a single-minded emphasis on republicanism—for example, from those who insist once again on the central importance of John Locke, in the face of Pocock's attempt to relegate Locke to the sidelines of early modern political debate. Thanks to John Dunn, Richard Ashcraft, Neal Wood, James Tully, and John Marshall, among others, Locke can no longer be understood as a "Lockean"—that is, as a theorist of "possessive individualism." According to Dunn, Locke's praise of enterprise should be read in a Protestant, not a capitalist context. Anticipating the rejoinder that the Protestant doctrine of the calling was itself inspired by the "spirit of capitalism," Dunn maintains that Protestants were more interested in the eradication of the monastic tradition than in the promotion of capitalism or the imposition of modern work discipline on vagrants and idlers. The idea that men and women served God best by devoted service to the worldly tasks to which they were divinely summoned grew up in opposition to the monastic ideal of spirituality and more specifically to the proposition that "salvation could be attained by the observance of a set of rigid rules of behavior." The Calvinist emphasis on the spiritual value of work may have given a certain moral sanction to capitalist enterprise, but "capitalist appropriation and intensive agricultural labor," as Dunn points out, "were equally apt vessels" for the "endless aspiration" to godliness

____________________
good," in the words of James Wilson. According to John Taylor, "an avaricious society can form a government able to defend itself against the avarice of its members" by enlisting "the interest of vice ... on the side of virtue." Virtue lay in the "principles of government," Taylor argued, not in the "evanescent qualities of individuals."

An equally important point of contention, as Wood shows, concerned the relation of government to individuals. Republican theory presupposed a society made up of "orders of men, watching and balancing each other," in the words of John Adams. But the theory underlying the state constitutions drawn up during the American revolution, as Taylor pointed out, was that government was "made of individuals." What was distinctive in the republican tradition emerges only in contrast to these liberal views of government and to the liberal view of history, as I have argued in chapter 2. The sharp disagreements between liberals and republicans, however, do not mean that liberals had no reservations about the new society that was taking shape around them (thanks in part to their own policies) or that liberalism could not provide some of the materials for a popular radicalism that condemned the new society in no uncertain terms.

-198-