During the period of the American and French Revolutions, many prominent political thinkers argued that the future stability of modern republics would depend, in a large measure, in correctly applying the intellectual resources of a ‘science of politics’. This claim featured heavily, for example, in The federalist, in which Hamilton underlined the crucial role to be played by political science in the constitutional design of a large federal republic.Footnote 1 A similar view informed the thinking of the abbé Sieyès and the marquis de Condorcet, who referred to the sciences politiques (and, more precisely, la science sociale) as keys to the political stability of the French revolutionary state (Condorcet himself was perhaps the most explicit eighteenth-century exponent of the idea of reconstituting the social and political sciences on the model of the natural sciences).Footnote 2 Although there were significant differences between these American and French conceptions of a science of politics, they both inherited – while also seeking to transform – a number of different eighteenth-century conceptions of politics as a science. One of these was the comparative study of political regimes set out in Montesquieu's The spirit of the laws, with its emphasis on causes générales and causes physiques as key components of any political analysis.Footnote 3 A second was a distinctive tradition of British constitutional analysis, with roots in James Harrington's Oceana, but more often associated with the science of politics set out in David Hume's 1741 essay ‘That politics may be reduced to a science’ and elaborated in the 1752 essay ‘Idea of a perfect commonwealth’.Footnote 4 A third was the Scottish Enlightenment's famed science of man, in which the resources of anthropology, natural history, and moral psychology were marshalled as the foundations for innovative work in moral philosophy, political economy, and the ‘science of the legislator’.Footnote 5
This article aims to extend our appreciation of the eighteenth-century sciences of politics and their legacies through a re-examination of the writings of Jean-Louis Delolme (1741–1806). Delolme, a Genevan by birth, moved to England in 1768 and achieved lasting fame as an analyst of the English constitution. His impact upon contemporaries was considerable: The constitution of England had a wide circulation in eighteenth-century Britain, France, Germany, and America, and its arguments featured prominently in debates about modern constitutional government throughout the first half of the nineteenth century.Footnote 6 Twentieth-century scholars recognized the significance of his treatment of the separation and equilibrium of powers, while more recent work has underlined his critique of classical republicanism and mixed constitution theory, his antipathy to his Genevan compatriot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the depth of his influence on Madison, Hamilton, and Adams.Footnote 7 Nevertheless, Delolme's precise contribution to eighteenth-century argument, and his broader significance as a political theorist, remain understudied. His writings have been subject to a kind of simplification (a process that actually began before his death) which has seen his work construed somewhat narrowly as a classical statement of the separation of powers or, as his contemporary critics suggested, as that of a conservative royalist.Footnote 8 Almost nothing has been written on the conceptual underpinnings of his thought, and nobody has related the argument set out in The constitution of England to his other writings of the 1770s and 1780s. Perhaps most remarkably, his arresting claim that The constitution of England rested upon a novel science of politics has gone unexplored.
This article corrects these omissions by emphasizing Delolme's distinctive contribution to eighteenth-century political science. The central contention is that he should be recognized not simply as an innovative constitutional theorist, but also as an interesting advocate of a scientific understanding of modern politics. Delolme certainly flaunted his neutrality as a political thinker, claiming that, as a foreigner and outsider, he was superbly suited to offer a properly scientific analysis of the English constitution.Footnote 9 But his science of politics was far broader than that implies. He argued that the modern political analyst, in developing a proper understanding of the workings of a constitutional system, should follow the methods of the natural sciences. More ambitiously, he claimed to be laying the foundations for a new science of politics which he supposed, like Hume, might approximate the precision of the mathematical sciences. Grounded firmly upon the principles of human nature, this science was designed to rescue contemporary political analysis from its entanglements in analogical, metaphysical, and metaphorical reasoning (especially the analogy of the ancients and the moderns, and the human body as a metaphor for the state).Footnote 10 Armed with the resources furnished by this science, Delolme aimed to supersede his British and continental contemporaries in his interpretation of the foundations of a modern constitutional government.
Delolme's political science was conceived as the foundation for a new explanation of the sources of eighteenth-century Britain's social and political stability. Crucially, he understood Britain as a new kind of empire, and consistently argued that, unlike the republics of antiquity or the monarchies of continental Europe, it had achieved immunity from the ancient cycle of constitutional flux, revolution, and political collapse.Footnote 11 This master-argument about Britain's stability as an empire featured to some extent in all of his works between 1771 (when the original French version of La constitution de l'Angleterre appeared) and 1787 (when he published an extensive but unfinished history of Anglo-Irish relations and the Anglo-British ‘imperial crown’).Footnote 12 Britain's invulnerability to revolution was a key theme of his 1772 Parallel between the English constitution and the former government of Sweden.Footnote 13 A number of untraced manuscripts, and his editorial introduction to a 1782 edition of the American state constitutions, indicate a serious and evolving interest in the relationship of the British state with its colonies and in the stability of large states. Finally, the successive editions of the English-language version of The constitution of England – which was much revised and expanded between 1775 and 1784 – provide a detailed sense of how Delolme's understanding of Britain's constitutional and political stability developed during the period of the American Revolution. Delolme's science of politics took shape in the context of this concern with the stability of an extensive modern empire.
