Political thought in England from Locke to Bentham
John Locke · en
The fall of Walpole, indeed, released no energies for political thought;
the system continued, though the men were different. What alone can be
detected is the growth of a democratic opinion which found its
sustenance outside the House of Commons, the opinion the strength of
which was later to force the elder Pitt upon an unwilling king. An able
pamphlet of the time shows us the arrival of this unlooked-for portent.
_Faction detected by the Evidence of Facts_ (1742) was, though it is
anonymous,[16] obviously written by one in touch with the inner current
of affairs. The author had hoped for the fall of Walpole, though he sees
the chaos in its result. "A republican spirit," he says, "has strangely
arisen"; and he goes on to tell how the electors of London and
Westminster were now regarding their members as delegates to whom
instructions might be issued. "A new party of malcontents" had arisen,
"assuming to themselves, though very falsely, the title of the People."
They affect, he tells us, "superiority to the whole legislature ... and
endeavor in effect to animate the people to resume into their own hands
that vague and loose authority which exists (unless in theory) in the
people of no country upon earth, and the inconvenience of which is so
obvious that it is the first step of mankind, when formed into society,
to divest themselves of it, and to delegate it forever from themselves."
The writer clearly foreshadows, even in his dislike, that temper which
produced the Wilkes affair, and made it possible for Cartwright and
Horne Tooke and Sir Thomas Hollis to become the founders of English
radicalism.
[Footnote 16: It was probably written by Lord Egmont.]
Yet the influence of that temper still lay a generation ahead; and the
next piece of import comes from a mind which, though perhaps the most
powerful of all which have applied themselves to political philosophy in
England, was, from its very scepticism, incapable of constructive
effort. David Hume was thirty-one years of age when he published (1742)
the first series of his essays; and his _Treatise of Human Nature_ which
had fallen "dead-born from the press" was in some sort compensated by
the success of the new work. The second part, entitled _Political
Discourses_, was published in 1752, almost simultaneously with the
"_Inquiry concerning the Principles of Morals_." As in the case of
Hume's metaphysical studies, they constitute the most powerful
dissolvent the century was to see. Yet nowhere was so clearly to be
demonstrated the euthanasia into which English politics had fallen.