I

The failure of the Jacobite rising in 1745–6 brought bitter consequences for many rebels. It was better luck for the development of political economy. Sir James Steuart (1713–80) wrote An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Oeconomy during the long exile he suffered for his role in the rising led by Charles Edward Stuart. While historians of eighteenth-century Scotland know Steuart as the descendent of one of Scotland’s leading Covenanting families whose political disillusionment led him to convert to the Jacobite cause, Steuart is best known by intellectual historians as a pioneering political economist who was silently refuted by Adam Smith and highly regarded by Hegel and Marx.Footnote ¹ He is usually situated in the canon of political economy as a late exponent of mercantilism, and often as a representative of the German current of political science, sometimes called cameralism or Polizeiwissenschaft (“the science of policy”), that encouraged a paternalistic administration of economies and governments.Footnote ² Steuart’s significant influence on Hegel and Marx and his warmer reception in Germany than in Scotland or England contributed to the reputation of his 1767 Principles as an artifact of German statecraft debates. The prolific postwar economist Joseph Schumpeter found that while Steuart’s work displayed “more originality and deeper thought than does the Wealth of Nations,” it “received rather more than its due from some of the Germans.”Footnote ³ Most twentieth-century scholars followed suit, approaching Steuart as a late mercantilist theorist and emphasizing the intellectual significance of his residence in Tübingen towards the end of his exile in the late 1750s and early 1760s.Footnote ⁴ A. S. Skinner, who did more work on Steuart than any other twentieth-century scholar, said that his interventionist tendencies must be judged “against the background not of a country, but of a Continent,” and various scholars since the 1970s have found it convenient to present Steuart’s ideas in terms of German economic debates.Footnote ⁵ On this account, the exiled Steuart intellectually extracted himself from his old country and cause to draw his ideas from the fresh currents of political and political-economic discussion that he found in Europe.

There are serious problems with this intellectual contextualization. The first problem is chronological. Steuart started working on his Principles in 1748, not long after the start of his exile, and had worked out many of his ideas by the time he joined the cameralists in Tübingen in 1757.Footnote ⁶ For most of the previous decade he had lived in France. The second serious problem is the lacuna that the prevailing interpretation leaves in understanding the origins of his ideas and intentions in his political convictions. The emphasis on Steuart’s time in continental Europe has led most scholars to disregard the reason he was there at all,Footnote ⁷ but the political and economic issues that Steuart addressed as a Jacobite strategist in 1745 became problems for which he sought answers in his major work. In recent years, certain scholars have tentatively started to examine the link between his Jacobitism and his political-economic thought. Ramos and Mirowski have pointed out connections between commitments made in the Jacobite propaganda that Steuart was involved in writing and some of the policy discussion in the Principles,Footnote ⁸ but they emphasize the German context and “cameralist influence” of the Principles,Footnote ⁹ and say nothing of the deeper contexts of his conversion to Jacobitism or of how elements of his economic thinking prior to his exile were spelled out in his later work. Steuart’s conception of how monarchs must attend to the “spirit” of the people has also been presented as part of a system of “late Jacobite” thought that adapted earlier counter-Whig principles to the contexts of the reign of George III and influenced radicals later in the century,Footnote ¹⁰ but this and other reappraisals of Steuart’s Jacobite background have hardly begun to explore the contextual origins of his work. Those who have addressed Steuart’s Jacobite past have been right to emphasize the patriotic motivations that surface in certain sections of his Principles,Footnote ¹¹ but they have overlooked the intellectual backdrop of his early political environment, his conversion to Jacobitism at the end of the 1730s, and his immersion in currents of Jacobite-leaning political and economic thought in both Scotland and France in the years between the 1745 rising and his commencement of work on the Principles in the late 1740s.Footnote ¹²

This article uncovers the Jacobite groundwork of Steuart’s variety of state interventionism. It considers Steuart’s intellectual context before and during his active Jacobitism, both in Scotland and during his Grand Tour, establishing in particular his connections with exiled Jacobites who were part of the network around the opposition magazines The Craftsman and Common Sense, before considering the manifesto he wrote for Charles Edward Stuart. It next considers Steuart’s exposure early in his exile to French debates about monarchy and political economy that involved various associates of the Club de l’Entresol, including the Chevalier Ramsay, Viscount Bolingbroke, the Marquis d’Argenson, Voltaire, and Montesquieu. Finally, it discusses some of the central theories and policies described in Steuart’s Principles that sustain ideas which he encountered during his rebel days in Scotland and France. In doing so, it demonstrates that Steuart’s two faces, as a fugitive Jacobite and famed political economist, can be reconciled. James Steuart’s political economy developed from a Jacobite groundwork laid in Scotland and France and drew from radical ideas and agendas for reforming monarchies and promoting modes of state intervention that would serve the public good.

