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Historians have long thought that America was, from the beginning, profoundly influenced by the Lockean notion of liberty, with its strong emphasis on individual rights and self-interest. Yet in his recent book, historian J. G. A. Pocock argues that early American culture was actually rooted in the writings of Machiavelli, not Locke. The implications of this substitution are important: if Pocock’s argument is right, then Americans may not be as deeply individualistic and capitalistic as many believe. Pocock argues that out of the writings of antiquity Machiavelli created a body of political thinking called “classical republicanism.” This body of thought revived the ancient belief that a human being was by nature a citizen who achieved moral fulfillment by participating in a self-governing republic. Liberty was interpreted as a condition that is realized when people are virtuous and are willing to sacrifice their individual interests for the sake of the community. To be completely virtuous, people had to be independent and free of the petty interests of the marketplace. The greatest enemy of virtue was commerce. This classical republican tradition is said by Pocock to have shaped the ideology of America during the eighteenth century. Many events in early American history can be reinterpreted in light of Pocock’s analysis. Jefferson is no longer seen as a progressive reader of Locke leading America into its individualistic future; instead Jefferson is understood as a figure obsessed with virtue and corruption and fearful of new commercial developments. Influenced by Pocock, some historians have even argued that a communitarian and precapitalist mentality was pervasive among the eighteenth-century farmers of America. Yet Pocock’s thesis and the reinterpretation of the history of eighteenth-century America engendered by it are of dubious validity. If Americans did believe in the ideals of classical virtue that stressed civic duty and made the whole community greater than its discrete parts, then why did the colonists lack a sense of obligation to support the greater good of the British Empire? If indeed America has not always been the society of individual rights and self-interest that it is today, how and when did it be come so? Classical republicanism is elitist, and it certainly had little to offer the important new social groups of artisans and shopkeepers that emerged in America during the eighteenth century. These middle-class radicals, for whom John Wilkes and Thomas Paine were spokesmen, had none of the independence from the market that the landed gentry had. They were less concerned with virtue and community than they were with equality and private rights. They hated political privilege and wanted freedom from an elite-dominated state. In short, the United States was created not in a mood of classical anxiety over virtue and corruption, but in a mood of liberal optimism over individual profits and prosperity. 8. The author is primarily concerned with (A) refuting a proposed thesis about eighteenth-century America (B) analyzing a long-established interpretation of American history (C) criticizing a set of deeply held beliefs about early American ideology (D) reconciling opposing interpretations of eighteenth-century American ideology（A） (E) defending a novel reading of the ideology of eighteenth-century America 文章先提出一个观点"strong emphasis on individual ",接着说另一个不同观点"classical republicanism",之后又说这个观点有问题,最后说"in a mood of liberal optimism over individual profits and prosperity"这个观点才是对的.第一个观点和第三个观点是一回事,那么E不是很正确吗? | 
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发表于 2007-4-10 21:23:00
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