Nostalgia and modernity

British radicals of the later eighteenth century derived their ideas from the various ‘outs’ excluded from the Revolution Settlement of 1689 and the Whig triumph of the early Hanoverian era: the ‘Country’ Whigs and city Tories, the supporters of the ‘Good Old Cause’ disappointed by the half-revolution of 1688, the Dissenters, and the deists (Colley 1981; Dickinson 1977, ch. 6; Pocock 1985, ch. 11; Robbins 1959). It was during the controversies surrounding John Wilkes, the continued imposition of religious tests, the American War of Independence, and, most spectacularly, the French Revolution that radical ideas developed.

The languages used – versions of classical republicanism, ancient constitutionalism, natural jurisprudence and contract, Dissenting tolerationism, and millenarianism – had been well established in the conflicts of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In the context of a new political and economic order characterised by the growth of empire, a military establishment, the explosion of commerce and credit, a court-dominated Commons, urbanisation, rural enclosure, and a creeping if never secure secularism, such ‘radicalisms’ were dispositionally nostalgic (Pocock 1984, 1985, ch. 11). An important feature of the period is the attempt by radicals to accommodate their inherited patterns of thought to new and irreversible features of society and to the aspirations of the growing urban middle and lower orders. This involved integrating received vocabularies with those derived from the philosophical psychology wrought by Locke and elaborated by Hume and David Hartley, and with the largely Scottish development of political economy and historical sociology (Claeys 1990; Hampsher-Monk 1991; Pocock 1985, chs. 2, 11; ch. 15 above).