Hendrickson, Kenneth E.

English

Histoire sociale / Social History (E-Journal, York University)

Comptes rendus / Book Reviews 235human and animal aggression. The author effectively demonstrates the multifariousways in which Darwins theories were translated into a wide spectrum of recurringpolitical and social discourse, ranging from issues of peace and war to the relativecontribution of nature and nurture, or instinct and learned behaviour. Crooks thesis,that Darwinism bred an influential tradition of non-violence, is, as he rightly notes,hardly congruent with the familiar textbook scenario that The Origin of Speciesunleashed primarily harsh and divisive, conflict-based social doctrines. In this senseCrooks work is an important contribution to recent revisionist scholarship whichplaces the origins of Darwinism in the context of historically specific intellectualand moral paradigms. Peace biology, he contends, found a more congenial followingin Britain and America than it did, for example, in Germany, because it conformedmore closely to pervasive social and moral values.The principal strength of his book is the careful, comparative textual analysis thatcharacterizes Crooks treatment of the ideas he examines. Methodologically this isfirst-rate, old-fashioned, intellectual history, which means it is both readable andcomprehensible. On occasions, a parade of lesser-known characters detracts fromthe narrative flow of argument, but this is a minor concern in a book that adds somuch to our understanding of the origins of controversial, modern sociobiologicalthought.Richard A. SolowayUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel HillJ. C. D. Clark  The Language of Liberty, 1660–1832: Political Discourse andSocial Dynamics in the Anglo-American World. Cambridge: Cambridge Universi-ty Press, 1994. Pp. xviii, 404.Jonathan Clarks new book, The Language of Liberty, is a vast survey of law,religion, English and colonial American notions of sovereignty, and the impetus torebellion in America. As such it is a complex work, nonetheless notable for a fewmajor themes: the division in English and American understandings of natural andcommon law; the breakdown (failure to appear) of the Anglican confessional statein the American colonies; the importance of Christian heresy in America for engen-dering doctrines of violent rebellion; the susceptibility of Dissenting Protestant sectsto Christological heresy and therefore to rebellious ideology; and the distancebetween American rebel rhetorical professions of rights and grievances and theunderlying denominational motor of rebellion. It is an impressive agenda of inquiry,and Clark handles each topic with considerable skill. There are some missteps. Forexample, readers interested in J. P. Greenes critique of Clarks arguments concern-ing natural and common law should consult Greenes long review of Language ofLiberty in the June 10, 1994, issue of the Times Literary Supplement. The cogencyof these criticisms aside, however, there remains a terrible gap in the review litera-ture surrounding Clarks work.Since the release of Language of Liberty, Clark frequently has been accused (or236 Histoire sociale / Social Historyhas faced variants of the accusation) of arguing simply that, after 1760, Anglicanstended to support the royal government of Britain and the colonies while Dissentersincreasingly tended to become critics or even rebels. However, this is not at allwhat Clark says. Instead, he argues that the intellectual roots of politically rebelliousDissent in Britain and America after 1760 delve into Christian heresy and therejection of the Divine sanction of Christ and His message. To understand rebellion,we must understand the development of English denominationalism and heresy.In eighteenth-century Britain and her subsidiary societies, political theory usuallyrevolved not around inalienable rights but around the legitimacy of sovereigns torule and defining the composition of sovereignty. Only after solving those ques-tions could most eighteenth-century English political theorists move on to posit therights of subjects. (Why else was John Locke for so long best known as a radicaltheologian?) After all, the constitution, since not digested or explicitly codified,was in part defined by the person of the royal ruler and his relationship withChurch, Lords, and Commons. How could one determine the rights of the subjectwithout first sorting out the status and balance of the constitution?Prior to 1828, an English monarch ruled explicitly as the head of a confessionalstate, enjoying political power and legitimacy in a relationship with the AnglicanChurch and Parliament. Clark illustrates how radicalism from the 1760s was in-creasingly effective in challenging the legitimacy of that confessional state bychallenging the authority of the Church. The challenge to the Church was predicatedupon a series of challenges to Christian Trinitarian orthodoxy, the root issue beingChrists actual authority to teach and to ordain an order among those who wouldfollow