From Republicanism to Liberalism: Corruption and Empire in Enlightenment Political Thought
Debates about the relationship between empire and corruption were prominent in eighteenth century British political thought. Some of these debates were framed within classical Republican or Civic Humanist discourses, of which Charles-Louis Montesquieu and Adam Ferguson were emblematic exemplars. Within the terms of this discourse, corruption represented a collective moral failure, and was closely connected to a supposed cycle of imperial greatness and decline. Yet, similar fears of empire motivated the articulation of more modern, proto-liberal notions of corruption as forms of activity that blurred the boundaries between private interests and public responsibilities. In his analysis of the economic distortions and trading monopolies caused by empire (especially the East India Company), Adam Smith articulated and pioneered this proto-liberal concept of corruption. Between Smith’s proto-liberal and Montesquieu/Ferguson’s Republican concepts of corruption, however, stood the work of Edmund Burke. Motivated in part by concerns about empire, Burke shared Smith’s strong opposition to the EIC, an organisation he considered to be corrupt and corrupting. Emerging from his work, then, was an understanding of corruption that shared the Republican emphasis on moral decay, but also anticipated a proto-liberal concern with keeping distinct the boundaries between public (political) and private (economic) activity. In the work of these four thinkers corruption thus emerges as a central concept in the transition from Republican to Liberal political thought in the late eighteenth century.
Adam Smith and Edmund Burke: Complementary Contemporaries
Economics and politics were long considered inseparable elements of political economy. Only in the last century did the two tend to drift apart. The division of intellectual labor which typified that period and that process seems to have reached a point of diminishing social returns, and there is currently the tendency to re-identify the two fields as aspects of social study in general. As Professor Charles A. Beard has made abundantly clear, economists erred in treating wealth and "the economic man" apart from the state which sets the very basis of economic operation; and political scientists were faulty in considering rights and the political man divorced from all economic interests which direct political activity.' Today's interrelated society suggests the complementary nature of economic and political institutions and poses the need of a social science compatible with modern industrial civilization. In so far as there exists a conflict between
Italian Influence on the Development of Calvinist Scholasticism
THIS ARTICLE TRIES to show that the rise of Calvinist scholasticism, which was the most important development in Calvinist theology during the second half of the sixteenth century, stemmed largely from several converging Italian influences, particularly from the writings of Peter Martyr Vermigli and Jerome Zanchi. Here Calvinist theology refers not only to the personal thought of John Calvin but also to the teachings of the founders of the Reformed or Calvinist tradition as it spread out from Geneva and Switzerland to France, Germany, England, Scotland, Poland, and the Low Countries. In this context Calvin emerges as the brightest star in a galaxy of Reformed theologians which includes Heinrich Bullinger, Pierre Viret, Theodore Beza and Wolfgang Musculus as well as Martyr, Zanchi and others. These theologians were often more influential than Calvin himself at a given place or time or on a given point of doctrine. Bullinger, Martyr, and Martin Bucer were all more important for spreading Calvinist ideas to Edwardian England than was John Calvin. Early Elizabethan Protestantism looked more to Zurich than to Geneva, as did early Polish Calvinism. German Calvinism owed more to Heidelberg than to Geneva.' These leaders developed their theologies sometimes in mutual dependence, sometimes with surprising independence. By no means was their relation to Calvin simply that of disciple to master, for each gave a personal nuance to his style of Calvinism. Thus the sixteenth century Jesuit Cornelius Schulting states on the opening page of his five volume polemic against Calvin and Peter Martyr that Martyr was clearer and far more learned than Calvin.2 Recently John Bray has pointed out that research in seventeenth century Calvinism leads "to the conclusion that the impact of Calvin upon the Calvinistic movement has been greatly over-rated. It may well be that some of