Carl L. Becker

The "sunshine patriot" only appeared once in this book, and that in a quotation from Thomas Paine's first American Crisis essay, which concluded a series of parallelisms that in turn presaged the introduction of General George Washington to the narrative.

In this particular passage, Becker attempted to illustrate the "profound disillusionment" of the early years of the Revolutionary War, demonstrated by how "drudgery in obscure committee rooms was valued above declamation...the practical sense of Robert Morris counted for more than the finished oratory of Richard Henry Lee...when a febrile enthusiasm for liberty and the just rights of humanity seemed strangely transformed into the sordid spirit of the money-changer...[and finally] the times that tried men's souls, when 'the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot...shrinks from the service of his country, but he that stands...deserves the love of man and woman.'

According to Peter Gay in 1957: Its urbane and acidulous dissection of the philosophes has had great and lasting influence; few recent books on European intellectual history have been as widely read and as generously received.

[5]Becker's assertion that philosophies, in the "Age of Reason," relied far more upon Christian assumptions than they cared to admit, has been influential, but has also been much attacked, notably by Peter Gay.

In his 1919 free trade in ideas dissent for Abrams v. United States, at the height of the First Red Scare, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., held that a dichotomous understanding of Progressive Era "negative freedom," between civil liberties in society on the one hand, and degrees of "free trade" in private as well as public economic sectors on the other, could still potentially result in the latter branch shaping, and even subsuming, the former branch.

and by the "harsh realities of the modern world"—the "trend of action," "trenchant scientific criticism," and "temporary hypotheses" inherent in nationalism, industrialism, and an "aggressive imperialism."

[13] Becker continued criticizing natural rights philosophy revivals in his 1932 The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers but both implicitly and explicitly indicated that such ideas could not be effaced from polities past, present, and future.

But Becker attempted to balance his history of civil liberties with an analysis of welfare states, the latter endeavor undermining his "post-progressive" disenchantment: "'what the common man needs is the opportunity to acquire by his own effort, in an occupation for which he is fitted, the economic security which is essential to decent and independent living.'"

"Take first the civil liberties," Becker averred, for "all of these (with the possible exception of the right to bear arms, which seems now advantageous chiefly to gangsters) are, in respect to the end contemplated, invaluable and should be preserved."

That exception, though, would undoubtedly prove significant because "one may well ask whether they [additional civil liberties] are defined in the bill of rights with sufficient care to attain the end desired in the complex social conditions of the modern world.

In one of his last major pieces of writing, he observed that "the anti-intellectual relativist trend of thought reaches a final, fantastic form: truth and morality turn out to be relative to the purposes of any egocentric somnambulist who can succeed, by a ruthless projection of his personality, in creating the power to impose his unrestrained will upon the world.

"[15] Over sixty years later, in a final twist of irony, one of his posthumous critics offered a countervailing argument for "totalitarian" figures pursuing "perfectionist ideas" within, rather than "relativizing," a conceptual category of "positive liberty.