II

There were two important intellectual backdrops to Steuart’s conversion to Jacobitism in his late twenties. The first was the counter-Walpolean network in Scotland. The second was the series of environments he passed through during his Grand Tour from 1735 to 1740. These contexts involved him in arguments about the economic role of the state that were becoming the currency of politics in Scotland and across Britain in the decades after the Union of 1707.Footnote ¹³

James Steuart was an unlikely Jacobite. He was born in 1713, the son of Ann Dalrymple and James Steuart, Baronet of Coltness and Goodtrees, who achieved Scotland’s second-highest law office of Solicitor General. His paternal grandfather, James Steuart of Goodtrees, was a leading light of Restoration Presbyterianism in the 1660s and 1670s,Footnote ¹⁴ before becoming a staunch supporter of James VII and II’s religious policies after returning to Scotland in 1687, and then serving as Lord Advocate for most of the post-Revolutionary period from 1692 to 1709. Goodtrees’s Covenanting schemes, his reconciliation with James VII in 1687, and his role in the 1689 revolution earned him a reputation for duplicity and the nickname “Jamie Wylie” which lasted throughout his years as Scotland’s foremost law officer. But his commitment to Scottish sovereignty trumped his loyalty to the Hanoverian regime: when the Act of Union was proposed in 1706, Goodtrees, by this stage an elder statesman, refused to speak on it, tried to hinder its passage, and petitioned against it.Footnote ¹⁵ One of his few stable positions was a patriotic dedication to sustaining what he saw as legitimate government in Scotland.

Despite his high-flying Presbyterian lineage, our young James Steuart decided that achieving legal office in Hanoverian Scotland was an uninspiring aim. After school at North Berwick and a law degree from Edinburgh University, Steuart rejected or at least postponed the option of a prosperous legal career. Instead, in 1735, by now in his early twenties, he embarked on a Grand Tour from which he returned to Scotland a committed rebel. Rare glimpses of Steuart’s travels reveal that in 1736 and 1737 he met a host of respected Jacobite veterans. The one to whom he became closest was George Keith, the exiled Earl Marischal, a leader of the 1715 rising who had also led a subsequent rising in 1719. By this time living in Spain, Marischal had in his youth been well acquainted with Andrew Fletcher, the outspoken republican patriot, economic writer, and opponent of the Act of Union, who had not supported the Jacobites but had indicated his approbation of the political principles that led Marischal to join the rising in 1715.Footnote ¹⁶ Marischal admired Fletcher throughout his life,Footnote ¹⁷ and earned a reputation for himself as a kind of “republican” as a result of his independent-mindedness and his insistence that any restored Stuart must have their power limited in the interest of the nation.Footnote ¹⁸ Whatever the intellectual substance of their encounters, Steuart developed with Marischal both a lifelong friendship and a political connection that he drew on throughout his Jacobite career.Footnote ¹⁹

Steuart was probably introduced to Marischal by the Duke of Ormonde, whom Steuart visited in the Jacobite enclave at Avignon. At this time anti-Walpolean ideologies were coursing through Ormonde’s Avignon circle, encouraged by Common Sense, a propaganda organ that had begun to appear in February 1737.Footnote ²⁰ It was supported by the exiled Stuart court, and promoted by George Kelly, an Irish clergyman and Jacobite plotter who made for Avignon after escaping from the Tower of London in October 1736.Footnote ²¹ Never explicitly Jacobite, Common Sense featured themes common to those of many articles in The Craftsman,Footnote ²² the journal associated with the British opposition leader Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke. At one time Foreign Secretary to the Pretender James Francis Edward Stuart, Bolingbroke became the unofficial leader of the opposition to Robert Walpole after his return from exile to Britain in 1723, and promoted his vision of a political class that governed according to its active concern for the public good and defended both the constitution and the liberties of those living under it.Footnote ²³ His followers used the language of patriotism to describe this perspective in an attempt to delineate it from what they regarded as the corruption of the oligarchy around Walpole.Footnote ²⁴ Common Sense sustained many of the tropes of this Patriot tradition, with which Steuart would have been very familiar by the time he left Scotland for his Tour.

The Patriot tendency, which had developed across Britain over the course of the late 1720s and the 1730s, emerged by the late 1730s as the distinctive and dominant movement in Scotland for those who were committed to opposing the Walpolean regime.Footnote ²⁵ In Amy Watson’s account, three moments of political crisis galvanized this movement: the extension of the malt tax to Scotland in 1725 at the height of Walpole’s power; the 1734 election that saw Patriots across Britain dent Walpole’s hegemony following the defeat of his plans to extend wine and tobacco excise in 1733; and the Walpole regime’s heavy-handed response in 1736–7 to the riots and lynching of Captain Porteous in Edinburgh, which generated anti-Walpolean sentiment across Scotland.Footnote ²⁶

The malt tax favored landowners by shifting the tax burden onto commodities instead of land and favored English voters by shifting the tax burden from England to other regions of the empire. Steuart, a thirteen-year-old in an intensely political household, would have been aware that the Whig ministry’s imposition had significantly undermined sympathy for Walpole’s government in Scotland. By the time of the 1734 election nine years later, he would have known of the various opposition alliances forming and re-forming in Scotland, as well as the arguments resonating across Britain around which they united: opposition to corruption and place-seeking, to national debt and the rise of a moneyed class, and to regressive taxes that were seen as a drag on the development of the Scottish economy.Footnote ²⁷ Politicians in Scotland like James Erskine, Lord Grange, writing in publications like The Thistle, articulated principles similar to those found in The Craftsman. They promoted policies to create a consumer-driven economy, lessen the tax burden in Scotland, and promote state investment in manufacturing. They also sought equal weight for the constituent parts of the British union and empire.

