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JOHN TRENCHARD and THOMAS GORDON. Cato' s Letters: or Essays on Liberty, Civil and Religious, and Other Important Subjects, ed. Ronald Hamowy. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1995. 2 vols. Pp. 1018. $15; $7.50 (paper).
The recovery of that idiom of political discourse known as "civic humanism" has been one of the stories of epic discovery in the scholarship of the last four decades. From Caroline Robbins and Hans Baron through John Pocock and Bernard Bailyn to a third generation of able exponents, it has been applied to more and more areas of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century discourse. It was not always accepted: many scholars in the USA remained committed instead to the early twentieth-century image of John Locke as a Founding Father of American, and therefore of English, contrac - tarian politics. A debate arose over the essence of "the Founding" of the USA between the skeptical revisionist exponents of civic humanist "republicanism" and the doggedly loyal champions of Lockeian "liberalism", sometimes (as with C. B. Macpherson) with a Marxist tinge.
Recently, the retro-Lockeians have staged a minor rally. In 1990, Mr. Hamowy argued to place the periodical essays of 1720-1723, republished as Cato' s Letters, squarely in the Lockeian camp ("Cato's Letters, John Locke and the Republican Paradigm," History of Political Thought 11 (1990), 273-294). In this republication of the sixth (1755) edition of Cato's Letters, Mr. Hamowy continues the attempt to locate them in that setting. This identification is partly correct, but also suggests important qualifications.
Locke can only be regarded as...