In developing this argument, Delolme sought to undermine two prominent alternatives to his own science of politics. His immediate target was the broad and disparate body of writing conventionally described as classical republicanism. Although his antipathy towards Rousseau's version of republicanism has been relatively well documented, the broader ramifications of Delolme's critique of civic humanist and republican thought have been underexplored.Footnote 14 Part of my aim below is to bring out the scientific grounding of Delolme's critique of a British tradition of constitutional analysis (which he associated above all with Harrington's Oceana and Hume's ‘Idea of a perfect commonwealth’.) The second and more significant target, however, was Montesquieu's The spirit of the laws. In the little that has been written about Delolme over the past thirty years, he is usually described as a writer who extended and refined, but did not essentially challenge, Montesquieu's understanding of the English constitution (set out most famously in Book 11, ch. 6, and Book 19, ch. 27, of The spirit of the laws).Footnote 15 In this respect, recent historiography has replicated the late nineteenth-century view that Delolme and Montesquieu were both anglophile theorists of limited government based on the separation of powers. This assessment, however, minimizes their disagreements and underplays Montesquieu's well-documented anxieties about the English model.Footnote 16 In fact, Delolme was a sharp critic of Montesquieu. He rejected the aristocratic or ‘Gothic’ features of Montesquieu's thought and, crucially, underlined the importance of a strong, unitary executive in Britain as a guarantee of personal liberty (Delolme's anti-aristocratic leanings can be traced to his early Genevan writings).Footnote 17 This stress on the unity of executive power, and its capacity for maintaining the political equality of the empire's subjects, sharply distinguished Delolme's political science from that of Montesquieu.
My argument is developed in four sections. The first section examines Delolme's conception of politics as a science. The second and third sections show how this conception of political science underpinned Delolme's critique of republicanism (section ii) and Montesquieu (section iii). The broader aim of both these sections is to bring out his critical engagement with Harrington, Hume, Rousseau, Montesquieu, and Smith, and to show how his thinking about the underlying principles governing human and political societies produced a new picture of Britain's stability as a monarchy. The fourth section examines his thinking about union, empire, and Britain's future as an imperial monarchy. A conclusion draws the various strands of the article together and assesses Delolme's broader relevance and legacy in late eighteenth-century debates about the modern or constitutional republic.
I
In the first English-language edition of The constitution of England, Delolme made a striking claim about the scientific foundations of his constitutional analysis. Just as his political and constitutional argument was novel, he argued, ‘the principles from which its truth is to be demonstrated, totally differ from what is commonly looked upon as the foundation of the science of Politics’.Footnote 18 He repeated this point in one of the amendments to the 1784 edition of the work, claiming that his argument was grounded upon a ‘Science of Metapolitics’, and hence differed from conventional understandings of the ‘sphere of the common Science of Politics’.Footnote 19 Delolme made no explicit attempt to connect the principles of his foundational science of politics (or ‘Metapolitics’) to his concrete constitutional analysis, claiming that a discussion of these principles would lead him ‘into philosophical discussions on what really constitutes the basis of Governments and Power amongst Mankind, both extremely long, and in a great measure foreign to the subject of this Book’.Footnote 20 Nevertheless, it is possible to identify three central elements in Delolme's science of politics. The first of these was its explicit anchoring in a sceptical understanding of human nature. The second was the idea that the systemic features of a political constitution could best be discovered by separating, like an experimental scientist, the ephemeral and extraneous aspects of a state from its underlying components. The third was its explicit analysis of politics in terms of the dynamic interplay of forces, or what Delolme called ‘real power’.
Delolme's fullest elaboration of his understanding of the scope and character of his own science of politics was set out in the important ‘Advertisement’ to the third (1781) edition of The constitution of England. According to Delolme, the ‘science of politics, considered as an exact science – that is to say, a science capable of actual demonstration – is infinitely deeper than the reader suspects’.
The knowledge of man, on which such a science, with its preliminary axioms and definitions, is to be grounded, has hitherto remained surprisingly imperfect: as one instance how little man is known to himself, it might be mentioned that no tolerable explanation of that continual human phaenomenon, laughter has yet been given; and the powerful complicate sensation which each sex produces in the other, still remains an equally inexplicable mystery … [T]hose Speculators who will amuse themselves in seeking for the demonstration of the political Theorem above expressed, will thereby be led through a field of observations which they will at first little expect; and in their way towards attaining such demonstration, will find the Science, commonly called Metaphysics, to be at best but a very superficial one, and that the Mathematics, or at least the mathematical reasonings hitherto used by Men, are not so completely free from error as has been thought.Footnote 21
This passage highlights two of the central features of Delolme's science of politics. The first was its character as an exact science, with a capacity to ground a precise and demonstrable explanation of political reality. The second was its explicit grounding in the principles of human nature, a feature of his science of politics which overlapped with the Scottish Enlightenment's famed ‘science of man’.Footnote 22 Delolme stressed the foundational character of the principles of human nature in every edition of his book. In the first English edition, he demanded of his readers that they would ‘not judge of the principles I shall lay down, but from their relation to those of human nature: a consideration which is almost the only one essential, and has been hitherto too much neglected by the Writers on the subject of Government’.Footnote 23 In one of the crucial chapters added to the 1784 edition, he argued that political reasoning supposed ‘an enquiry into the nature of Man’.Footnote 24 But the centrality of the theme is most clearly revealed in a long passage in the first English edition, which is also of interest because it indicates how far Delolme sought to move beyond conventional understandings of luxury and corruption.
