The Two Sides of the Coin - The Act Settlement of 1701
I intend to write an article a day in August. The articles are about the history of political philosophy; So, I am publishing the articles on Proof of Brain.
The main feature of this publicaion is a collection of articles I've titled "The Two Sides of the Coin." These articles show that the left and right come fromt the same source.
This is an important topic as it shows why both Progressive and Conservative Administrations lead to centralization.
The first articles aimed to show the distinction between the Machiavellian World View and the Classical Liberal World View. The ruling class tends to be be Machiavellian, while the merchant class tends to favor the classical liberal view.
The Act of Settlement of 1701
The best place to lauch a study of the Left/Right split is with a strange piece of legislation called "The Act of Settlement of 1701."
England had experienced centuries of brutal civil wars. The Civil Wars usually centered on control of the throne. However, the wars tended to include a religious component with Protestants and Catholics pitted against each other.
Most of the members of the English Parliament of 1701 were Protestant. Their greatest fear was that a future King would convert to Catholicism.
The fear did not end with the proclaimed religion of King. The fear was that the liberal arts schools attended by the House of Stuart taught a curriculum favorable to the Catholic view.
When Quenn Anne passed away in 1714, the crown passed over the heads of her close relatives and landed on the head of Georg Ludwig (1660 – 1727) who was prince-elector of Hanover.
Hanover is in Germany. King George I was German. Legend tells that King George spoke broken English at best.
As mentioned earlier, the Act of Settlement was not simply about the religion of the king. It was about the education of the king. The Hanoverian Kings of England established a network of universities that were set on developing a new pedagogy.
The premiere school was Georgia Augusta University in the town of Göttingen in the German province of Hanover. Satellite schools include King's College London and King's College New York (aka Columbia).
The appointment of an German King over England had interesting implications in England.
The primary factions in the English Parliament were the Whigs and the Tories. The Whigs favored a strong parliament. The Tories favored a strong monarch. Many Tories supported the ideal of the Divine Right of Kings.
During the reign of King George I and II, the Whigs grew in power. A Whiggish parliamentarian dubbed Sir Robert Walpole became the leading minister of parliament. Walpole's consolidation of power created the position that we now call The Prime Minister.
George III (1738 - 1820) was raised in England and spoke English. After being crowned in 1760, King George saught to re-established the authority of the monarchy.
To stem the influence of the Whigs, King George appointed the Tory Statesman Frederick North to the position of Prime Minister.
England had depleted its treasury during the Seven Year War. This was was known in the colonies as the French and Indian War. King George III sought to tighten his control of the colonies with new regulations and taxes so that the colonies would pay for their fair share of the war.
The US Founding Fathers had a liberal arts education. They had studied Aristotelian logic along with the writings of Roman statesmen such as Cato and Cicero.
The founder were largely whigs and indepedents. Many descended from religious dissenters who left Europe to avoid religious persecution.
When faced with an increasing number of demands from King George III, the founders chose to respond by issuing a Declaration of Independence in 1776 and a Revolutionary War.
It is interesting to note that the first troops to rally to the King's cause came from Germany. Historians tend to label the Hessian soldiers who fought for England as mercenaries.
I find the claim absurd. The Hanoverian Kings of England came from Germany. King George was the titular ruler of a large section of Germany.
The German soldiers who fought for King George III would have seen King George as their king.
During the Revolutionary War, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson travelled to France to build support for the revolutionary cause. A successful alliance between the US and France brought an end to the Revolutionary War.
After the American Revolution, King George III was still the head of England and of the universities founded by the Hanoverian Kings. So, King George tasked the universities with creating a counter-revolution that would lead to the restoration of the King.
King George held a doctrine called the Divine Right of Kings. The Divine Right of Kings held that monarch's held divine authority over the king's dominion.
Just as German soldiers rushed to the aide of the German King of England in the Revolutionary War, an army of German professors rushed to the aide of of the primary financier of the German Unversity and began drafting ideologies that would create a counter revolution to restore the monarchy.
These German thinkers drafted a slew of modern philosophies that bear names such as socialism and progressivism. Tomorrow we will examine the philosophies of Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer and other early modern philosophers.
For the picture I present a public domain image drawn from Wikicommons of the true father of progressivism as he funded the research to create a counter-revolution that would restore the monarchy.
