Introduction, I

Liberty and authority exist side by side in some modern states but they are uneasy neighbours. Where should the line between them be drawn? When does liberty become licence? When does authority become tyranny? The great social and political changes beginning to be so apparent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries stirred the intellectual world to a great debate on this basic problem in political science, a debate which still rages. Active minds in both Europe and America were ceaselessly at work on the great question. The inquiring bent of the European mind and the unprecedented experiments across the Atlantic gave the contribution of publicists in the New World an unusual significance. Europe was watching America and America was instructing Europe.

John Taylor of Caroline County was a Virginia planter who lived through much of this ferment and was particularly jealous of liberty and fearful of power. In 1814 he published his Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States and established his fame as a political theorist of note. His Inquiry reflects the intellectual power and breadth of the eighteenth century.

The eighteenth, and the seventeenth century preceding it, were periods charged with great energy in Europe. There political revolution changed man’s concepts of freedom and government. A flood of inventions started an industrial revolution which was to re-order men’s lives and alter their thinking. Europe was expanding and planting new settlements in far-off wildernesses, which in turn were to contribute a mass of new folkways to alter the behaviour patterns of mankind.

Few centuries have produced thinkers of wider interests and greater enthusiasm for truth than the more outstanding of the eighteenth-century philosophers, particularly in France and Great Britain. They were anticipating a new heaven which was to descend upon earth to demonstrate how men of virtue could lead society along highways of progress ever nearer the goal of perfection. Many of the eighteenth-century citizens of the Enfightenment, like the men of ancient Athens, preferred nothing so much as hearing some new thing; they felt intense interest in American happenings. For their part, the new Americans were growing more and more to feel that they had the answer to some of society’s problems, particularly those touching politics.

The atmosphere in which Taylor grew up was decidedly influenced by European relationships of a complex sort. The nature of his thinking, the reasons for his conclusions and his contributions to political theory can be grasped only by placing them in their setting of European-American interchange; for Taylor, like all his fraternity, had the patterns of his thought drawn by the hand of experience.