Historians have long thought [1] that America was, from the beginning, profoundly influenced by the Lockean notion of liberty, with its strong emphasis on individual rights and self-interest. [2] Yet in his recent book, historian, J. G. A. Pocock, argues that early American culture was actually rooted in the writings of Machiavelli, not Locke. The implications of this substitution are important: if Pocock’s argument is right, then Americans may not be as deeply individualistic and capitalistic as many believe.

[3] Pocock arguing that out of the writings of antiquity Machiavelli created a body of political thinking called “classical republicanism.” This body of thought revived the ancient belief that a human being was by nature a citizen [4] who achieved moral fulfillment by participating in a self-governing republic, liberty was interpreted as a condition that is realized when people are virtuous and are willing to sacrifice their individual interests for the sake of the community. To be completely virtuous, people had to be independent and free of the petty interests of the marketplace. The greatest enemy of virtue was commerce. This classical republican tradition is said by Pocock to have shaped the ideology of America during the eighteenth century.

Many events in early American history can be reinterpreted in light of Pocock’s analysis. [5] Jefferson is no longer seen as a progressive reader of Locke leading America into its individualistic future. Instead Jefferson  a figure obsessed with virtue and corruption and fearful of new commercial developments. Influenced by Pocock, [6] some historians have even argued that a communitarian and precapitalist mentality was pervasive among the eighteenth-century farmers of America.

Yet [7] Pococks’ thesis and the reinterpretation of the history of eighteenth-century America engendered by it are of dubious validity. [8] If Americans did believe in the ideals of classical virtue that stressed civic duty and made the whole community greater than its discrete parts, then why did the colonists lack a sense of obligation to support the greater good of the British Empire? If indeed America has not always been the society of individual rights and self-interest that it is [9] today. How and when did it be come so? Classical republicanism is elitist, and it certainly had little to offer the important new social groups of artisans and shopkeepers that emerged in America during the eighteenth century. [10] These middle-class radicals for whom John Wilkes and Thomas Paine were spokesmen, had none of the independence from the market that the landed gentry had. They were less concerned with virtue and community than they were with equality and private rights. They hated political privilege and wanted freedom from an elite-dominated state. In short, the United States was created not in a mood of classical anxiety over virtue and [11] corruption; but in a mood of liberal optimism over individual profits and prosperity.