Instead of looking for the principles of Politics in their true source, that is to say, in the nature of the affections of Mankind, and of those secret ties by which they are united together in a state of Society, Men have treated that science in the same manner as they did natural Philosophy in the times of Aristotle, continually recurring to occult causes and principles, from which no useful consequence could be drawn. Thus, in order to ground particular assertions, they have much used the word Constitution, in a personal sense, the Constitution loves, the Constitution forbids, and the like. At other times, they have had recourse to Luxury, in order to explain certain events; and at others, to a still more occult cause, which they have called corruption: and the abundance of comparisons, drawn from the human Body, have been also used for the same purposes … [T]he singular perplexity which Men in general, even the ablest, labour under, when they attempt to discuss abstract questions in politics, also justifies this observation, and proves that the true first principles of this Science, whatever they are, lie deep in both the human heart and understanding.Footnote 25
These conceptual underpinnings of Delolme's vision of politics as a science had several implications. Perhaps the most important was an explicit concern with the political constitution as a kind of mechanism or system, comparable in its working to an automatic and hence predictable machine: it was
upon the passions of Mankind, that is, upon causes which are unalterable, that the action of the various parts of a State depend. The machine may vary as to its dimensions, but its movement and acting springs still remain essentially the same; and that time cannot be considered as lost, which has been spent in seeing them act and move in a narrower circle.Footnote 26
The idea of the state as a regular but dynamic machine, which could be analysed in terms of its underlying components, was a constant refrain in Delolme's thought (although he occasionally used different images to describe the regulated motion he associated with political systems; in the 1781 edition, for example, he compared government to a ‘great ballet or dance, in which, as in other ballets, every thing depends on the disposition of the figures’).Footnote 27 These ideas had probably been stimulated by his experience of Geneva, which he viewed as a kind of microcosm of the political world, a small but independent state which contained ‘within itself the principles of its motions’, and was the origin of his ‘insight into the first real principles of Governments’.Footnote 28 Against this background, Delolme's preferred model for the political scientist was that of the mathematician, who would uncover the underlying principles of a complex and dynamic system by focusing on the real distribution of forces or powers:
As the mathematician, the better to discover the proportions he investigates, begins with freeing his equation from coefficients, or such other quantities as only perplex without properly constituting it; so it may be advantageous, to the inquirer after the causes that produce the equilibrium of a government, to have previously studied them, disengaged from the apparatus of fleets, armies, foreign trade, distant and extensive dominions, in a word, from all those brilliant circumstances which so greatly affect the external appearance of a powerful Society, but have no essential connection with the real principles of it.Footnote 29
Delolme's understanding of the state as a predictable, regular, and mechanical system was underpinned by a focus on power and force as the primary constituents of a political analysis. Throughout all of his writings, Delolme argued that the real distribution of power in a political state had to be identified empirically. Ancient constitutions and legal arrangements were poor guides to understanding the functioning of a political system; the political scientist had instead to focus upon what Delolme called ‘real power’. This focus on ‘real power’ is most clearly visible in the Parallel of Britain and Sweden, in which he claimed that a ‘description of the distribution of the real power’ was the best indication of the true form of a government.
In our disquisitions on the liberty of a Nation, we must indeed pay a great attention to the description of the outward form of its Government; but it is at the distribution of real power that has been introduced, we must chiefly look. Governments are the work of force: like the treaties between Princes, they only subsist by the continued effect and weight of force; and it may be laid down as a maxim, that, in any shape of Government, whatever may be got on the side of form, never can compensate what is lost in point of real strength.Footnote 30
Delolme's analysis of ‘real power’ or force was sophisticated. He carefully separated power from liberty, and power from action, claiming that the confusion between these concepts had created many confusions in political science. He distinguished between active and passive powers (he probably borrowed this distinction from natural philosophy or psychology).Footnote 31 He underlined that ‘active’ power – which he associated primarily with the power of execution – could be ‘repressed’ or ‘limited’ but not ‘transposed’ or ‘divided’ (execution, like sovereignty, could not be divided.) Passive power, by contrast, was a latent or ‘virtual’ power.Footnote 32 The result was a kind of political mechanics, centred on the ‘reciprocal actions and reactions’ of the different powers of the state.Footnote 33 The mechanical basis of his thinking is perhaps best exemplified in a passage in which Delolme described the real (but latent or virtual) powers of an indivisible ‘People’:
Forming thus, as it were, one body, the People, at every instant, has it in its power to strike the decisive blow which is to level everything. Like those mechanical powers the greatest efficiency of which exists at the instant which precedes their entering into action, it has an immense force, just because it does not exert any; and in this state of stillness, but of attention, consists its true momentum. Footnote 34
One final consequence of Delolme's science of politics was its strict focus on interests and passions and its downgrading of virtue or patriotism. This preference for interest over virtue aligned Delolme with a number of prominent predecessors (including Harrington and Hume), but it is worth emphasizing the consistency with which he downplayed the importance of older, republican ideas of political commitment. Britain's liberty did not rely on the patriotism or disinterestedness of its elite, and required no special degree of capacity or virtue among the nation's representatives. Interest and the love of power, not patriotism, were the psychological principles underlying the workings of a complex system of modern liberty.Footnote 35 The basis of Delolme's admiration of the British constitution, therefore, was not that it stimulated ‘public virtue’, but rather that it was compatible with the ‘political passions of Mankind’; it housed a capacity to balance and contain the contradictory social forces ‘which have an unavoidable tendency to arise at one time or other, in all human societies’. It was, in this respect, grounded in nature: England was the ‘finest Government upon Earth, or rather the only one that has hitherto been founded upon principles truly consonant with human nature’.Footnote 36
II
The most immediately striking aspect of Delolme's science of politics was its anti-republican character. He straightforwardly denied that a republican constitution could be a viable form of government for a large modern state like Britain, and argued that republican government was usually a disguised form of aristocratic domination. More generally, his political science provided foundations for a radical overhaul of many of the key presuppositions of civic humanist or republican political philosophy. Not only did Delolme reject the anxieties about empire and luxury that were a staple of much earlier civic humanist thinking, he also rejected the fears of contemporaries who were preoccupied with the ‘fate of civil Societies’, and the ‘numerous and powerful causes which seem, as it were, unavoidably to conduct them all to a State of incurable political Slavery’ (this passage reads as a response to Adam Ferguson's 1767 Essay on the history of civil society, which had underlined the causes of political slavery or despotism among modern states).Footnote 37 Finally, Delolme's science of politics underpinned a critique of republican conceptions of liberty and a correspondingly strong emphasis on personal security (or the ‘liberty of the subject’) as the main criteria of modern liberty.
