Henry St. John, first viscount Bolingbroke is best known for his development of the classic British Republican theory. In this theory, a healthy, virtuous English republic is dependent on a sturdy, independent citizenry, especially yeoman "County" gentry tied to the land, agriculture, and rural values and traditions. The British Parliament and the king should reflect this virtue of farmers and patriots. Corruption of this republic comes from a highly centralized government that is tied to business, commerce, paper money, the stock market, banks, and appointed administrators. Bolingbroke saw the long ministry of Robert Walpole as embodying such anti-republican corrupt government with its high taxes, public debt, standing army, and imperial pretensions. Much of Bolingbroke's "civic republicanism" influenced the American Revolutionaries Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. The American resistance to the British Empire was seen as preserving the "virtuous republic" of yeoman farmers against the corrupt financial and military "Court" of Great Britain under King George III. This "republican ideology" continued in the United States under the Jeffersonian Republicans and agrarians who opposed the political centralization, patronage, and financial manipulation of Alexander Hamilton and the Federalists. Bolingbroke's ideas differed from the Americans in their faith in a "Patriot King" preserving traditional British values and in a socially conservative "gentleman's" republic that is opposed to social equality. Bolingbroke's republicanism is more aristocratic than its American derivative: It opposes banking and commerce from a nostalgic "rural gentry" perspective; this becomes a romantic English Tory outlook later that is associated with Edmund Burke.

Adopting the classical republican ideas of ancient Greek and Roman political thought, Bolingbroke's republicanism sees history in terms of the cycles of birth, growth, decline, and death of a republic. The healthy "adult" republic emphasizes civic virtue, the common good, self-sacrifice, and so on, while creeping corruption tempts with private interest, economic gain, and personal immoral conduct. Once a state is corrupted by financial intrigue and power politics, it can only be revived by a return to original republican principles of public virtue, devotion to the common good, patriotism, and duty.

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