Republicanism Revisited: The Case of James Burgh.

James Burgh published three volumes of 'Political Disquisitions' in 1774, and these found wide circulation among the American political elite. Burgh demonstrated the influence of English opposition ideology and republicanism on the minds of American revolutionaries. The conventional reading of Burgh is wrong, and "the republican reading" of most of the opposition ideology is also wrong. The English reformers were liberal capitalists, not republicans. Burgh was a Lockean, not a civic humanist.