One important source for Delolme's critique of republicanism is the 1772 Parallel between the English constitution and the former government of Sweden. Written in the aftermath of the Swedish Revolution of 1772 (when Gustavus III terminated the Constitution of 1720 and re-established strong monarchical rule), the Parallel was designed to dispel contemporary anxieties that Sweden's return to absolute monarchy was a portent of Britain's future.Footnote 38 Delolme began by stressing that the Swedish constitution between 1720 and 1772 had secured neither personal nor political liberty. Standard understandings of Sweden as a republican ‘free state’ were not grounded in a correct appreciation of the distribution of power in the country; the reality was that the ancient nobility dominated the legislature, monopolized all civil and military offices, and owned most of the property. Popular deputies or representatives had ‘little more than the appearance of a share in the power of their assemblies’.Footnote 39 Neither monarchical nor republican, the best description of Sweden in the decades before 1772 was as an unfree aristocracy:
The Government of Sweden, therefore, because it had what they called a King, may have been mistaken for a monarchical one, by those who judge of things, from their outward appearance; or for being popular, because even Peasants had a seeming share in it. But the executive and military Powers centering in the Nobles, with the reality of the legislative authority, it was merely aristocratical, consequently subject to all the evils that necessarily attend that sort of government.Footnote 40
Delolme's denial that Sweden had been a free state was connected to his broader critique of early modern republican thought. Throughout the Parallel, he sought to break the connection between monarchy and political slavery that was part of the standard political rhetoric of conventional whigs, radicals, and civic republicans. He denied that royal government was necessarily a ‘government of slavery’, and argued that the ‘liberty of all’ frequently terminated in the ‘power of a few’.Footnote 41 More specifically, he criticized the Harringtonian idea of ‘equal rotation’, which Harrington himself had described as a fundamental component of his own ‘political anatomy’ and one key to maintaining the superstructure of an equal commonwealth.Footnote 42 According to Delolme, this opened a door to disaster.
If, which may God avert, through some unforeseen revolution, we might be so unfortunate as to be brought to parcel a Power in whose indivisibility lies the safety of the State; to think of subjects regularly succeeding each other and independently of the will of the Prince, in places of power and public trust; to dream of rotations and such crude schemes of unwary Politicians, we should see ourselves, liberty ceasing with its cause, immediately falling into the same condition from which the Swedes have sought at any rate to extricate themselves; and Aristocracy, as it were watchful of the moment, bursting out at once, and spreading itself over the Kingdom.Footnote 43
This attack on the principle of ‘rotation’ was immediately followed by criticism of Hume's ‘Idea of a perfect commonwealth’, which Hume had explicitly presented as an attempt to overcome the weaknesses of Harrington's model through the establishment of an intricate system of representation.Footnote 44 At the core of Delolme's critique of Hume was the charge of failure to understand the mechanics of political representation. Hume, Delolme wrote, ‘took it for granted that it was enough, in order to constitute Representatives of the People, that the People, after electing them, should call them so; and only thought of calculating their number and exterior functions’.
But a little more attention would have informed him that the People never are represented, till the interest of their Representatives is identified with theirs; and if he had reflected that our Constitution has effected this, and made the safety of our Law-makers depending on the goodness of their laws, he would have looked no farther for the model of a perfect commonwealth, and seen that what he was seeking on the foot-steps of Plato, was already at home.Footnote 45
In The constitution of England itself, Delolme launched a full-scale assault on political ideas grounded upon admiration of the ancient republics (especially Rome). Rome's history had little relevance for those hoping to understand England's future. He criticized ‘certain writers of the present age’, who, in their desire to present ‘striking contrasts’ to the ‘degenerate manners of modern times’, had described the governments of Sparta and Rome ‘as the only ones fit for us to imitate’. This kind of admiration for the ancients was potentially extremely dangerous. The patriotism of the ancients was no more than ‘an ardent desire of injuring all mankind for the sake of the society of which we are members’, while their love of glory was simply an ‘ardent desire of committing slaughter in order to afterwards make a boast of it’.Footnote 46 Delolme also attacked the aristocratic bias in the Roman constitution. Rejecting old arguments about luxury and corruption, he argued that Rome's decline related directly to the dominance of the patricians in the government of the state.
The above disorders arose from the very nature of the government of the republic; of a government in which the executive and supreme power being made to centre in the body of those in whom the people had placed their confidence, there remained no other effectual power in the State that might render it necessary for them to keep within bounds of justice and decency. And, in the mean time, as the People, who were intended as a check over that Body, continually gave a share in this same Executive authority, to those whom they intrusted with the care of their interests, they increased the evils they complained of, as it were, at every attempt they made to remedy them; and instead of raising up opponents to those who were become the enemies of their liberty, as it was their intention to do, continually supplied them with new associates.Footnote 47
The essence of Delolme's critique of the Roman constitution was that, unlike in England, there existed no distinct, independent sovereign that could limit the tendency of the government to encroach upon popular liberties. In the absence of a properly organized executive power, the guardianship of liberty fell to the Roman tribunes, who found it impossible to establish any lasting security against the ambitions of the nobility. At this point Delolme's pronounced anti-aristocratism emerged very clearly. Unlike the English House of Commons, the Roman populus only possessed the power of approving (as distinct from proposing) legislation, which in practice meant that legislative decisions fell to a small but powerful clique of unscrupulous nobles who were able to manipulate the assemblies (Delolme claimed that both Montesquieu and Rousseau had failed to recognize the extent of senatorial ‘State-Craft’).Footnote 48 Thus the long-vaunted Roman constitutional principle – populi jussu, ex auctoritate Senatus – was itself a source of considerable political disorder. Delolme's conclusion was unambiguous. Only a ‘lawful regular authority, once trusted to a single ruler’ would have succeeded in ending the tyranny of the Senate and in correcting the maladies that lay ‘too deep for common legal provisions to remedy’.
