The French Revolution and English Parliamentary Reform

James Mackintosh and the Vindiciae Gallicae

Bibliographic Data

ID16004294
AuthorsLionel A Mckenzie (corresponding author)
Year1981
Volume14
Issue3
Pages264-264
Publication date1981-01-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueEighteenth-Century Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0013-2586 • E-ISSN: 1086-315X
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/2738491
OpenAlexW2330959793
LanguageEN
Citations received9

ion (p. 454). Across the Atlantic, fortunately, opinion had continued to progress until it freed America from the of tyranny. Across the Channel the same moral revolution had reached point where it needed only a pebble to bring the same Colossus down. Mackintosh in 1791 was looking back on period in which much had been achieved in France with fair degree of harmony. This unobstructed perspective reinforced his illusion that the French legislators fortunate enough to live in period This content downloaded from 157.55.39.157 on Tue, 17 May 2016 06:29:13 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 280 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES when it was only necessary to affix the stamp of laws to what had been prepared by the research of philosophy (p. 423). Burke had written in 1790 but had detected new and, in his estimation, more dangerous currents running not far below the tranquil surface which which seduced Mackintosh, as well as other supporters of parliamentary reform in England. That the principle of consent might be extended beyond the original constitution of government, and even its subsequent accountability, to include the right of the people actively to intervene in government, to participate directly, and to suffer very few if any practical limitations on the exercise of their sovereignty were positions Mackintosh would not concede. Yet it was this extended notion of consent that made permanent revolution definite possibility, and it explains why Burke would allow no concessions to the principle at all, even in its restricted sense. In addition, notions of consent in France seem to have incorporated further postulate, to which Burke himself perhaps was not fully attuned; namely, the assumption that the will of an enlightened and virtuous people would be also unanimous. Opposition or disagreement from this point of view could be explained only as the product of corruption and ignorance, and in the transitional stage, in which corruption and ignorance were still widespread, knowledge of the general will fell to the enlightened and virtuous few. If one could claim monopoly of enlightenment and virtue, one could legitimately claim monopoly of power, together with the freedom to use whatever means seemed necessary to eliminate corruption and to dispel ignorance. This ideology therefore is to be distinguished from the ideologies that English thinkers commonly associated with the revolution of 1688 and the American revolution, although similar one had been present in England in 1649 when the Army of the Saints took the role of the elite. One may therefore conclude that Mackintosh's conversion by Burke was immanent in the Vindiciae Gallicae itself. Quite simply Mackintosh was defending something far different from what he imagined in that work, and in 1793 and 1794 he began to concede that Burke was right after all. Of course his concession and conversion were hastened by the fact that in 1793 England was at war with France, and the parliamentary reformers, sympathizers with the revolution, became transformed into supporters of the enemy. This ironical turn meant that only those with the strongest convicThis content downloaded from 157.55.39.157 on Tue, 17 May 2016 06:29:13 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms MACKINTOSH AND THE VINDICIAE GALLICAE 281 tions would thenceforth continue openly and actively to seek reform. In general, these were the English Jacobins, whose favorite defense of the revolution was not Mackintosh's Vindiciae Gallicae but Thomas Paine's Rights of Man. Paine's text, moreover, possessed internal consistency, virtue that Mackintosh's lacked because of its author's deliberate adoption of highly syncretistic intellectual approach. By drawing upon different traditions of opposition thought, including the Painite, Mackintosh inevitably developed misconceptions about the French Revolution. More important, the same approach left him without coherent justification for parliamentary reform in England itself. Assuredly this was the more serious weakness, and it explains why he capitulated to Burke not only regarding his view of the revolution but also on the question of parliamentary reform in England, at least as he projected it in the Vindiciae Gallicae. Before Mackintosh could demand parliamentary reform again, he would have to dissociate it from the French Revolution, and then he would have to decide upon which intellectual foundations the demand could be coherently and legitimately advanced. Eighteenth-century Commonwealthman, utilitarian, and rightsof-man theorist-that was James Mackintosh of the Vindiciae Gallicae. The historical value of the text rests in the fact that it records the opposition languages available to parliamentary reformers in radical Whig circles. It also registers the dilemmas to which the attempt to harness these languages could lead. For Mackintosh did not recognize that to retain the Commonwealth belief in first principles, for example, might be inconsistent with his commitment to unmixed democracy, which his observation of single-house legislature in France inspired him to make, unless he also rewrote English history to support the theory. In place of the assumption that the ancient constitution was based on distribution of power among the one, the few, and the many, he would have to substitute the thesis that it coinprised single-house legislature. But he did not supply such history, and the inconsistency remained. Nor did he recognize that the declaration of the sovereignty of the people might lead to direct democracy, which he always repudiated. And he failed fully to come to terms with the utilitarian argument that the forms of government might be in themselves of secondary importance; the essential thing was that they promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number. In this naively eclectic approach This content downloaded from 157.55.39.157 on Tue, 17 May 2016 06:29:13 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 282 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES lies the explanation for Mackintosh's temporary abandonment of the reformist cause; what happened in France after 1792 merely offered him convenient escape from having to confront issues that his own political thought actually focused and crystallized. Moreover, if Mackintosh was indeed representative of his intellectual milieu, as it seems that he was, then his flight from thorough investigation and systematic statement of the foundations on which parliamentary reform could be based provides an explanation for its long postponement until 1832, the last year of his life. The Johns Hopkins University This content downloaded from 157.55.39.157 on Tue, 17 May 2016 06:29:13 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

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