Whig Anti-Intellectualism: An Intellectual History

Abstract

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, radical British and American writers wrote a set of influential meditations on the nature of liberty and tyranny. This set of texts became canonized in the later eighteenth century as the “Whig” or “Old Whig” or “True Whig” tradition. Historians of political thought have studied this corpus extensively, chiefly because of its lasting historical significance. In Britain, the Whig tradition came to represent a road not taken in the nation’s political trajectory – the main historical alternative to the political outlook that did in fact win out. In the Thirteen Colonies, the Whigs’ conception of liberty and tyranny became orthodoxy, providing the building-blocks for “Country” politics even today. But historians have missed a disturbing aspect of Whig political thought in their efforts to celebrate or vindicate that tradition. Scholars have tended to zero in on the Whig polemic against a professional military force and on the Whig polemic against financial wizardry. (Possibly because these are still important elements of American populism today.) However, these are precisely the two domains where the Whig tradition is arguably least original. In their diatribes against a “standing army” and against the “corruption” of financial innovation, the Whigs take great care never to stray from Ancient Greek and Roman tropes and arguments. So, what comparative-philosophical reason do we have to study the Whig tradition? What is still original about the Whig tradition? Is there a distinctively Whig conception of liberty, and if yes, where can we find it? The answer, I suggest in my dissertation, resides in the rabid anti-intellectualism of the Whig tradition, which has also left clear traces in the American political landscape. The literature that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britons and Americans were most familiar with – pre-modern European political literature – was almost unanimous in associating the intellect and intellectuals with good government. Whether we examine Plato, Sallust, medieval glossators, or Italian humanists, the assumption was almost always that tyranny had nothing to do with intellectual activity. Tyrants were viewed as bestial and sub-rational. Against that backdrop, the emergence of a Whig outlook in which intellectuals sometimes sustain the vilest tyrannies looks stunningly original, if not revolutionary. In my dissertation, I trace this aspect of politically motivated anti-intellectualism through roughly two centuries of Anglo-American political reflection. By rereading the English Civil War (1642-51), the Exclusion Crisis (1679-81), the Glorious Revolution (1688-89), the American presidential election of 1800, and other important events through the lens of anti-intellectualism, Whig literature emerges as a protracted struggle against intellectual abuse. From the historical perspective provided in this way, the Republicans’ current assault on elite universities begins to look impeccably “republican.” Rather than dismissing the Republican campaign against the universities as senseless, confused, or stupid, my dissertation gestures at a history and logic behind it. Whether American citizens will decide to repudiate that history, and reject that logic, remains entirely up to them.