Imposture, Fraud, and the Politics of Republicanism

Much has been written about republicanism in the eighteenth century.  Dominating this discussion has been the “Atlantic” or  “Anglo-Saxon” model, articulated by, among others, J.G.A. Pocock and Gordon Wood. There are, of course, many ways in which one can discuss a European-wide republicanism (as, for instance, a “shared European heritage”), but perhaps more useful historically are studies that emphasize the varieties of republicanism. Wijnand Mijnhardt and Jonathan Israel have argued that “city burghers whose interests were commercial and non-agrarian” shaped the republicanism of cities like Amsterdam and Hamburg. Fears of the deleterious effects increased wealth had on political and civic virtue animated controversy in states like England or the infant United States but remained muted in mercantile republics, where few agonized over acquisition of a wealth that (albeit not solely) qualified men for civic office and underwrote their social position. 

Nonetheless, there were points of overlap, although sometimes the similarities were superficial.  “Transparency” was one and the mercantile republics – at least rhetorically –  valued transparency in business deals, but also in government, even if both were less frequently practiced as preached.  In an environment of economic volatility, fraud in, for instance, bills of exchange threatened to undermine the whole system.  Fraud was inextricably linked with imposters, with those who pretended to be and pretended to have that which they did not. Impostures and frauds threatened the transparency that sustained economics and politics. Indeed, political and economic virtues so tightly entwined that the language condemning both was virtually identical.  This paper investigates the ways in which imposture and fraud were seen to raise dangers to moral, economic, and political order in the quite concrete forms of individuals and individual actions.