The king is dead. Long live the king!
I upvoted you, thank you for posting!
Many, many more people would benefit greatly from understanding the content of this post. In history are the seeds from which our present fruits, and what will pass to our posterity.
Thanks!
Thank you for the compliment. I designed the outline for a Youtube channel. I want to show that Conservatism and Progressivism came from the same place. Both ideologies use conflict to gain power and both ideologies end up creating highly centralized societies.
This observation that the Act of Settlement of 1701 was non only about politics but was about education explains one of the most puzzling aspects of the modern world.
German philosophers of the modern era mysteriously began creating reactionary ideologies that inevitably lead to centralization.
The mystery makes sense the moment one realizes that the Hanoverian Kings of England were German and that they were funding the Germany University System. The university system was simply doing what it was hired to to.
The problem I face with the articles if figuring out where to begin. The best place to begin is with a discussion of the ancient world. The problem with this outline is that I would have to produce about 20 essays with a biased view of history before getting to the juicy pieces of modern history.
I chose to start with Machiavelli as I thought it might be a quick way to introduce the conflicts that were raging in Europe during the Enlightenment.
I think the next essays will be interesting. I will look at the creation of the public education system, the French Revolution, the dawn of Conservatism and the roots of Capitalism.
I probably should include an essay on the American Revolution.
Thomas Paine meeting Ben Franklin was pretty influential. The American Revolution was at least less productive of national chaos in the years following it than the French. I think we were lucky in that. A little quirk of personality spared us our own Napolean.
I look forward to your essays. This is a fascinating topic to me, and few realize our present exigency presses now because of the compromises that were forced on our forebears.
Thanks!
I don't think it was a personality quirk that kept the US Founders from establishing a new monarchy. It was about education and ideas.
I probably should mention that my parents spent years researching the books that were owned and cited by the US founders. They were reading Cicero, Addison, Arnauld and a large number of writers who were developing the classical liberal theme.
The leading figures of the French Revolution were studying Voltaire, Rousseau. Napoleon studied Machiavelli.
The classical liberal education teaches people to think for themselves.
Modern education, by design, teaches people to conform to groups.
People on both the left and right are starting to favor strong men who can push through an agenda. Trump is the perfect example of a strong man. However, if you look closely, you will see that Pelosi and Biden are skilled at pushing partisan agendas.
So, we had one president who ruled by executive order followed by a second. It is very scary.
I have found Locke and Paine to be instructive in my own political development. I commend your folks on their rational self education, and see it has borne good fruit in your own.
I am beyond being scared by American government. Given the global extent and breadth of the censorship, propaganda, and tyrannical violence ongoing today, I am confident America is just one facet of a far more deadly and sinister polity being imposed.
Thanks!
You are right to be scared of the American government.
The members of the American Foreign service studied in elitist universities and they seem to have developed some destructive ideas about the nature of governance.
Politics inside the United States has become scary. I think the best way to explain it is with the idea of capture. The US has a two party system. It appears that the Democratic Party has been captured by the Radical Left from Europe. The Republican Party has been captured by the Reactionary Right from Europe.
This means that the United States is being ripped apart by the very division that lay at the heart of WW II.
The divisions keep getting louder and more intense and it is negatively effecting the world.
For example, you can ask: Who is Joe Biden's enemy? Joe Biden and the core of the DNC see the Republican Party as their enemy.
Conservatives see "liberalism" as their enemy.
Conservatives in the United States don't even know what "liberal" means. They are simply trained to hate the word.
Locke and Paine are liberals. One cannot talk about Locke to a Conservative because Conservatives have convinced themselves that all liberals are communists.
It is absolutely absurd.
John Locke (1632-1704) was English. He witnessed the Glorious Revolution which resulted in genocide. His writings were highly influential in the American Revolution.
It is sad when such mere connotations so overshadow a words actual etymology and definition that Conservatism, which originally referred to conserving the rights and liberties free societies acknowledge, now is considered to be nothing more than Fascism. Likewise Liberalism, which originally referred to the civil rights of free people and the necessity to tolerate the decisions free people themselves make of how to mutually conduct their personal lives.
I have long considered my self to be a Classical Liberal intent on conserving the rights and liberty free societies protect.
I am neither a Conservative nor a Liberal by the modern understanding of those terms.