While these Patriots accepted the Revolution settlement, their links with Jacobites were no secret. After the election, the powerful Fifth Duke of Hamilton, whose lands neighbored the Steuarts’ Lanarkshire estate, joined other peers to challenge the corruption that they alleged had taken place, citing abuses of power which Grange would describe in a pamphlet that was the closest that the Patriot party had to a manifesto.Footnote ²⁸ Grange later became a contributor to Common Sense, and may have written the articles published in 1737 and 1738 which lamented the shortcomings of the Union for Scotland. The Scottish constitution, according to the author’s political mythology, had aligned the royal interest with the interest of the whole country rather than with those who benefit from arbitrary tax and debt policies.Footnote ²⁹ Reading constitutional principles in such political-economic terms was part of the Scottish Patriot opposition project.

Even before his Tour, Steuart had cut his connections with the powerful Walpolean politician Dundas of Arniston, who had mentored him at university. Instead he became a political friend of the powerful Duke of Hamilton, who resigned as a lord of the bedchamber in 1733 in opposition to Walpole’s administration. Hamilton became involved in the Scottish campaign against Walpole’s excise scheme,Footnote ³⁰ and his Jacobite proclivities were noticed in London, where he still spent most of his time.Footnote ³¹ In the years that followed, the political purchase of Jacobitism began to increase rapidly. This rising Jacobite sentiment in the Lowlands was triggered in part by the crisis following the Porteous riots of 1736. The Walpole regime’s suite of suppressive measures following the riots had alarmed even the Argathelians—those in the powerful party of the Second Duke of Argyll—whose loyalty to Walpole seldom wavered. Archibald Campbell, the Earl of Ilay, future Third Duke of Argyll, and another of Walpole’s most loyal nobles, wrote to tell him in 1737 or 1738 that the Jacobites were more active “than ever I knew them” and that “though the most of those who foment this Patriot spirit here are still not Jacobites, yet I plainly for see [sic] that if they shall find that all their fancied hopes are blasted by a different turn in England, Jacobitism will be their next resource.”Footnote ³² At this time, just as some Argathelians came over to the Patriot party in disgust at Walpole’s measures, some Patriots shifted in favour of out-and-out Jacobite rebellion. Watson draws a hard dichotomy between those who saw the Patriot movement as a route to “economic prosperity, a measure of independence and a voice in their own governance,” and those who “sought to overturn the British system entirely and start anew, heeding the overtures of a bonnie prince from across the sea.”Footnote ³³ But the gap was not too wide for many to bridge it.

In 1739, around the time of Steuart’s return to Scotland, a number of nobles and gentry, including his soon-to-be-brother-in-law David Wemyss, Lord Elcho, formed a society of Highland and Lowland gentlemen called the Buck Club to explore the prospect of restoring the Stuarts, to petition the French court, and to make preparations for rebellion.Footnote ³⁴ Club members were motivated by many issues: opposition to the Union, the restoration of the Episcopal Church, toleration for Catholics, and the dismantling of the Whig patronage system. Whatever their motives, many of them moved in the circles of the Patriot party that promoted more just and even tax distribution, investment in infrastructure rather than war, and the redistribution of power away from the moneyed class.Footnote ³⁵ These were among the principles of the Lowland opposition milieu who took up the Jacobite cause in the late 1730s and early 1740s.

Steuart’s encounters during his Tour, and the overlaps between the political circles of Scottish Patriots and exiled Stuart sympathizers, are a critical context for understanding his shift to Jacobitism. One must not assume any inconsistency between the political and economic principles he encountered in Europe and those which he had taken with him or developed after his return. Nor is his conversion to Jacobitism best understood as a result of being seduced by exiles committed to the Stuarts’ indefeasible, divine, or hereditary right to rule. He continued to be a respected political activist, and in 1742, even as he was holding private meetings to turn people to the Stuart cause, Steuart organized the parliamentary campaign for Hamilton’s chosen candidate, Steuart’s friend Baron Mure.Footnote ³⁶ A few years later, in 1744, Steuart ran another campaign in Midlothian for his anti-Walpolean relative, John Baird of Newbeith, against Sir Charles Gilmour, Dundas of Arniston’s candidate.Footnote ³⁷ During the 1744 election Dundas excluded Steuart from the voters’ roll, which in Steuart’s eyes was a case of serious corruption. Steuart challenged Dundas in court—unsuccessfully but impressively—and the icy relationship between Dundas and Steuart never thawed. Steuart remained committed to political life, but as Dundas’s tightening grip on power made it impossible for Steuart to advance as a statesman, he found himself increasingly central to the Jacobites’ recruitment efforts in the Lowlands.Footnote ³⁸ In due course, after Charles Edward Stuart captured Edinburgh in September 1745, Steuart presented himself at Holyrood and used his place in Charles’s privy council to recommend policies for the interim government. He also produced propaganda, including the manifesto issued by Charles Edward Stuart on 10 October.Footnote ³⁹

