TheCommonwealth men,Commonwealthmen,Commonwealth's men, orCommonwealth Party were highly outspoken BritishProtestant religious, political, and economic reformers during the early 18th century. They were active in the movement called theCountry Party. They promotedrepublicanism and had a great influence onRepublicanism in the United States, but little impact in Britain.^[1]

The most noted Commonwealthmen wereJohn Trenchard andThomas Gordon, who wrote the seminal workCato's Letters between 1720 and 1723. Other members includeRobert Crowley, Henry Brinkelow,Thomas Beccon,Thomas Lever, andJohn Hales. They condemnedcorruption and lack of morality in British political life, theorizing that onlycivic virtue could protect a country fromdespotism and ruin.

Their criticism aboutenclosure and the general material plight of the poor were particularly notable to early twentieth-century scholars likeRichard Tawney who saw in them a valuable though regrettably abortive form ofChristian socialism that represented a preferable alternative to the view ofMax Weber thatProtestantism enabled and sustained the rise ofcapitalism.^{[citation needed]} On the other hand, it has been argued that the Commonwealthmen "by no means stand against an individualistic or capitalistic spirit, and — despite what [for example, historians JGA Pocock and Gordon Wood] have claimed — are far from espousing classical virtue or the Aristotelian conception of man aszoon politikon [a political animal]."^[2]

Although nearly all British politicians and thinkers rejected the ideas of the Commonwealthmen in the eighteenth century, these writers had a powerful effect on British colonial America. It is estimated that half the private libraries in theAmerican Colonies held bound volumes ofCato's Letters on their shelves.^[3]

• Trevor Colbourn,The Lamp of Experience: Whig History and the Intellectual Origins of the American Revolution (1965)
• Robbins, Caroline.The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman: Studies in the Transmission, Development, and Circumstance of English Liberal Thought from the Restoration of Charles II until the War with the Thirteen Colonies (1959, 2004).
• Bailyn, Bernard.The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, (Cambridge MA, 1967).
• Middlekauff, Robert.The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789, Revised and Expanded Edition (2005), Oxford University Press,ISBN 978-0-19-516247-9

• Republicanism in the United Kingdom
• 1720s in Great Britain
• 1730s in Great Britain
• 1740s in Great Britain
• 1750s in Great Britain
• Politics of the Kingdom of Great Britain

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