Jonathan Charles Douglas Clark

Conventional accounts of the development of the Enlightenment in the English-speaking world posit an evolution. Over time, it is argued, dominant ideas of the “divine attributes,” the characteristics of the First Person of the Trinity, moved from Calvinist images of God as a stern avenger to Latitudinarian reliance on God as an indulgent parent and Deist understandings of God as a First Cause, increasingly synonymous with Nature. This chapter argues that this view is mistaken. All the chief ways of conceiving God had long been available; and powerful and sustained debates in the long eighteenth century about God’s nature followed no single direction. The classic model of the Enlightenment as the advance of secularization is untenable.

The contest between “Lockeian liberalism” and “classical republicanism” as explanatory frameworks for the intellectual history of the American Revolution, and therefore of the present-day United States, has been one of the longest running and most distinguished in recent U.S. historiography. It also has major implications for the history of political thought in the North Atlantic Anglophone world more widely. Yet this debate was merely suspended when it was held to have ended in an ill-defined compromise. Although some U.S. historians expressed doubts and qualifications, attention in U.S. historiography moved on to other themes while leaving the initial problem unsolved. This article reopens the question; it suggests that a historicization of both these two categories is now both possible and necessary, and that their supersession will advance understanding of the Revolution. It seeks to help solve this problem by the same means that the debate began: that is, by re-establishing a link between U.S. and U.K. historiographies.