that was also painful. i had this idea i could do fifty pages of reading in the morning and record all night, but i found myself getting through a few paragraphs of this thing per day. i have to admit i was hugely distracted by youtube, as you may have noticed.
i'm not giving up on the idea yet, but i'm thinking song/book alternation may be a better idea.
derp
i was tangentially blown off course to this text when attempting to get in between the ideological debate carried out by burke and paine over the revolution in france. i seem to have gotten some wires crossed (i'm going to guess it was complications from a google search) in thinking that the editor of my copy of burke's reflections on the revolution in france claimed that his text was in response to this one. rather, the claim was that burke was replying to a sermon given by rev./dr. price in 1789. this text is claimed by some, however, to have had a strong influence on certain american revolutionaries, so i've decided to give it a read through for historical purposes.
price splits his text into two sections. the first states a few assumptions about liberty and is likewise split into three sections: liberty in general, civil liberties as they relate to government and what could vaguely be called sovereignty in the context of empire. price cites locke in his preface and, without having read much locke directly, i'm willing to take him at face value in his claim that he's merely stating lockean principles. the second section discusses the possibility of a war with the american colonies and is really the crux of the text. as the first section is merely a statement of principles, deconstructing it in too much detail is to largely miss the point of his argument about the possible upcoming war against the colonies. however, there are a few curiosities that are worth pointing out to more broadly understand what 'liberty' meant, as a concept, amongst liberals (including proto-anarchists and proto-socialists) of the time period.
price specifies four different types of liberty: physical, religious, civil and moral. the first three are intuitive; the last references the liberty to not be controlled by 'contrary principles'. today, most people would acknowledge that intellectual liberty (the liberty to define our own principles) is a key type of liberty and contrast it directly against this idea of 'moral liberty' that price is asserting. i think it's worthwhile to try and understand this a little bit better in case i see it jump up elsewhere.
would it not be easy to derive the idea of defining our own principles from not being controlled by those of others? sure, and this is the intuitive connection between moral and intellectual liberty. however, price is being far too specific to allow that derivation. to price, "contrary principles" means "principles contrary to christian principles". specifically, he claims that those who are "controlled by passions" have lost their moral liberty and those without moral liberty are "wicked and detestable". again, it's easy to claim this can be converted into modern language by talking about various types of sexual oppression, but he speaks not of this but of "licentiousness", which no doubt referred to any kind of sexuality that was not properly puritan. he takes it a step further than this in comparing licentiousness to a type of despotism. while he's not explicit, it's clear that he means to state that the despot is satan. his concept of moral freedom is consequently one of freedom from enslavement to satanic principles and, while this is maybe an easily understood relic of classical thinking, it is not at all consistent with intellectual liberty. rather, it reduces the parliament to a rubber stamp for the church and threatens to oppress all those who do not conform to the doctrine dictated by the church-state; "moral freedom" is the so-called "freedom" to not be exposed to ideas that differ from the state's (and church's) official pronunciations. this is 1776, not 1984.
it's not entirely clear how far price would enforce his right to "moral freedom" in an attempt to suppress "intellectual freedom" and emancipate those whom he considers to be enslaved to their corrupt desires. he does suggest that licentiousness should be restricted by laws, but he's also careful to point out that despotism is the greater threat than licentiousness. on the other hand, he makes it clear that he believes that people have the "right" to "protect" themselves from influences that may lead them away from the church. he also seems to reject the idea of a written constitution - specifically because it may restrict government in punishing "licentiousness". i'm really not able to develop a cogent thought from that seemingly contradictory mess of ideas, other than to derive the somewhat outlandish view that price believed that restricting "licentiousness" was a valid act of communitarian democracy, in the sense that it protects the majority from harm (as he sees it). that is, he seems to be arguing in favour of the tyranny of the majority and specifically when it comes to sexuality. such thinking seems better suited to the spanish inquisition than to british liberalism, and yet here it is in an important revolutionary document. i cannot make further sense of it, other than to applaud jefferson's insistence on the lockean notion of separating church and state in an environment where not doing so could have been truly catastrophic.
i also want to take note of how haphazardly price glosses over the problems of corruption that are endemic in government. it does not seem as though price is interested in the kinds of objections that an ancient philosopher like socrates may have provided against democracy. nor does he provide arguments for his claims, but this is to be forgiven due to the nature of the first section as a statement of principles rather than an exposition of them. it is somewhat annoying, though, that, even while arguing against authority, he asserts his arguments in the form of sometimes inane assertions. it may indeed be obvious that pure democracy becomes less and less reasonable as population size increases, but it in no way follows that "a free government may be established in the largest state" by setting up a decentralized representative democracy. while price correctly points out that money is a possible corrupting influence in representative democracies, centralized or not, he does not present any kind of argument as to why his proposals will not lead to that kind of corruption or why "in these circumstances," of decentralized representative democracy, "each separate state would be secure against the interference of sovereign power in its private concerns, and, therefore, would possess liberty". could the corrupting forces not merely simultaneously co-opt several states? i'm not saying they must or can't, i'm just pointing out that there's no argument at all and that reduces price to some kind of cheap mystical guru, pumping out oracular nonsense that seems almost precious in hindsight.
