My favorite work on the American Revolution is by Edmund Morgan, Inventing the People, but by far the most astounding, challenging and awe inspiring is the monumental book by J.G.A. Pocock from 1975 entitled The Machiavellian Moment, and what a moment it was.
Machiavelli: He looks ill
Pocock’s work is not flawless – a lot of Lockean scholars picked him apart because his hypothesis was to distance the Revolution from Locke and move it to another set of theorists and writers who stood in opposition to power in England and followed a technically non-Lockean Liberal ideology termed classical republicanism. More on CR (classical Republicanism) in a bit, but Pocock deserves a little more time. The book is very difficult – you need to be conversant in law, in philosophy and in history or at least two of the three! To not spend over 500 pages like Pocock, suffice to say he connects political concepts from antiquity through time to the pen of Thomas Jefferson, and the ink that marks the words of TJ is provided by the mind and ideas of none other than one of history’s most sinister figures, by literary reputation, Niccoli Machiavelli – yes, that Machiavelli who is known to most people only as the author of The Prince, the dictator’s guide to power. Certainly, it was all I knew about Mach when I read his moment and so I was caught off guard that evil Machiavelli could play a role in establishing virtuous liberty and justice for all (or for some (or for a few)).
The Machiavelli that Pocock claimed became the font of eventual democratic ideals, however, was not merely the author of “the ends justify the means (Palpatine laughing).” Oh no, and to most of the founding generation and their English republican ancestors The Prince was the least of their Machiavellian reading. Mostly it was his Discourses which centered on Republican theory and the means of what we would call a democratic state where people, regular people, had the potential for controlling their own destiny and therefore living in a community where they had rights and the ability to defend those rights. Those ideas on Liberty, according to Pocock, were picked up by 17thand 18thcentury political writers in England, most notably, a not so very notable, James Harrington, author of Oceana, and John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, authors of Cato’s Letters. Unlike what you learn in political science (hack discipline that it is) where you learn that ideologically the American Revolution is based on the social contract theories of Thomas Hobbes, (really? Did they actually even bother to read Leviathan?) who we can confidently state is the founder of democratic totalitarianism (I made that up, but it is apt!) and John Locke whose Second Treatise on Governmentis the founding document of Liberalism (the ideology on which the United States is based, with or without a Lockean connection), Pocock is part of the ascendant line of scholarship that gives most of the ideological gravitas of the American Revolution to Harrington (and other CR authors) and Trenchard and Gordon. Pocock’s crowning innovation to this paradigm is to reveal Machiavelli was behind the intellectual curtain of all of this thought, and his prints (see what I did there?) can be seen all over the pens of the founders. Ok, great. A lot of egghead soup there that really doesn’t link up much with the economic underpinnings I have laid down in the previous parts of Finding the Founding. So how does it connect? Well it might be easier if we went back to the time that Pocock did, but instead of law and philosophy, look at politics in action and some really messed up stuff. So goodbye to Pocock.
Rome. Republican Rome. In part, we can find the Founder’s there (in the same sort of way that the world of Islam initiated the Founding through development of sugar mass production in the western world, see previous blog posting on the origins of the Modern Economy). And we get to look at the dawn of Rome’s own Revolution ended with Augustus seizing power and destroying the Roman Republic and began with our focus, The Gracchi.
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The Roman Constitution had several moving parts,
but they would have cringed being styled as a
Pentagon, which is Greek?
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I love the Gracchi and envisioned their grizzly political deaths to be something that my older brother and I would someday follow …. when I was a kid of course. Oh, spoiler. Things don’t work out so good for our heros.
Now when Americans read about Republican Rome we think we know what it was like politically – because it was a Republic and we live in a Republic, so of course we know what that is. No, we don’t. Rome was a republic in that it wasn’t a kingdom and therefore had balances of power spread across parts of the population – mostly it was a tribal (insert really long word ending with archy). But Rome, despite having a senate and a number of popular assembly’s which added to the legislative basis of the state, was not a democracy, and certainly not a democracy based on self-definition and self-determination as is the United States under Liberalism (or at least it’s supposed to be that, but as we all know, we often fall short of that and in the era of Trump, we’re not even standing). The Roman Republic was ruled by clans, not the Klan, clans. Stay with me, this is Rome, not Trumpland.
Powerful blood relationships defined who you were and your access to power in ancient Rome. Powerful familial groups and groups of related families, clans, sought power and influence and fought with each other to get it. Rome’s constitution of having multiple institutions of power, an executive separate from the legislative and a Senate which acted as a sort of Supreme Court, insured some stability in the state because no one clan could really take over all of the reigns (tee hee) of power, at least not until Augustus did it for the powerful Julian clan. A distant ancestor of the Julians were the Sempronii from which came two brothers named Tiberius and Gaius. Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus and Gaius Sempronius Gracchus – first name was your personal name, second name your Clan name (kind of akin to our last names) and then the third name the particular family line from whence you came. So Sempronius is the important political affiliation for our boys.
If all that was a bit boring, it gets better – about 1,000 stabs better. Contemporary historians love to compare the Gracchi (Tiberius and Gaius) to the Kennedy’s and not merely because it ended badly as it did likewise for John and Robert, but also because the Gracchi were dreamy eyed reformers who wanted something better for their people (but then weren’t all ancient Romans hot – I mean, from what I’ve seen from the statues, both male and female had rock hard abs). Now, I don’t know if the Kennedy’s really wanted to make things better for regular people, but their legacy certainly says they did, and the Gracchi likewise have the same political rep.