This manifesto is the earliest published text in which Steuart addressed issues of political economy,Footnote ⁴⁰ and it mounts a Jacobite case on the basis of Patriot positions. Addressed to the people of England but clearly aware of its Scottish audience, the manifesto appealed to opponents of Walpole’s debt and tax policies and to those concerned about patronage and corruption. It endorsed the dissolution of the Union and promised tolerance for diverse denominations. Its political substance was markedly different from other statements issued by the royal Stuarts. Whereas various declarations issued by the Pretender over the previous months and years had asserted his royal prerogative, this manifesto declared that the Pretender’s son Charles, as de facto ruler of Scotland, was attuned to the “inclinations of the People of Scotland.” The manifesto declared that the king unequivocally refused to ratify the “pretended Union” and committed to “reinstate all his Subjects, in the full enjoyment of their religion, laws & liberties.”Footnote ⁴¹ This was a major departure from the principles of divine right maintained by many who had come with Charles Edward Stuart from France, including his former tutor Thomas Sheridan and other Irish émigrés whose focus was always on regaining the Crown of England. Steuart’s manifesto was a striking expression of the aspiration to restore political power to Scotland, uphold laws justly and evenly, and extend liberties to all British subjects.Footnote ⁴²

The manifesto also addressed questions of political economy, declaring that the national debt was “a heavy load upon the Nation” and that the methods for addressing it must involve Parliament.Footnote ⁴³ This pledge to reduce the national debt reflected widespread antipathy towards Walpole’s extractive borrowing policies in pursuit of imperial expansion. The manifesto also aired grievances relating to corruption, placemen, and the length of the parliamentary terms that had been central to the charges of corruption challenged in 1734 by the likes of Hamilton and Grange. Lord George Murray, who worked closely with Steuart, echoed this language when he explained that he was motivated to join the cause because the “practice of the Ministers” had shown that “by bribery alone they would rule.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Steuart used this package of policies, principles, and commitments to promote rebellion.

While this manifesto was a product of Scottish debates, it took stances similar to those of English Jacobites, such as Watkin Williams Wynn’s position on Walpole’s rising national debt and his corruption of the Parliament and people, and William Shippen’s adoption of rhetoric in the Bolingbrokean tradition of the 1730s.Footnote ⁴⁵ By 1745 Bolingbroke was clear that he was no longer interested in the Jacobite camp, but his conception of an organized and principled opposition party may well have inspired Steuart and other Scottish Lowland Jacobites. Patriot ideas are the substance of the manifesto, not theories of passive obedience or divine right. Historians continue to grapple to fit these latter residual and often ridiculed principles into the ideological nexus of Scottish Jacobitism, and some still sustain claims made by Hume and Kames in the wake of the ’45 that such positions predominated among Jacobite adherents in Scotland.Footnote ⁴⁶ Steuart’s manifesto, however, promotes a free and legal parliament, and discusses the Stuarts’ “undoubted right to the crown” without claiming it to be hereditary or divine.Footnote ⁴⁷

Steuart’s manifesto presented the official policy of the Jacobites during their occupation of Scotland. The Pretender pledged to “make the Good of His People the sole Rule of His Actions” as he “redress[ed] and remove[d] the encroachments made upon” them.Footnote ⁴⁸ In his effort to motivate fellow Lowlanders to join the Stuart cause, Steuart appealed to those disillusioned with the Hanoverian regime by deploying ideas developed in the Patriot movement and expressing them in the form of principles of political economy fit for a post-Union Scotland. He sought to invest the monarch in Scotland with power to redress grievances, remove encroachments, and repeal the Act of Union. Steuart articulated in the manifesto the aspiration for a constitutionally bound executive that was nevertheless capable of enacting a major constitutional change, and of intervening administratively and economically to ensure the extension of liberties to all. Steuart’s prospectus offered a vision of an active state guided and limited by the public interest. His idea of monarchy, forged through dialogue with Scottish Patriots and Jacobite exiles, would develop during his own exile that began in 1746.

