Eric Nelson is a young historian of political thought at Harvard whose basic ambition is to transform every topic he studies. He has published three books in the past decade, and each seeks to transform a major subject in the study of early modern (16th-18th century) political ideas. His first book, The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought (2004), identifies a mode of thinking about the collective use of property that departs sharply from the emphasis on political liberty and personal independence that dominates the scholarly interpretation of early modern republicanism. Nelson built on this argument in his second book, The Hebrew Republic (2010), by noting how early modern thinkers used the biblical idea of the half-century Jubilee to support the redistribution of property. But that book’s greater contribution lies elsewhere. Nelson argues that the Jews’ desire to replace direct divine rule with monarchy, as expressed in 1 Samuel 8:4-9 and rabbinic commentaries, provides a basis for preferring representative government to arbitrary royalty. The use of these sources by early modern writers demonstrates that creative political thinking was profoundly informed by religious texts and concerns and was not merely a secular development.
In The Royalist Revolution, Nelson turns his attention from Europe to revolutionary America. His argument will alternately surprise, shock, distress, and outrage many scholars, but it will also help to reshape a debate about the origins of the presidency, a topic that gravely matters as we agonize over the role of the post-9/11 executive in our impassioned and impasse-ridden politics.
Nelson’s argument begins with an ingenious analysis of a surprising claim that American revolutionaries made just before independence. Resistance leaders and the Continental Congress repeatedly urged George III to take their side in the struggle against Parliament’s assertion that it possessed unlimited authority to enact laws governing the colonies “in all cases whatsoever.” In their view, the king should act as a wholly independent monarch who would treat each of his empire’s representative assemblies as possessing essentially the same authority. If Parliament overstepped its power in enacting laws for the colonists, the king should intervene, wielding his royal veto against unjust legislation. He should act, as Thomas Jefferson memorably wrote in 1774, as “the balance of a great, if a well poised empire.” Far from clinging unthinkingly to the Glorious Revolution settlement of 1688 and its aftermath, which made the British king a decidedly constitutional and limited monarch, George III should reclaim his prerogative and vigorously exercise the independent powers that custom and theory located in the executive. The clearest exponent of this view was James Wilson of Pennsylvania, who later played a critical role in shaping the novel presidency that emerged from the Constitutional Convention of 1787.
Other scholars, myself included, have never known quite what to make of these claims. Taken at face value, they imply an ignorance of British governance so profound as to make the colonists seem like political idiots. Perhaps the claims can be read as an ultimatum to Britain’s ruling class. The colonists really did not believe that the king would take this part. They simply wanted to demonstrate that they would no longer recognize any parliamentary jurisdiction over America, beyond allowing it to regulate imperial trade, a power that had to be lodged somewhere.
Nelson powerfully demonstrates that there was a depth to this position that other scholars have simply missed. In his view, some (though hardly all) American leaders had become “patriot royalists” who were strikingly sympathetic to the monarchist arguments that the “execrable” Stuart monarchs of the 17th century had made against Parliament. The key texts here pivot on a largely forgotten struggle in the 1620s, when Parliament tried to enact legislation regulating American fisheries, and James I and Charles I each wielded the royal prerogative to insist that the colonies were not subject to parliamentary governance. For patriot royalists arguing within the precedent-laden traditions of Anglo-American governance, the Stuart success on this point in the 1620s provided crucial evidence that the colonists could revive and deploy a century-and-a-half later.
If Nelson stopped here, he would have provided a notable corrective to our understanding of the arguments that some colonists directed against Parliament before independence—but not much more. In the end, the British government in its wisdom was impervious to American arguments. There could be no relinquishment of Parliament’s jurisdiction over the colonies. Nor could the king possibly abandon his loyalty to the principles of 1688. Indeed, no one supported the policies of his government more ardently than George III. Next to him, Lord North was a simpering, weak-kneed wimp.
Nelson has a second and more ambitious goal with this book, however: to explain how the presidency that Americans created a decade after declaring independence was also derived from the defense of executive prerogative in the age of the Stuarts. Here, it is important to say “executive” rather than “royal,” because none of the authors of the U.S. Constitution—not even that purported quasi-crypto-monarchist Alexander Hamilton—seriously imagined an American king or hereditary ruler. But the same “patriot royalists” who wanted the king to nullify Parliament in 1774-76 remained advocates of a republican executive armed with independent prerogatives (such as the presidential veto) that hardly conformed to the weak models of executive leadership that Americans had once favored.
