Radical Whigs

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Radical Whigs
Founded
Parliamentarism
Political positionLeft-wing
National affiliationWhigs

The Radical Whigs were a group of British political commentators associated with the

Radical movement
.

Seventeenth century

The radical Whigs ideology "arose from a series of political upheavals in 17th-century England: the

Algernon Sydney.[2]

Eighteenth century

The18th-century Whigs, or

commonwealthmen, in particular John Trenchard, Thomas Gordon, and Benjamin Hoadly, "praised the mixed constitution of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, and they attributed English liberty to it; and like Locke they postulated a state of nature from which rights arose which the civil polity, created by mutual consent, guaranteed; they argued that a contract formed government and that sovereignty resided in the people."[3]

The radical Whigs' political ideas played a significant role in the development of the

Puritanism. That moral decay threatened free government could not come as a surprise to a people whose fathers had fled England to escape sin. The importance of virtue, frugality, industry, and calling was at the heart of their moral code. An overbearing executive, and the threat of corruption through idle, useless officials, or placemen, had figured prominently in their explanations of their exile in America." So "most" of the ideas the American Revolutionaries put into their political system "were a part of the great tradition of the eighteenth-century commonwealthmen."[4][5]

Although the commonwealthmen had little influence on British politics in the eighteenth century, their political ideas had a long-term effect on Britain's constitutional system: constitutional monarchy, which in turn became a model for other countries, for example, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Belgium.[6]

References

  1. , p. 51
  2. ^ Middlekauff (2005), p. 136
  3. ^ Middlekauff (2005 ), p. 136
  4. ^ Middlekauff (2005), pp. 51-52
  5. , pp. 7-8
  6. , pp. 142ff, 634ff

See also