III

However attractive Steuart’s Jacobite prospectus was to Lowland commoners and gentry, military priorities trumped political economic visions. When Charles Edward Stuart decided to march for London, Steuart was sent to Paris to raise funds to support the invasion.Footnote ⁴⁹ It was a futile adventure. After the Jacobite defeat at Culloden in 1746 Steuart privately reaffirmed his loyalty to the Stuarts, and as late as January 1749 he privately pledged himself again to James Francis Edward Stuart in a letter affirming his “unshaken loyalty.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Meanwhile he started petitioning to return home and resume a political life. But Dundas of Arniston had nursed his wrath, and persuaded the government not to forgive the Jacobite agent whom one British official called “the Pretender’s principal adviser.”Footnote ⁵¹ Facing an exile of uncertain duration, Steuart had to choose between moving in the Jacobite circles of Paris and beginning the long process of seeking rehabilitation with the British regime in the hope of eventual repatriation.Footnote ⁵² He opted for the quieter life and relocated to Angoulême in 1747,Footnote ⁵³ where he started researching and writing systematically on issues of political economy, commencing his work that would become the Principles.Footnote ⁵⁴ The debates taking place in France in the late 1740s were thus an important backdrop to the development of Steuart’s political philosophy that underpinned his political-economic ideas.

During his mission in Paris, Steuart had encountered statesmen who had dedicated much thought to the question of how monarchs should wield power in contemporary commercial societies. Most were eager to see a Stuart restoration. One of them, René-Louis de Voyer de Paulmy, Marquis d’Argenson (1694–1757), had in 1739 expressed his conviction that with “the Hanoverians and Walpole combining together for rapine,” France should support the Stuarts to bring about “a legitimate, peaceful king, reigning according to the rights of the nation.”Footnote ⁵⁵ The Jacobite manifesto he penned with Voltaire in 1745 relied more on hereditary and geopolitical arguments than on appeals to the interest of the British public,Footnote ⁵⁶ yet there are many resemblances between d’Argenson’s political perspectives and those of Walpole’s critics. His journal during his years as a minister from the end of 1744 until February 1747 records his frustration with the French Court party, whose degraded morality and flattery of the king inhibited the ability of ministers to carry out reforms.Footnote ⁵⁷ The ministers, seeking to implement reforms, had to appeal to public support; “but no one at Court ever speaks of or stipulates for the public.”Footnote ⁵⁸ D’Argenson continued to support Jacobite efforts until his dismissal as foreign minister in 1747.Footnote ⁵⁹ Later described by Steuart’s brother-in-law and fellow exile Lord Elcho as one of the “savants who did honour to France,” d’Argenson would in turn remember Steuart as “un homme d’esprit.”Footnote ⁶⁰

D’Argenson was certainly not alone in expressing his political ideals and justifying monarchical reform in terms of the public and its interest. Along with Voltaire and other savants, d’Argenson had been a member of an exclusive club called the Club de l’Entresol which debated, among other subjects, the power and policies appropriate to the French monarch and to monarchs in general. Its members were all French, with two exceptions: the Scottish Jacobite Andrew Michael Ramsay, one-time secretary to the Archbishop Fénelon and tutor to Charles Edward Stuart; and Viscount Bolingbroke.Footnote ⁶¹ While the range of the club’s members’ positions differed widely, most worked from the basic principle that centralized royal power could and should be wielded in the interest of the public. This principle underpinned their contributions to the science of political economy and the variety of positions they took as to the appropriate concentration of power with the monarch. The club ceased to meet after 1731, and the particular influence of each thinker on Steuart is hard to delineate, but he would have been familiar with these debates as he came to terms with his idea of the public interest and the requisite degree of state interference to advance it.Footnote ⁶²

Of the club’s members, the Chevalier Ramsay (1686–1743), was superficially the most akin to Steuart. A Scot and former tutor to Steuart’s brother-in-law, David Wemyss, Ramsay was living in exile as a result of his ardent support for the Stuarts earlier in life. He had earned his savant reputation as secretary to the Archbishop Fénelon, the most influential French writer on monarchy from the previous generation.Footnote ⁶³ Ramsay’s major political essays promoted the extension of liberty within the bounds of absolutism. His Essay de politique, published in 1719, advocated the concentration of power in the king in a context where, in Britain and increasingly also in France, power was shifting towards parliament.Footnote ⁶⁴ Its second edition, entitled Essay philosophique sur le gouvernement civil, explicitly expressed its Jacobite allegiance.Footnote ⁶⁵ In these works, Ramsay presented his theory that the fundamental aim of government was to sustain “the Order and Union of Society,” where subjects obeyed the duties of the Law of Nature and followed their “love of Order, and the publick Good in general.”Footnote ⁶⁶ In such a society the people were bound to be dependent and unequal, with God-given authority vested in the monarch, who had (or should have) absolute power in the last resort, including the right to control the actions of people when he judged it to be in the public good, and the prerogative to control legislative power, pass taxes, and make war. Ramsay proposed a form of “Monarchy, moderated by Aristocracy,” with a senate to assist the king, and the multitude kept from power.Footnote ⁶⁷

