The Influence of Continental Thinkers
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entitled not only to the rights of Englishmen, some maintained, but to the
‘‘natural rights of life, liberty and estate’’ (Locke’s phrase) common to all
mankind.
The Influence of Continental Thinkers
It should come as no surprise that only a handful of contemporary European thinkers on the continent had much influence in the colonies. Most
European states were governed by powerful monarchs who were strangers to constitutional government. Germany and Italy, divided into principalities, did not even exist as sovereign nations. Although the Europeans had experimented with confederation government, political power
was almost everywhere centralized, and there was no tradition, as in
the American colonies, of local self-government to serve as a model for
building a modern federal system with two levels of government. The
predominant view in Europe, as expressed by Jean Bodin in his De Republica (1576), was that national sovereignty could not be divided and
was ‘‘unrestrained by laws.’’ The European legal system, based on the
civil law of ancient Rome, but differing from one nation to the next because of the infusion of local customs and practices, differed substantially from Anglo-American common law. It was far less hospitable to the
kinds of civil liberties that the English-speaking peoples had come to expect, and as we have already seen did not even allow for jury trials.
A few educated Americans were familiar with the works of some of
the great international law jurists—Jean Jacques Burlamaqui, Emmerich
Vattel, Samuel Pufendorf, and Hugo Grotius—who wrote on the law of
nations and had much to say about the meaning of justice and ethical
practices in international relations; but probably the bulk of their influence in America came later, after the United States had become an independent country, adopted the Constitution, and entered into diplomatic
relations with foreign governments.
There was considerable intellectual activity in France, which in the
eighteenth century had become the center of radical political theory; but
the Americans showed little interest, and when they did, as in the case of
John Adams, they often expressed profound disagreement. Few American leaders embraced the wild and visionary doctrines of Jean Jacques