Delolme claimed that his science of politics had enabled him to overturn conventional understandings of liberty. As he wrote in The constitution of England, ‘I feel a kind of pleasure … that though I have been called by some an advocate for Power, I have carried my ideas of Liberty farther than many Writers who have mentioned that word with much enthusiasm.’Footnote 49 He rejected the idea that liberty consisted in a positive participation in government or even in election: ‘these are functions, are acts, of Government, but by no means constituent parts of Liberty’.Footnote 50 This enabled him to ridicule Rousseau's notorious accusation, in The social contract, that the English were slaves between parliamentary elections.Footnote 51 The general will in republics like Geneva was usually ‘the effect of the artifices of a few designing men’.Footnote 52 Delolme's alternative – which he alternately called ‘constitutional liberty’ and ‘general liberty’ – sprang from the capacity for maintaining general law in a large society with a representative constitution and a powerful executive. This, which was equivalent with the ‘liberty of the subject’, secured ‘primeval equality’ to all citizens, nobody was exempt.Footnote 53 Constitutional liberty did not require the impractical vigilance or ‘watchfulness’ that republicans believed was necessary to preserve a free constitution.
Liberty, so far as it is possible for it to exist in a society of beings, whose interests are almost perpetually opposed to each other, consists in this; that every man, while he respects the persons of others, and allows them quietly to enjoy the produce of their industry, be certain himself likewise to enjoy the produce of his own industry, and that his person be also secure.Footnote 54
III
This critique of civic and republican political thought was matched by an equally powerful critique of Montesquieu's evaluation of the British system of government. For Delolme, Montesquieu's analysis of the English constitution lacked conceptual clarity.
Having neglected, as indeed all systematic Writers upon Politicks have done, attentively to examine into the real nature of Governments, of Power, and of Liberty, among Mankind, the principles he lays down are not always so clear, or even so just, as we might have expected from a Man of so real a genius. When he speaks of England, for instance, his observations are much too general; and though he had frequent opportunities of conversing with Men who had been personally concerned in the public affairs of this Country, and had been an eye-witness of the operations of the English Government, he rather tells us, when he attempts to describe it, what he conjectured, than what he saw.
Although Delolme agreed with Montesquieu's broad argument that the English political system was sui generis (when set against the more typical monarchies of continental Europe), he made a number of targeted criticisms of Montesquieu's analysis of the English constitution. He rejected Montesquieu's use of the Rome–Britain analogy (in a case where, Delolme argued, ‘no analogy is to be found’). He explicitly rejected Montesquieu's ‘opinion’ that Britain would lose its liberty when the legislature was more corrupt than the executive.Footnote 55 He rejected Montesquieu's characterization of England as a republic masquerading as a monarchy. More generally, he set out to correct what he took to be the aristocratic bias in Montesquieu's own science of politics, with its strong emphasis on a neo-German system of intermediary noble ranks.
These criticisms of Montesquieu began with the reinterpretation of England's history contained in the first three chapters of The constitution of England. The thrust of this critique was to undermine Montesquieu's idea of the Germanic origins of the English constitution, with its claim that the English took their system of political government from ‘the woods’. Although he occasionally lapsed into the language of mixed government (England as the embodiment of Tacitus's vision of a mixture of democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy), Delolme's history of English liberty was, in fact, highly original. The secret of England's unprecedented degree of personal liberty lay not in the Germanic or Saxon past, but in the radical redistribution of public powers that had followed the Norman conquest. The conquest had unified the entire realm into a ‘compact indissoluble body’, setting the English state on a different trajectory to that of France, which had only achieved political union much later.Footnote 56 The massive power of the English crown had the unforeseen effect of creating a ‘spirit of union’ between the people and nobility. Over many centuries, this resulted in a sharp distinction between the indivisible executive power located in the crown and the legislative powers of parliament (especially the Commons), an arrangement that secured England's liberty both against the anarchical disorders that afflicted republican governments and against the slavish tranquillity of the continental monarchies. The major consequence of this historical reconstruction – and a key difference from Montesquieu – was the reclassification of England as a monarchy, but one quite unlike the ‘Monarchies established in the other parts of Europe’. England in Delolme's reading was a unitary and quasi-democratic monarchy.Footnote 57
Further details of this understanding of Britain as a monarchy were set out in the Parallel. Citing a famous passage from Virgil's Georgics which had emphasized the role of royal power in maintaining cohesion among the community of bees, Delolme underlined the ‘immense benefits we are indebted for, to the authority of the crown, which we do not sufficiently acknowledge’.Footnote 58 He also noted that the British crown was possessed of ‘every principle of active power’, and ‘all Execution in the State’.Footnote 59 This concentration of active executive power had several positive effects. First, it nullified the power of the British aristocracy, making them ‘mere atoms’ and legally equal to every other subject.Footnote 60 Second, it was a source of constitutional stability, allowing Britain to avoid the calamitous ‘revolutions’ in Sweden and other European states (‘whenever revolutions have taken place among us, their only effect has been the ruin of some individuals, and the Constitution itself never underwent but temporary eclipses’).Footnote 61 Finally, the indivisibility of executive power in the crown promoted national union. Delolme summarized the consequences of making the crown the ‘sole depositum’ of executive power as follows:
all Subjects, of whatever denomination, are actually brought to a level; a salutary jealousy of Power diffuses itself throughout all Parts of the State; interest, that only sure ground of loyalty, interest ties the Legislators to the People; a sort of confederacy takes place amongst all Men of every rank and order; and instead, as in other States, of an apparent union, with a real though concealed division, we see, amidst the warmth of our oppositions, always existing among us a general union upon every immediate concern of public liberty.Footnote 62