Some historians have treated Ramsay as the archetypical Jacobite political philosopher. Nick Childs has called his “view of government … essentially a Jacobite one, but strongly influenced by the ideas of Fénelon and by his own religious views.” This raises the question of what an essentially Jacobite view is, and Childs suggests that as “the most natural form of government” Jacobites saw one “developing out of earlier patriarchal societies,” a kind of Filmerian conservatism.Footnote ⁶⁸ Doowan Ahn describes the Essay philosophique as a “serious attempt to forge a Jacobite theory of government in accordance with the instructions of Fénelon,” and Gabriel Glickman suggests that it expressed the “Fénelonian undertone in the [Jacobite] diaspora.”Footnote ⁶⁹ While Michael Sonenscher offers a rare exploration of Ramsay’s interest in the pursuit of liberty under laws,Footnote ⁷⁰ Andrew Mansfield has insisted that Ramsay drove Fénelon’s ideas in a patriarchal and authoritarian direction.Footnote ⁷¹ The detail and nuance of Ramsay’s political philosophy is not directly relevant here; while they may well have met in Paris, Steuart would have been cautious about being connected with such a Jacobite celebrity and he never referenced him directly in his Principles. It is enough to recognize that Ramsay created something of a bridge for conservative absolutists in Jacobite court circles towards a position that recognized the benefits of allowing religious and commercial liberty in modern monarchy, while preserving the tradition of patriarchal absolutism often associated with seventeenth-century Stuart politics.

Where Ramsay sought to impose fairly faint limits on the monarch, Bolingbroke went much further than Ramsay in emphasizing the compatibility of a powerful monarch and public liberties.Footnote ⁷² While Ramsay’s ideas had little resonance in his native country, Bolingbroke’s ideas, as has been seen, were central to the opposition principles in Britain. The Idea of a Patriot King, published in 1738, presents his idea of how the interests of all might best be served by limitations on the monarch that would constrain a bad prince, while a good one—a patriot king—would have “power as extended as the most absolute monarch can boast.”Footnote ⁷³ His model resembled some paternalistic elements of Ramsay’s ideas while emphasizing the threat to liberties presented by a regime that concentrated too much power at the top.

Ramsay and Bolingbroke both believed that strong monarchy depended on a high degree of inequality. Ramsay believed that this was essential, otherwise everyone would pursue their own separate interests, while for Bolingbroke it was necessary so that the gentry and nobility would continue to hold a significant share of influence over monarchs. By contrast, the club’s secretary, d’Argenson, had in the 1730s set out a different vision of inequality under monarchy in his leveling agenda for a “democratic monarchy.” His Considérations sur le gouvernement ancient et présent de la France, probably written in 1737, placed the blame for France’s fiscal difficulties on venal offices, financiers, tax collectors, and the prevalence of charity rather than industry as the means of supporting the rural poor. His Considérations, which he called “my manuscript on democratic monarchy,” set out his case for socially egalitarian reforms.Footnote ⁷⁴ It presented the case for a strong monarch able to enact reforms in the “interest of the greatest number of citizens.”Footnote ⁷⁵ To enact the “thousand new commercial and police regulations” that d’Argenson had in mind required unified government under a monarch whose authority “should increase in force and solidity” through the establishment of the “democracy” he described, in which people were executors of the laws developed by the monarch, and authorized their deputies to perform the requisite administration.Footnote ⁷⁶ This concentration and distribution of power was in contrast to that of England, where, in d’Argenson’s view, the Commons divided public power which he believed ought to be unified.Footnote ⁷⁷ D’Argenson believed that if power was dispersed among aristocrats then inequality would prevail, whereas reform in the public interest relied on a strong and centralized power and would result in a tendency “toward making citizens equal.”Footnote ⁷⁸ By contrast, the right to purchase places in government resulted in the “alienation of public power.”Footnote ⁷⁹ As Stephen Sawyer explains, d’Argenson’s plan “at once [to] increase liberty and public power” was fully compatible with absolutism.Footnote ⁸⁰

D’Argenson’s treatise was highly praised by Voltaire,Footnote ⁸¹ who in the late 1730s had collaborated with Frederick the Great to write Anti-Machiavel, which laid out a system of monarchy in which the subjects came to resemble citizens in their liberty and equality. It prescribed that “a prince must treat all the orders he commands in his state equally well, without making distinctions that would cause jealousies disastrous for his interests.”Footnote ⁸² The notion of equal treatment required the prince to be subordinate to law and constrained from doing ill, on the model that Voltaire suggested England had developed, “where the Prince is all-powerful to do good, and, at the same time, is restrain’d from committing evil.”Footnote ⁸³ In the early 1750s Voltaire took up the thread again with his Thoughts on Public Administration, which developed his own view of the kinds of liberty and equality he thought compatible with monarchy. He argued that “equality does not mean the abolition of all subordination: we are all equal as men, but not [equal] as members of society.” Thus a monarch should be constrained by law, and all should be equal according to that law: “The best form of government seems to be the one where all ranks of society are equally protected by the law.”Footnote ⁸⁴

