Shaftesbury explanation for the two Lockes: the early Baconianempiricist and absolutist of the Essay on Human Understanding, and the latersystematic libertarian theorist. On Locke's early Baconianism, see Neal Wood,The Politics ofLockesPhilosophy: A Social Study of 'An Essay Concerning