Him.Readers who struggle with Clarks findings would do well to consider the worksof John Henry Cardinal Newman, the nineteenth-century Tractarian Anglican priestwho eventually converted to Roman Catholicism precisely because he could notunite English political-state theory, as it had developed under the negative andpositive influences of the eighteenth-century radical critique, with a theologicallyintelligible Anglican variant of Christianity. Newman wrote that the legitimateAnglican Church had been driven into the tomes residing in the libraries of eigh-teenth-century divines, while the practice of Anglican Christianity by the middle1800s had embraced all sorts of illegitimate innovations, most of which did nothonour the Christian duty of obedience to Christ and His Apostles and some ofwhich did not accept the Holy Trinity of God.For Anglicans of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the situationNewman later diagnosed had always been a problem. The Book of Common Prayer(and thus popular understanding of Anglican doctrine) was overtly Trinitarian, whilepolitical theories of representation increasingly were predicated upon Dissentingphilosophies which rejected the Trinitarian world view and its corollary doctrine ofobedience. The eighteenth-century Anglican Church had always been particularlyvulnerable to the introduction of such heresy thanks to the manner of the Englishreformation, to the tides of politics in Britain after 1688, and to the atrophied natureof its hierarchy in America. If, as radicals claimed, the apostolate and thus also themonarchy derived from no more than a social theory or a practice of power, thenComptes rendus / Book Reviews 237why not take the power for oneself? To paraphrase the aphorism as it once ran, Ifthe bishops cannot teach, the king cannot rule.From this argument, this elaboration of the primacy of legitimacy and sovereign-ty, Clark then proceeds to demonstrate that popular radicalism as it actually ap-peared from the 1760s on could not have done so until men were made to believethat serious flaws existed in the rule of the sovereign and his relationship withChurch and Parliament. The perceptions of flaws which motivated men in thecolonies, Clark shows, had much more to do with religious individualism than withpurely legal or materialist individualism. In fact, he demonstrates that to the con-temporary mind the latter two forms of individualism made no sense except in lightof the former. Radicals in the eighteenth-century Anglophone world, and in Americain particular, pointed first to real and imagined infringements of religious con-science, the threat of popery, and the supposed presumption of the Anglicanepiscopacy. In America, the Dissenting Protestant sects had kept active this particu-lar list of fears since the time of the Civil War. The fears were in fact constitutiveof the sects. Thus the Radical appeal motivated masses of men to rebellion byappealing to liberties based in popular heresy.This is Clarks basic argument, and it is one no serious student will easilydismiss. Despite accusations to the contrary, Clark makes no attempt to exclude theimpact of other factors on eighteenth-century Anglophone political theory andpractice. He is entirely open to the study of property rights, scientific-secularthought, sociological dynamics of class, and other issues important to Americanpolitical life. Clark claims, and his research of the last ten years more than substan-tiates the assertion, that the serious student of Anglophone political development inthe eighteenth century cannot understand his subject without understanding Christianpolitical theory in its Trinitarian Anglican variant.Anyone who doubts that Jonathan Clark has been misunderstood might benefitfrom a close survey of the critical literature surrounding his work. It is rare to findany reference to Trinitarian theology (and even rarer to find thoughtful ones) amongClarks critics, despite the fact that the man they hope to refute has placed theconcept at the heart of his work. Next, look for an essay on English Dissent andradicalism by A. M. C. Waterman, in Haakonssen, ed., Enlightenment and Religion,forthcoming from Cambridge. Professor Waterman can assist us all ably in at leastgetting the categories of argument right. Perhaps some of the heat of the criticismagainst Clark would dissipate if the ignorance of his categories of analysis wereless.Kenneth E. Hendrickson, IIISam Houston State UniversityRobert H. MacDonald  Sons of the Empire: The Frontier and the Boy ScoutMovement, 1890–1918. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993. Pp. viii, 258.In response to and emerging from that nexus of Edwardian anxieties  impover-

J. C. D. Clark — The Language of Liberty, 1660-1832: Political Discourse and Social Dynamics in the Anglo-American World

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J. C. D. Clark — The Language of Liberty, 1660-1832: Political Discourse and Social Dynamics in the Anglo-American World

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