This principle that freedom consists in being dependent only on the law was a common position of the time, and one shared by an associate of the club who was much less sympathetic to d’Argenson’s perspective. Charles-Louis Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755), another Jacobite sympathizer, published his De l’esprit des lois in 1748 around a decade after d’Argenson’s Considérations began to circulate. It presented his theory that any significant concentration of power in the monarch’s hands risked jeopardizing the liberty of all, and it identified this danger in d’Argenson’s theory of government.Footnote ⁸⁵ Without the nobility, the most “natural intermediate, subordinate power,” there might be “a despot” but there could be “no monarch.” It followed, for Montesquieu, that to reform monarchies to be more equal by dissolving the power of the nobility would lead to the end of liberty altogether.Footnote ⁸⁶

These three figures—d’Argenson, Voltaire, and Montesquieu—shaped the French debate about monarchy that would have been familiar to Steuart when he lived in Paris in 1746 and during the following years when he began to research and write his Principles. Montesquieu’s particular influence on Steuart has often been acknowledged, but this brief survey indicates the broader significance of this debate as Steuart began to refine the political principles that he made the groundwork of his wide-ranging study of political economy. There is more to uncover about the engagement in the late 1740s and early 1750s between Scottish Patriots, Jacobite exiles, and the Entresol associates, and further research might establish how far, for instance, French ideas helped Jacobites come to terms with the political vision that had led them to rise. Equally, a closer study of d’Argenson’s papers would reveal how far he was influenced by Patriot and Jacobite arguments.Footnote ⁸⁷ Such investigations, however, would not necessarily shed more light on Steuart’s thought: he was careful after 1746 not to align himself with a party, nor does his Principles betray any clear partisan inclinations.Footnote ⁸⁸ But while many of Steuart’s sources remain opaque, he was certainly familiar with these debates about the powers that the monarch ought to wield and exercise, and his conception of the “state” reflects the conceptions of other Scottish and French writers of the “monarch.” By understanding Steuart as a late Jacobite political-economic thinker whose ideas were formed in the 1740s and 1750s, the relevance of these contexts becomes clear for understanding his own conception of an active, interventionist state that would extend liberties equally to all.

IV

Steuart was more distant from these debates after his move to the intellectually arid Angoulême in 1747. By 1752, he complained in a letter that he was living in the “dull old way,” with no hope of changing the world for the good.Footnote ⁸⁹ But Steuart had spent these years exploring practical questions of political economy and considering how to balance the interests and freedoms of a population, and to inhibit powerful classes with extractive priorities from jeopardizing the liberties and livelihoods of the people. These problems guided his writing of the Principles. Much of the work consists of detailed explorations of the economic condition of countries at different stages of development, and of long excursions into policy debates ranging from population control to financial innovation. But it is grounded in his answer to the question of how—and how far—a state should intervene in the economy to make reforms in the public interest and counteract the opportunities that certain interests have to pursue their own advantage rather than public prosperity and liberty. Some may be inconvenienced, his Preface to the Principles explained, “under our free modern governments, whenever a wise statesman sets about correcting old abuses,” but the duty of the statesman is relative to “the general good of that society of which he is the head.”Footnote ⁹⁰ At the heart of Steuart’s legitimation of such a state is his theory of just subordination and dependence. He defined the theory’s principles in terms of the “subordination of the laws” and regarded such subordination as being entirely compatible with freedom.Footnote ⁹¹ This theory has resonances with the activist, law-bound absolutism promoted by the Entresol set. The kinds of laws it permitted gave plenty of grounds for a state to intervene in terms of tax, investment, borrowing, financial regulation, and other economic matters. On Steuart’s account, good political economy required a strong state that subordinated all classes to laws that could ensure the freedom of all and the advancement of the public interest that was not served by corrupt ministers or heavy tax impositions. Of course, any such concentration of power brought with it “inconveniences” or harms that would affect some “in consequence of a step taken for general reformation.” It also brought with it the risk of arbitrary misuse of powers and prerogatives. But such risks could be solved, Steuart said, as long as the monarch was “bridled” and kept within certain limits.Footnote ⁹²

Steuart, like Voltaire, accepted that equality does not necessarily mean the end of subordination. Early in the Principles, Steuart asserts that the “authority which superiors have over inferiors” is justified (only) in proportion to inferiors’ dependence (such as where a person depends on a master for food).Footnote ⁹³ However, it followed that subordination should diminish as people and classes become more independent, until they would depend only upon security and protection, and so become justly and equally subordinate to the protecting power alone, under which “no person, no class should be under a greater subordination than another.”Footnote ⁹⁴ This is Steuart’s theory of the progress of the society from a system of necessary inequality to one of equal subordination. This, for Steuart, was infinitely preferable to the idea of classes struggling to achieve economic power in an open field, or cabals and corporations seeking to monopolize the open market, realizing their particular commercial interests at the expense of general welfare, or attaining political supremacy in parliament. Such principles are expressed in a similar way in his 1769 essay proposing policies for his native Lanark, where he writes,

To steward the economy in the common interest, a state must have the full range of requisite powers and prerogatives to create and enforce laws that, if necessary, compromised the privileges of the higher classes.