I read Locke when still a child. It was formative for me, as one of the first philosophical works I was acquainted with I found both understandable in the main, and just as agreeable. Later, my read of Paine bore that same patina of agreeable rationality.
I agree that the etymology of words is extremely important. When the meaning of a word changes all of the propositions that depend on the term become invalid.
The term liberal has been in use since antiquity. The term "liberal arts" referred to a curriculum based on the trivium. The three legs of the trivium are "grammar, logic and rhetoric." The ideas associated with the term liberal were important in the Roman Republic, the Florentine Republic, the English Parliament and US Republic.
I think it is a great word.
The term "conservative" in politics has a very clean etymology. The picture shows the ngram of "conservative" from 1750 to present. I show both the capitalized and lower case version of the word to emphasize a point.
The term "conservative" became prominent in the English lexicon in the 1830s when the Tory Party rebranded as the "Conservative Party."
The capitalized version was popular because it was a "brand."
The ideology called "Conservatism" is the ideology of The Conservative Party.
I think it is important to have brand names for political parties. Political parties routinely change their position on issues.
The organizing principles of the Conservative Party were written in a document called "The Tamworth Manifesto." The Tamworth Manifesto states that a primary goal of the party was the maintain the supremacy of the established church. The established church of England is the Anglican Church.
I suspect that the Conservative Party took its name from "Le Senat Conservateur." The Senat Conservateur was the group that allowed Napoleon to crown himself king.
The meaning of the term "conservative" will be relative to the current political situation.
The term "conservative" is dangerous because it is relative. What is the group trying to conserve? In most cases, people are trying to conserve the social order or the supremacy of a religion.
The Conservative Party became the dominant party in England.
The idea that Liberalism means socialism came about in the early 1900s when the Liberal Party of England formed a coalition with the Labour Party. The coalition was led by Lloyd George and introduced a young Liberal named Winston Churchill.
The coalition fell apart because socialism is illiberal. Conservatives took to calling members of the Labour Party "liberal."
Hegel used the term "sublate" to describe the way that terms change over time and often turn into their opposites.
Modern liberalism came out of this partisan mess.
As for Fascism
The kings of England were German. Kaiser Wilhelm II was the grandson of Queen Victoria of England. The German Empire had developed a political philosophy based on the English Conservative Party. The Conservatives of Germany were advanced the idea of an empire. This would not be far from the ideas of Napoleon who used the term "conservative"
The fascist parties that sprang up after WW I were based on the basic structure of the German Conservative Party.
The term "conservative' entered the American political lexicon after World War II. This is where people developed the idea that conservatism is about conserving the liberties of the people.
The etymology of conservative is a little bit cleaner than "liberal."
To an extent the American use of the term "conservative" is radically different from the way that the Tories used the term conservative in the 1830s. The Tories were the people who fought against the US Revolution. When the Republican Party adopted the term "conservative" the party adopted a term created by the enemies of the US Founders.
Of course, partisan definitions will change with the policy positions of the parties. Every conservative movement is relative to the thing the movement wants to conserve. Al Qaeda and the Taliban are actually conservative movements. They want to conserve a radical form of Islam.
What a wonderful exegesis and contribution to my grasp of history. I have often wondered at the visceral antipathy people have to the words conservative and liberal, and it is my lack of understanding of English history that caused me to not understand. I have not previously grasped that my understanding of conservative as meaning the retention of human rights was not shared by folks who oppose conserving the power of the Anglican Church, for example, and you explanation has struck me like an epiphany.
Thanks!
The three things that floored me in my study of Partisan History was the fact that the Kings of England were German. Royalists funded the universities that produced Kant, Hegel and that group. This is probably why these ideologies tend to dictatorships.
The second thing that floored me was that the Tories rebranded their party as the Conservative Party. The Tories were the people who fought against the Revolution.
Conservatives in America are supporting the ideology of the people who fought against the US Founders in the Revolutionary War.
The last thing that astounded me was that the Liberal Party and the Republican Party were both founded in 1850s and had a similar platform.
The Republican Party was the Liberal Party and the Democratic Party was the Conservative Party up until the Civil Rights Movement.
The reason we equate the terms "liberal" and "socialism" is simply that the Liberal Party fell apart and Conservatives took to calling members of the Labour Party "Liberal."
The Politicians destroyed our lexicon.