he closes the first section by arguing (i use that word lightly) that empires are impossible to maintain and always eventually result in dissolution. the empire must demand certain things of it's client states, which it's client states will see as rightfully theirs, leading to a conflict developing between positions of imperial authority (which are illegitimate) and expressions of popular rule. the imperial state will need to assert itself by force, which will produce a violent reaction. this is a much easier set of statements to take at face value, although it's perhaps no longer reasonable in our world to think a popular movement can offer any kind of violent resistance to a centralized state. of course, he's setting himself up for a discussion of the situation in america, which he turns to in his second section.
while price provides moral and constitutional arguments, and these form an important part of his perspective, what he's really suggesting is that it is not in britain's self-interest to try and suppress the colonies by force. price is by no means a revolutionary himself. rather, his main concern is the strength of the empire and how to maintain america within it in a way that both grants the colonists a higher level of autonomy and maintains the cohesion of a greater, trans-oceanic british civilization. the real core of his opposition to military action consequently reduces to his perception that such a conflict is unwinnable, from the british perspective; that is to say that the crux of his essay is to suggest that the crown ought to have been using more enlightened tactics than they were using in order to maintain the empire.
was the probability of success really so remote? well, it depended entirely on how many people could be convinced to fight, and price realized that. his calculation assumed that the british empire could not gather any recruits from russia, india or canada (a clear underestimation) and also assumed that every single colonist would fight against the empire (a clear exaggeration that, as a canadian, is especially absurd to me). he consequently derives a force of 40,000 imperial british soldiers vs. 500,000 american colonists. in reality, the loyalists in america actually outnumbered the revolutionaries; the empire had a large numerical advantage in the war. price continues by suggesting that blockading the colonies could not truly harm them because they were entirely self-sufficient. he once again becomes incoherent here, in suggesting that the blockade he opposes would be an act of providence to deliver the colonists from the temptation of foreign luxuries.
throughout his arguments, price persistently returns to this romanticized conception of the american colonists as a pious, pure entity that understands and practices an undiluted, true kind of liberty and continually contrasts them against his perception of the british as corrupted by earthly desires. it's maybe easy to forget at this point that the puritan founding myth was as much of a british invention as an american one and that the historical roots of it carried on in britain for at least as long as it did in america. that is to say that price was producing british stereotypes of america while speaking to a british audience. ulterior motives that price may have had aside, one gets the impression that the british would have generally taken this entirely outlandish, romanticized idealization at face value. the following passage illustrates this:
In this hour of tremendous danger it would become us to turn our thoughts to Heaven. This is what our brethren in the Colonies are doing. From one end of North-America to the other they are fasting and praying. But what are we doing? We are ridiculing them as fanatics, and scoffing at religion, We are running wild after pleasure and forgetting every thing serious and decent at masquerades. We are trafficking for boroughs, perjuring ourselves at elections, and selling ourselves for places. Which side then is Providence likely to favour?
price even ends the text (somewhat hilariously) by comparing america to jesus: he asks the colonists to forgive the empire for it's oppression, as it knows not what it is doing.
on the brighter side of things, it should be noted that price had a fairly refreshing view of indigenous concerns, relative to the period. while he ultimately puts the question aside, seemingly due to the perception that it is an argument he can't win, his articulation both of british massacres in india and of native american sovereignty demonstrate that these were not unknown moral concerns at the time:
If sailing along a coast can give a right to a country, then might the people of Japan become, as soon as they please, the proprietors of Britain. Nothing can be more chimerical than property founded on such a reason. If the land on which the colonies first settled had any proprietors, they were the natives.
indeed, they were.
another thing that price seems abstractly (if not explicitly) aware of is the revolution as a process of recentering the empire in washington, rather than one of an independent entity breaking off and starting a new nation. while he upholds the constitutional principle of "no taxation without representation", he also makes it clear that he doesn't really see the colonists as representing a new national identity that in any way transcends their inherent britishness. he demonstrates this by projecting a possible future where the hanoverian kings (or some other aristocratic family of continental despots) have reduced britain to an authoritarian monarchy, consequently creating a situation where the colonists are the remaining descendants of traditional concepts of british liberty. such a future is one where the colonies would be drastically more populous, have a much larger economy, be more intellectually advanced and command a much stronger military. out of this, price is able to project a fantasy where america is both morally and realistically superior to britain. he dares not suggest that britain would be forced into submission, but the implication is between the lines. he then uses this projection to argue for reconciliation with the colonists out of british self-interest.
overall? this is a short text, but it took me a long time to get through it because i found it very difficult to put it into context. i suspect that that difficulty placing it into context may be why it's not often cited today. whatever it's value as a liberalizing document in it's own time, it reads off today as a manifesto of the type of social conservatism that is often found on the religious right. yet, price was a major opponent of no less a conservative icon than edmund burke himself. when the lines are this blurry, it's no wonder that he's been left unclaimed in the second half of the twentieth century. however, that doesn't negate the text's historical value. it may not have a direct successor today, but it may perhaps be traced forwards in time as an influential text on the socially conservative aspect of the progressive movement of the late nineteenth century.
full text:
http://www.constitution.org/price/price_3.htm
http://dghjdfsghkrdghdgja.appspot.com/categories/books/congress/E/211.P930.1776b/index.html