This was a simpler, more unitary, and more egalitarian model of monarchy than the ‘republic disguised as a monarchy’ set out in Montesquieu's The spirit of the laws. Although, like Montesquieu, Delolme conceived the English state as grounded upon three separate powers, he laid particular emphasis on two distinctive components. The first of these was the executive power of the crown which, Delolme reiterated, was the sole ‘depository of public power’ or the ‘sole and indivisible seat of all the active powers in the State’.Footnote 63 The ‘whole mass’ of executive power was concentrated in a single point. The advantage of this arrangement lay not simply in the fact that it balanced a dangerously powerful legislature (as David Wootton argues) but, equally importantly, in the fact that it immunized Britain against conflicts over executive power and, simultaneously, created a ‘community of interest’ between all the orders of the state.Footnote 64 The second component was the representation of the people in a bicameral legislature. Representation was a key feature of Delolme's modern science of politics. In The constitution of England, he noted that modern Britain possessed a ‘representative’ rather than a ‘popular’ constitution, and in his 1782 edition of the American constitutions, he argued that representation was the key feature that distinguished the American state constitutions from the commonwealths of antiquity and from the modern republics of eighteenth-century Europe.Footnote 65 The achievement of the English system was to have fully separated representative and represented while simultaneously maintaining an identity of interest between them. Simultaneously, the interaction between executive and legislature ensured the overall stability of the state. Deploying a maritime metaphor that he used frequently, Delolme explained that the royal power in England was ‘a vast body which cannot of itself accomplish its motions; or, if you will, it is like a ship completely equipped, but from which the Parliament can at pleasure draw off the water, and leave it a-ground; as also set it again afloat by granting subsidies’. But the crown was also ‘like an anchor which resists both by its weight and the depth of its hold’, and ‘insures a salutary steadiness to the vessel of the State’.Footnote 66
Delolme's evolving understanding of the British monarchy led, in the 1784 edition of The constitution of England, to a significant criticism of Adam Smith. This criticism is relevant not only for the light it sheds on Delolme's understanding of the British monarchy but also for his place in broader eighteenth-century debates about civil and military powers. According to Delolme, Smith's famous claim that ‘the principal nobility and gentry of the country’ should form the backbone of a modern standing army reflected a flawed understanding of the relationship between state, monarch, and army under the modern constitution. Smith had been ‘struck with the necessity of a sufficient power of re-action, of a sufficient strength, on the side of Government, to resist the agitations attending on liberty’. However, he had ‘deemed a government to be a simpler machine, and an army a simpler instrument, than they in reality are’.Footnote 67 By conferring military power upon the ‘nobility and gentry’, Smith had simply opened a back-door to the kind of instabilities which, for Delolme, had already been consigned to the past. In reality, the stability of the crown owed little to ‘that kind of strength which arises from an armed force’.Footnote 68 The
kind of strength which is conferred by such a weapon as an army, is too uncertain, too complicate [sic], too liable to accidents; in a word, it falls infinitely short of that degree of steadiness which is necessary to counterbalance, and at last quiet, those extensive agitations in the People which sometimes seem to threaten the destruction of order and Government.
In reality, Delolme insisted, the crown's strength and stability rested exclusively on the ‘Civil branch of their regal Office’.Footnote 69
Delolme's conception of the crown as an ‘anchor’ (or, as he wrote elsewhere, as a ‘ballasting Power’) that kept the British state afloat was one aspect of his break with the central presuppositions of Montesquieu's science of politics. It was part of a broader effort to redefine the British regime as a unitary and even ‘democratic’ monarchy (as opposed to a monarchical republic), in which a strong executive was compatible with the political equality of the nation's subjects. But perhaps the most revealing sign of the broader differences between Delolme's and Montesquieu's sciences of politics is Delolme's dismissal of the distinction between republics, monarchies, and despotisms that dominated The spirit of the laws. Crucially, Delolme's emphasis on the unity and indivisibility of executive power had the interesting consequence of collapsing together republics and absolute monarchies as different species of a single genus of unfree state. The failure to maintain a unitary executive in Europe's absolute monarchies made them similar to the republics of antiquity: they ‘constantly did so, and from the very same reasons, as it constantly happened in ancient Commonwealths; those Monarchical Governments being in reality, so far as that, of a Republican nature’.Footnote 70
IV
Although Delolme's works focused primarily upon the internal structure of England's constitution, he occasionally discussed a number of wider problems facing Britain as an imperial monarchy. Here, the resources of his political science underpinned a clear vision of Britain as an extensive, stable, and powerful empire which carried, ‘to every part of its dominions, the blessings of equality and industry’.Footnote 71 He emphatically contrasted this version of empire with the despotic rule exercised by the ancient Roman city over its conquered provinces.Footnote 72 Delolme's interest in the problems of an extensive empire was serious and sustained. Sharpened by the revolutionary conflict between Britain and its American colonies in the 1770s, this interest was particularly marked in the ‘Advertisement’ to the 1781 edition of The constitution of England, in which Delolme mentioned his plan to produce a book on the ‘American disputes’ (this work has never been located).Footnote 73 It continued in 1782–3, when he edited a volume containing the constitutions of the American states and discussed the prospects for maintaining a republican union or ‘perpetual Confederation’ in America.Footnote 74 But the most sustained product of Delolme's interest in empire and union was a work of 1787 (published in two slightly different versions) which dealt with the history of England's relationship with both Scotland and Ireland, and which seems to have been conceived as part of a larger enterprise dealing more comprehensively with Anglo-Irish politics in the 1770s and 1780s.Footnote 75 This work, which I shall refer to as the British empire in Europe, only implicitly rehearsed the case for an incorporating union between the two nations. When read together with The constitution of England, however, these texts underline Delolme's broader purpose, which was not simply to warn against republicanism in a British or American setting but, more specifically, to demonstrate the dangers of reconstituting the British empire as a confederation of states under the bond of the monarchy. As Delolme wrote in the remarkably candid 1781 Advertisement, the book was designed in part as a ‘confutation of those political notions by the help of which a disunion of the Empire was endeavoured to be promoted’.Footnote 76
