Men of Little Faith: The Country Party Ideology in Britain and America

This article revisits the debate about the British eighteenth-century Country Party ideology and its influence on America. It points out that the Country Party tradition could best be understood as a libertarian resistance movement against the modern state. The article remedies the misrepresentations of the Country Party economic philosophy as feudal, agrarian, or anticapitalist. It reconceptualizes it as a philosophy of proverbial men of little faith, skeptical not of progress and modernity as such, but of the mercantilist regime created by the Walpole in England and emulated by Hamiltonian nationalists in America. The political and especially the economic philosophy of the British Country Party is compared with the Anti-Federalist and Jeffersonian doctrines in America, and the conclusion is reached that the Country Party thinkers and pamphleteers of both countries were not the slaves of romantic visions and republican virtues but the followers of Adam Smith, David Hume, and Jean-Baptiste Say.