Here again, Nelson brilliantly uses 17th-century English sources largely neglected by American scholars to illuminate another critical debate. American ideas of political representation, it is often argued, rested on a belief that election by the people in constituencies mapping the real distribution of the population formed a sufficient basis of political legitimacy. Architects of the revolutionary constitutions conceived of a representative assembly as a “miniature,” “mirror,” “portrait,” or “transcript” of the larger society. If these images were accurate, the demand for active consent was adequately satisfied.
But arguments like that had also appeared during the English civil war of the 1640s, to be countered by the idea that the king also embodied the national interest. If the executive was adequately authorized to serve that function, advocates for this claim held, the theory of exclusive legislative supremacy grew weaker. A space might be cleared in which the claims for executive prerogative—for an independent capacity to recognize and pursue the public interest—would complement, or even counter, the republican orthodoxy of 1776.
At the Constitutional Convention, the patriot royalists of the mid-1770s thus acquired a second opportunity to vindicate their position, as part of a process of positive constitution-making. The presidency that emerged in 1787 was the product of this process, and its great architects were founders like Wilson and Hamilton. By contrast, James Madison remained a muddled thinker on this point. Madison was preoccupied with legislative deliberation rather than executive decision—a gap he would have to correct in the 1790s, when the exercise of presidential prerogative became a decisive controversy in American politics.
Nelson’s main argument thus holds that a critical element of American constitutionalism—the capacity of the president to serve as an independent source of political authority—emerged from the revolutionary controversies of the 1770s. The origins of this position did not lie in the republican tradition that passed from Machiavelli to 17th-century English radicals and on to the colonists. It came, instead, from the ostensibly detested sources of Stuart despotism, to be propounded by those Americans who did not believe that the legacy of the Glorious Revolution captured the whole of constitutional wisdom. Here, as in his other books, Nelson wants to remake the landscape of the history of political thought by rescuing neglected sources that were surprisingly influential.
This is a provocative argument, and there is much to learn from it, but also much to dispute. Here are four main criticisms that identify significant weaknesses in Nelson’s case.
First, Nelson does not provide a credible account of why the mainstream of American opinion remained so decidedly suspicious of executive power in 1776. He disparages this attitude as “the antimonarchical enthusiasms” or “the frenzied antimonarchism of the moment.” But that attitude culminated decades of political quarrels over the disparities between the use of prerogative power in the colonies and its limitation in Britain, as Bernard Bailyn (one of Nelson’s mentors and my own) argued a half-century ago.
Second, Nelson also describes his advocates as participants in “a twenty-year campaign in favor of prerogative power.” But that hardly matches the circumstances of revolutionary constitution-making. Nelson awards excessive importance to a single pamphlet by Edward Bancroft, better known to history (though not to his contemporaries) as the British spy in the American embassy in Paris. (Nelson weirdly describes Bancroft as a “Connecticut physician”; he lived there as a youth, but only became a physician after his studies in Britain, where he resided thereafter.) Important developments did take place with the writing of the constitutions of New York (1777) and Massachusetts (1780), but these did not create a movement. It took the conditions that led to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 to permit the Framers to puzzle out a reshaped version of executive power.
Third, when Nelson turns to the convention, his decisive conclusion, he accords far more coherence to the Framers’ vision than they possessed. The Constitution certainly restored a significant measure of prerogative—notably the veto—to its most novel creation, the presidency. But other customary prerogative powers went to Congress, in Article I, Section 8. Moreover, the critical powers over war and foreign relations, key aspects of the royal prerogative, were divided in complicated ways between the president and Congress (or the Senate).
Equally important, Nelson overlooks the greatest uncertainty of all: the nature of the political influence the president would exercise. The mode of presidential election was not determined until the convention’s final days. When it was, none of the Framers could readily predict how the proposed electoral system would operate. It took decades of experimentation, at least to Andrew Jackson’s reelection in 1832, for the American political system to acquire some of its mature characteristics. Perhaps Jackson’s veto of the bank renewal bill, rather than the adoption of the Constitution, would be the best moment to mark the proper conclusion of Nelson’s experiment.
But that would turn this remarkably productive and provocative scholar into more of a historian than he wants to be. Eric Nelson’s real genius is to force us to rethink both the origins and substance of critical political ideas. Much may be problematic in The Royalist Revolution, but for the third time in a decade, Nelson has captured an ambitious goal. We will be wrestling with the implications of its argument for some time.
Jack N. Rakove, the William Robertson Coe professor of history and American studies at Stanford, is the author, most recently, of Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America (2010).