The foundations of this argument were laid out in The constitution of England. In the 1775 edition, Delolme underlined the dangers of establishing ‘distinct independent Assemblies’ in the colonies, which would be able to ‘treat immediately with the King, and grant him subsidies, to the utter annihilation of those ancient, and hitherto successful, assertors of general liberty, the British Parliament’.Footnote 77 Here Delolme was criticizing contemporary conceptualizations of Britain's Atlantic empire as (to cite Eliga Gould) ‘a confederation of sovereign states bound together, not by Parliament's unlimited authority, but by allegiance to a common monarch’.Footnote 78 Delolme developed this argument in one of the much-expanded chapters (book ii, ch. 20) in the 1781 edition of the work, in which he attacked contemporary arguments for a reconstitution of the British empire as a confederation of separate legislatures. For him, the crucial right of granting subsidies was only ‘effectual when it is exercised by one Assembly alone’.Footnote 79 The establishment of a separate and independent legislature in North America would, therefore, have undermined the capacity of parliament to control the executive and rendered royal power entirely independent and despotic. It would also have destroyed the unity of Britain's dominions and have introduced a ‘spirit of competition’ between the various peoples and colonies that made up the empire. These issues were laid bare in both the American crisis and in the growing tensions between England and Ireland:
That a similar spirit of competition might be raised in Ireland, is also sufficiently plain from certain late events. And should the American Colonies have obtained their demands, and at the same time should Ireland and America have increased in wealth to a certain degree, the time might have come, at which the Crown might have governed England with the supplies of England and of the American Colonies – and the American Colonies with the money of each other, and of England and Ireland.Footnote 80
The critique of ‘empire as confederation’ carried over into the British empire in Europe. The immediate context in which this work should be read is that of the prolonged debate about Ireland's economic and constitutional position after 1782 (when Ireland attained legislative independence) and after 1785 (the year of Pitt's Anglo-Irish commercial propositions).Footnote 81 In the first part of this text, Delolme focused on the history of Anglo-Scottish relations and underlined the positive consequences of the 1707 Union for both countries.Footnote 82 He noted a number of beneficial changes brought about by the Union. It destroyed the power of the Catholic interest in Scotland and strengthened the Protestant succession. It conferred what Delolme called individual, or personal, liberty upon the Scottish people, extending to the Scots the advantage of ‘individual freedom, and of a better Government’ (however, as Delolme recognized, this situation was not made fully effective until the abolition of Scotland's heritable jurisdictions in 1746).Footnote 83 Both countries felt the benefits of the ‘abolishment of the spirit of rivalry’ and ‘perpetual peace within the whole Island’.Footnote 84 Finally, and most importantly, Scotland now had full access to English markets, and ‘all the advantages of English trade and navigation’.Footnote 85
The combination in Scotland of economic dynamism with personal liberty stood in contrast to the situation in Ireland, which Delolme identified as a backward country whose development had been stifled by religious dissensions and English reason of state. He condemned the long history of English aggression in attempting to civilize Ireland by the sword (a project he associated with Sir John Davies). The main thrust of his reconstruction concerned the public controversy between Ireland and England that, Delolme claimed, had begun with the publication of William Molyneux's The case of Ireland (1698).Footnote 86 He condemned the ‘spirit of commercial competition’ that motivated British policy towards Ireland; according to Delolme, the ‘British Parliament, in their dealings with Ireland, had evidently availed themselves of the right of the strongest’.Footnote 87 By 1777–8, the combination of commercial anxieties and political dissatisfactions had reached breaking point.Footnote 88 Delolme stopped short of calling for a full, incorporating Union between the kingdoms of Ireland and Great Britain. But his strong praise of the consequences of the Anglo-Scottish Union, his condemnation of the spirit of rivalry between the British and Irish legislatures, and the argument contained in The constitution of England about the dangers of separate legislatures strongly suggest that the purpose of publishing these texts in 1786–7 was to demonstrate the advantages of closer political and economic union between the two countries. In this respect he echoed the much better-known argument laid out a decade earlier by Adam Smith, in The wealth of nations, who had also advocated full political and economic union on the grounds of the diffusion of prosperity, and on the grounds that it would destroy the ‘odious’ Irish aristocracy.Footnote 89
Delolme's writings on America and Ireland reflected two connected fears. The first was the traditional worry about the independence of the crown that would follow from the acquisition of wealthy foreign territories. Although he hinted at this possibility, the thrust of his argument in The constitution of England was to reassure his readers that this prospect had receded.Footnote 90 The second and far more urgent danger stemmed from the prospect of a republican-inspired reorganization of the British empire in the 1770s (America) or the 1780s (Ireland). Parts of The constitution of England, as well as the British empire in Europe, were designed to show that the establishment of separate ‘legislatures’ under the overall authority of the crown would ultimately give rise to a despotic form of government. Moreover, England's constitutional structures were not for export. As Delolme warned in yet another addition, which appeared in the 1784 edition of The constitution of England, any attempt to institute the English constitution in other countries, ‘without at the same time transferring the whole Order and conjunction of circumstances in the English Government, would prove unsuccessful attempts’.Footnote 91 In line with this argument, the British empire in Europe warned against the commercial and political enmities likely to develop between England and Ireland if an incorporating Union along the lines of the Anglo-Scottish Union were not established. The only viable alternative to a federation of separate legislatures, as Delolme saw it, was the maintainance of the unified sovereignty of the British crown-in-parliament, which could maintain legal and political equality in an extensive empire.