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| I have no idea what this is but I pray it has nothing to do with the Kennedys |
The Sempronii were not one of the Patrician clans who dominated Rome but they were one of the Plebian families who had entered into power – kind of like the Kennedy’s being immigrants and then moving into power positions thanks to Papa Joe. Well, Tiberius had a papa named Tiberius who was a commander of Roman armies and a consul of Rome – kind of akin to their chief executive. The boys’ mother was, however, a well heeled Patrician and the daughter of Scipio Africanus, the conqueror of Carthage and the Roman who defeated Hannibal (arguably the greatest general of all-time). Cornelia was a member of one of the innovative clans in Rome who sought out wisdom and culture from Rome’s imperial conquests – so the boys learned Greek politics, or so the story goes, because this made them keenly interested in what was good for the people. And the rule of the people in Greek, rule=cracy, people=demos – Democracy. My sneaking suspicion, however, is the boys didn’t get their impulse from Greece and instead they got their “populares” leaning from another place, serving Rome and serving with average Romans.
The enemies of the populares also had a famous ancestor who was the rival of Scipio Africanus, Cato the Elder. Cato detested foreign ways and foreigners, and thought all the world had to offer outside of Rome was decadence. He was a rather sober cuss, but I doubt his political followers were. Instead they probably used the rhetoric of upholding “Roman Family Values” of virtue (service to the state and denial of individual importance) and a spartan lifestyle (nice Greek play on words, take that Cato!) as an excuse to justify their un-gods-ly wealth and the meager existence of the poor as most Conservatives like Cato do.
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| Poor Cato lived a good life and was still miserable |
Certainly, by the time of the younger Gracchi entering politics towards the end of the second century b.c.e. Cato’s crowd (he was already dead) had monopolized most of the Italian country side. Why was this important? Because in the world before industrialization (mass production to lead to mass consumption) owning, possessing, having land was the way most people stayed alive by farming that land. If you don’t own, possess or have land then you have to work for the dregs that the landowners give you. You may as well be a slave, and many were, and even those who weren’t, like Rome’s veteran soldiers basically lived a material condition like slaves.
Enter the Gracchi
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| You can see in this image why the Gracchi get compared to JFK and RFK |
Or at first enter the oldest brother in 133 b.c.e., Tiberius. That year he became one of the other executive officers of the Roman state, a Tribune of the People, who administered one of Rome’s legislative bodies. Rome had several and by this time several bodies could make law for Rome. The Tribunes oversaw legislation that emanated from what had traditionally been the Plebian legislative body. According to ancient sources, Tiberius reflected hard on the starving veterans and growing poor population of Rome – He realized that a Republic can not be the Rule (res) of the Public (publica) very long if most of the public were destitute. How could they access their Roman rights, Roman freedom, Roman Liberty! Let alone Roman virtue without the material means to make it meaningful. Tiberius’ answer was that they could not. So … in classical Republican style he took measures to limit the landholdings of the wealthy and enable the poor, the marginalized, the regular Romans a chance to indulge in owning, possessing and having land: A chance for a better life.
Just like in our time most of the Republicans in power in Rome were the same Romans who had previously owned all the land and had created shitty jobs for the poor – which is what job creators do, they monopolize sources of wealth and use that to dominate everyone else by doling out crumbs from which originated the Latin phrase, “take this job and shove et tu.”
For his efforts Tiberius’ enemies killed him.
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| Tiberius getting Whacked and Whacked |
It’s hard to get into the mind of historical figures. Gaius got into politics a decade later. Was he motivated by vengeance against the Senatorial Patrician Conservatives? He certainly did seem to have an animus against the clans that sprang from Cato’s ideological loins. Or was he like his brother, a real reformer who wanted to protect the public of the Republic by giving them the problem of real control over their own lives? Was he a democratic reformer?
Gaius’ first reforms were over the judicial system, making it less a function of Senatorial (Patrician/Catonic) whim. Oh, the Senate no like that. He continued and added to Tiberius’ land reforms. Oh, the Senate no like that. He passed food laws, increasing the caloric intake of the average Roman, he extended roads and made communication better and he extended the possibility of citizenship to more people …. Oh, the Senate really no like that. And for his last straw and those of you who want a hypothesis on left and right in politics connecting with liberal (populares) and conservative (not-so-populares) he started facing left instead of right (towards the Senate) when giving a speech in the public Forum. That’s almost like kneeling!
For his efforts Gaius and his followers were all killed ....
Though technically when the Senatorial forces were closing in on Gaius he committed suicide. Tiberius was actually clubbed to death by a mob of slaves sent by the Senate to get him that was actually led by his cousin. Ouch!
What the Gracchi realized and what was absorbed into Machiavelli’s Renaissance work on republics was that for a people to be free, to understand liberty and obtain virtue (which Mach altered from the Roman denunciation of the self and glorification of the state towards a more modern self-defining quality of virtue) they had to have stuff. They couldn’t be slaves. They couldn’t work for pitiful wages. To be somebody you have to be somebody and that means you have to have stuff, or in the case of Classical Republicanism, land.
If more people have the substance to control their own lives, in pre-modern times access to land, they can be free and live in a republic, res publica. What Machiavelli transferred to the Modern era of English politics was the idea that wealth at the top had to be inhibited so that society could invest in a middle class, neither rich or poor, but self-sustaining. Self sustaining is the key to achieving self-definition and self-determination which is the very definition of what we, in 2018 United States of America, mean by the term freedom; the power to own, possess, have life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Classical Republicanism taxes wealth to redistribute that wealth to a broader section of a free population. Otherwise we’re just a bunch of owners and slaves. The Gracchi didn’t want that for Rome and according to Pocock, the Founders didn’t want that for America.
Next time we’ll take a peak at how Classical Republicanism, the Founders’ Ideology, worked its way into the colonial situation, and we’ll get to know another, better Cato.