This principle was the foundation on which Steuart developed many of the policies set out in the Principles. The breadth of topics and powers it discusses goes far beyond what this article can address, but three policy areas among many demonstrate the kind of robust, active, and interventionist government which Steuart regarded as being lawful and compatible with liberty while advancing the interests of the nation: minimum income, labor market regulation, and proportionate taxation. A minimum income should be established “by comparing the price of the markets, with the lowest rate of daily labour” to discover “when it is necessary to augment the wages, and to what extent.” This way, income will have a floor that is relative to subsistence costs but can also rise with the value of work.Footnote ⁹⁶ Maintaining enough jobs paid at the minimum income level depended on there being adequate work, and for this reason, the good statesman pays attention to prices in order that he “feels perfectly where hands are wanting” in the labor market,Footnote ⁹⁷ and takes care to “support a perfect balance between the hands employed in work and the demand for their labour,”Footnote ⁹⁸ keeping a certain number employed in necessary branches of industry, cognizant that “whatever can render this [demand] precarious, will ruin the undertaking, and those employed in it.”Footnote ⁹⁹ The lack of employment, he would reiterate in his 1769 essay, “is not the fault of these poor people, but of those whose business it is to find out employment for them.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Meanwhile taxation, a third policy area, which Steuart regarded as the mightiest tool in the prince’s toolkit, should not harm workers or raise living costs. The “principle advantages of proportional taxes,” he wrote, “is [sic] to throw the whole of the burden upon the rich.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ The tax that the industrious pay on consumption should be “drawn back” through higher labour prices.Footnote ¹⁰²

This very brief sample of the kinds of position that Steuart sets out and analyzes, often at exhaustive length, provides a picture of the variety of state interventions presented in his Principles.Footnote ¹⁰³ Full employment, minimum income, labor market regulation, and progressive taxation are often associated with a strong, centralized, interventionist state that is commonly characterized and even caricatured as a creature of Continental thinking. But while Steuart certainly shaped the details of such policies during his time in France and Germany, and back in Scotland in the 1750s and 1760s, his development of these and other policies in the Principles should not be seen apart from his intellectual formation and the contexts and debates that shaped his own political principles.

V

On Steuart’s account, good political economy required a strong state that subordinated all classes to laws while maintaining the capacity to provide for the freedom and subsistence of the whole population within a structure of dependence that was subordinate to the general good and sustained by the power of an absolutely sovereign yet bridled state. In this, Steuart wove ideas from the French monarchy debates together with Scottish Patriot and Jacobite traditions. He grappled with problems that had confronted Scotland and had been articulated in his Jacobite manifesto: the imposition of extractive policies that harmed the population by taking wealth out of the country rather than allowing it to circulate, the great weight imposed by national debt, and the corruption of government by those seeking personal wealth. These problems shaped the focus of the Principles, which he finished about two decades after the 1745–6 Jacobite rising. Against the backdrop of the changing dynamics that he observed in the economy, his Principles made the case for a sovereign who would govern with the kind of centralized authority that was denied to Scotland and, in his eyes, was necessary if the interest, equality, and prosperity of the public was to be prioritized.

This chronological and contextual coverage of Steuart’s life and works begins to fill the unsatisfying historiographical lacuna between Steuart’s earlier political life and his later economic work, and to reconcile his dual character as a determined rebel looking for the restoration of Stuart rule and a diligent economist envisioning radical policies for modern government. More work is required to comprehensively situate the different drafts of his texts and the contexts of his intellectual development through the 1750s and 1760s. But this article has allowed us to make more sense of the currents of Scottish political thought that scholars have detected in Steuart without connecting them with the Jacobite movement. In particular, it gives a new basis to the suggestions of Ramos and Mirowski and to my own earlier research about Steuart’s place in a current of political thought that includes the republican Andrew Fletcher, the Jacobite general Earl Marischal, the Chevalier Ramsay, and the Jacobite sympathizer d’Argenson. It also connects a species of Jacobite thought with the active interventionism that developed in France in the 1740s, whose influence on Jean-Jacques Rousseau and radical thinkers later in the century has been charted by Michael Sonenscher.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ However else Steuart is seen, his work should be regarded as part of 1730s–1750s debates about how the growing power of states was altering the nature, capacity, and potential of government. This in turn opens a new view of the significance of Jacobitism in the development of principles of political economy which, despite efforts by Adam Smith and others to bury them, deeply influenced French and American revolutionaries, Hegel, Marx, and the broader history of political economy.