V
Delolme's political science supplied the intellectual foundations for a coherent vision of Britain's stability as a modern empire. Grounded on a disabused picture of human nature and a sophisticated analysis of the mechanisms by which force or ‘real power’ functioned in the framework of a modern constitutional state, this science of politics was the undergirding for a comprehensive attack on two rival approaches to political science in the eighteenth century. The first of these, civic and republican, rested on the terminology of luxury and corruption and expressed distrust of the executive power of monarchs. The second was the sophisticated comparative science of politics set out in Montesquieu's The spirit of the laws, with its neo-German aristocratic sympathies and its depiction of Britain as an unstable, quasi-republican commercial state. Against both of these, Delolme's science of politics offered an account of Britain's functioning as a unique kind of state which owed nothing to the legacy of either the ancients or the Germans. Delolme defended the unitary executive as part of a broader vision of an imperial monarchy with an unrivalled capacity for maintaining the liberty, industry, and equality of its subjects. The overall outcome was a self-consciously modernist explanation of Britain's stability as a new kind of empire, based on a sceptical understanding of human nature and a naturalistic account of constitutional machinery.
Delolme's science of politics had an intricate intellectual legacy. His work had an immediate resonance in the fierce British debate of the 1780s and 1790s over the causes and possible consequences of the American and French Revolutions, a debate in which The constitution of England loomed large as an anti-republican text and as a key work in the redefinition of Britain as a ‘free monarchy’. In this debate, Delolme's science of politics constituted a clear alternative to the more radical political science of David Williams, Thomas Paine, or Joseph Priestley, and offered a clear demonstration that constitutional liberty was best preserved in the framework of the modern British monarchy. One of the most detailed elaborations of this thesis appeared in an anonymous pamphlet of 1780 entitled An essay on constitutional liberty (the text is sometimes attributed to Delolme himself). The pamphlet, which offered a critical genealogy of ‘republican’ ideas from Harrington and Locke to Bolingbroke and Price, combined Delolme's emphasis on a unitary executive with a broader evaluation of the superiority of monarchy for the government of large and unequal states.Footnote 92 By the 1790s, Delolme's thesis of the unitary executive was cited by many critics of French revolutionary republicanism, including John Gillies (who echoed Delolme's vision of monarchy in his 1797 translation of Aristotle's Ethics and politics) and James Beattie (who explicitly followed Delolme's critique of Roman republicanism in his 1793 Elements of moral science).Footnote 93 In this guise, Delolme's work served primarily as an indication of the compatibility between liberty and monarchy. Something of this view survived in nineteenth-century German political thought, where writers seized on Delolme's writings to underline the compatibility of monarchy and freedom. As Friedrich Christoph Dahlmann wrote in his own introduction to the 1819 German translation of The constitution of England, Delolme's aim was to correct the view that monarchy was anachronistic in the modern world and, more substantively, to show that Britain was a ‘free state in monarchy’ (Freistaat im Königthume).Footnote 94
But Delolme's science of politics had a somewhat different afterlife in European and American debates about the constitutional structure of a modern republic. In this context, The constitution of England was read not simply as an anti-republican defence of monarchy, but rather as a significant account of the appropriate relationship between executive and legislative powers in large modern states. This perspective on his thought was strikingly revealed in the early stages of the French Revolution, which set Delolme's admirers, such as Jean-Joseph Mounier and Charles-Alexandre Calonne, against his critics, such as Condorcet. For Mounier and Calonne, Delolme's account of the unitary executive was based on an accurate assessment of the dangers of a despotic legislature (from this perspective it was Delolme, rather than Montesquieu, who supported a distinctively French vision of constitutional monarchy during the early stages of the French Revolution).Footnote 95 For Condorcet, by contrast, Delolme's science of politics rested on a flawed understanding of nature and justified an unacceptable dilution of legislative sovereignty.Footnote 96 The remarkable critique of Delolme (along with John Adams) that Condorcet helped publish in 1789 is testament to the depth of division between these key advocates of a ‘science of politics’ at the end of the century. But perhaps the most durable legacy of Delolme's political thought was in furnishing intellectual resources for the defenders of a strong presidential executive in the United States constitution. Alexander Hamilton seized on Delolme's work in support of his own advocacy of a ‘vigorous’ unitary executive.Footnote 97 In these contexts, both French and American, Delolme's political science appeared not merely as an elaborate justification of a particular understanding of the English empire, and instead took on a wider relevance in debates about the structure of a modern constitutional republic.
