Book Review

Canada and the United States

This is an ambitious, well-constructed, and ultimately provocative study of the American concept of wealth distribution, a neglected area of investigation that James L. Huston uses to illuminate the requisites of a democratic polity. Rooting this concept in what he finds to be widely held axioms of eighteenth-century republicanism, Huston theorizes that the revolutionary generation prescribed a foundation for political discourse concerning the proper form of government, wealth distribution, and economic development that lasted for over a century. The subtext of his discussion is the continuities in political philosophy and economic processes that defined an integrated historical period: the age of the American Revolution, 1765–1880. Through much of the nineteenth century, American politics and ideology (themselves embodying the continuity of two moderately opposing forces, which Huston places on the Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian political axes) were devoted to working out the implications and premises of the Revolution. This historical stage was abruptly and harshly terminated, during the years 1880–1900, by the rise of a consolidated industrial economic and social order that destroyed a property system based on individual competence and opportunity and rendered the axioms of republican political economy irrelevant. Huston's interpretation, including his selection of axioms and, perhaps more important, his characterization of the pre-Civil War economy, is controversial; given the clarity of his theoretical framework, his candid probing of the ambiguities in republicanism, and his strong documentation affecting commonly contested points, it certainly merits serious consideration.

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Huston's primary concern is to delineate the axioms and demonstrate their longevity in political discourse. This is intellectual history written from the perspective of political philosophy and economic theory. Huston's first, and central, axiom is "the labor theory of property/value," which signifies the laborer's entitlement to "the fruits of labor" (perhaps the key phrase in republican political economy). The conjunctive "property/value," however, which he uses throughout the study, raises problems that the author does not adequately address. Although he cites, and draws on, the standard literature of republicanism, he ignores C. B. Macpherson's seminal work on the imbrication of property and freedom (particularly as manifested in the Levellers' concept of suffrage restriction), and hence his conjunctive possibly obscures the existence of contradictory elements—that is, two distinct labor theories, one legimating property, the other the fruits of labor specific to the laborer. Even in a commercial agrarian republic, nonpropertied social forces, urban and rural, have striven for an equitable reward for their labor. The difficulty in ascertaining the meaning of the term "equitable" (with reference to wealth distribution) in the discourse of revolutionists, Jacksonians, and abolitionists, among others, despite Huston's scrupulous attempt to detect shades of meaning, reveals the restrictive cast imparted to the phrase "fruits of labor" under the auspices of republicanism. Nevertheless, this is not a fatal flaw in his analysis, for he is prepared to accept the consanguinity between republicanism and liberal capitalism. To this extent, the labor theory of property/value remains serviceable as a persisting theme for later decades: as Huston shows, it formed the basis for the free labor ideology and constituted an effective critique of the slave system.

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