First Principles Baldwin's political principles must be viewed in the context of the eighteenth-century British “Country Party,” a loose coalition of Parliamentarians whose influence was also felt in the American Revolution and subsequent Jacksonian politics. The Country party embodied a civic humanism that drew on ancient Greek and Roman conceptions of citizenship, and the value of selfless political participation for the public good; those selfish few who placed their private interests before the public good threatened the moral commitment of all citizens to political participation. The civic humanism of the Country party rejected the commercial ideology of the royal "Court” party. The Country party had a republican emphasis that sought to preserve the power of a democratic parliament from the encroachments of the crown during the vast expansion of state administration, public credit, and the financial and commercial revolutions in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth centuries. It was similar to American conceptions of “civic republicanism” as they developed after the revolution among Jacksonian Democrats, as well as in the Chartist movement in Britain in the late 1830s.
First Principles Baldwin's political principles must be viewed in the context of the eighteenth-century British “Country Party,” a loose coalition of Parliamentarians whose influence was also felt in the American Revolution and subsequent Jacksonian politics. The Country party embodied a civic humanism that drew on ancient Greek and Roman conceptions of citizenship, and the value of selfless political participation for the public good; those selfish few who placed their private interests before the public good threatened the moral commitment of all citizens to political participation The civic humanism of the Country party rejected the commercial ideology of the royal "Court” party. The Country party had a republican emphasis that sought to preserve the power of a democratic parliament from the encroachments of the crown during the vast expansion of state administration, public credit, and the financial and commercial revolutions in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth centuries. It was similar to American conceptions of “civic republicanism” as they developed after the revolution among Jacksonian Democrats, as well as in the Chartist movement in Britain in the late 1830s.