On Revolution and Revolutionary Sobriety
The American Revolution was unique in being both principled and sober — driven not by ideology or passion, but by a rare mode of thinking that translated natural rights directly into constitutional design.
Why revolution? Why did the American colonists insist on taking up arms against the British? The simple answer is that they thought vindicating their rights was their duty. Further, prudence dictated that they were justified in taking this very risky step fraught with danger, suffering, and death. They faced this prospect squarely because they had patiently explored all avenues and tirelessly petitioned the British government for over a decade. In November of 1774, one Samuel Seabury made the case for remaining loyal to the Crown and attacked the first Continental Congress: “Tell me not of delegates, congresses, committees, mobs, riots, insurrections, associations; a plague on them all. Give me the steady, uniform, unbiassed influence of the courts of justice.” Young Alexander Hamilton’s reply is revealing:
Give me the steady, uniform, unshaken security of constitutional freedom; give me the right to be tried by a jury of my own neighbors, and to be taxed by my own representatives only. What will become of the law of justice without this? The shadow may remain, but the substance will be gone. I would die to preserve the law on a solid foundation; but take away liberty, and the foundation is destroyed.
The “clear voice of natural justice” told Hamilton that no one can exercise power over another without consent; this is the ground of natural equality and liberty. The British forms of justice had become detached from this foundation and could thus no longer command the allegiance of rational creatures. Hamilton thus appealed to an abstract principle of natural right and the need for right to be channeled and embodied into forms and laws. The revolution would stand on the enunciation of the principles of natural right and the insistence, pace Hamilton, that such principles infuse the foundation of all political architecture. But it could endure only if such architecture yielded a structure capable of channeling consent and steady administration of law.
The American Revolution has been puzzling for modern commentators and scholars, precisely because both in word and deed, it was genuinely revolutionary and yet so unlike other events which have garnered that name. A half century ago — during the run-up to the Revolution’s bicentennial anniversary — distinguished thinkers and scholars such as Irving Kristol, Martin Diamond, Harry Jaffa, and Ralph Lerner all tried to grasp its distinctive character.
Diamond’s noteworthy characterization was that it was a revolution of “sober expectations.” Kristol similarly identified the revolution as “successful” due to the way it was conducted. Yes, those decades saw the release of “tides of passion,” yet Kristol notes that “this was a revolution infused by mind to a degree never approximated since, and perhaps never approximated before.” Lerner, for his part, calls the leaders of these events “thinking revolutionaries” who “saw their task and opportunity in fashioning a new beginning, but without presuming a magical transmutation of the species.” Lerner notes that the “highest activity of the thinking revolutionary is constitution making and constitution preserving.” All seem to agree that the Revolution’s meaning must be sought in both 1776 and in 1789. For Diamond, these are the “two springs of our existence” and “to understand their relationship is to understand the political core of our being.” An important line of disagreement emerges between Diamond/Kristol on the one hand and Jaffa on the other. Diamond and Kristol find sobriety and caution in the Revolution in general and in the Declaration in particular. For Jaffa, such a characterization misses the substance behind the Revolution’s grand and heated rhetoric: these were extraordinarily ambitious men who had great confidence that their ideas could transform political life for the better. Jaffa argues that only by grasping the Declaration’s depth, precision, and grandeur can one approach the Revolution’s true meaning. Absent this, we are bound to go astray and forget why the colonists revolted.
For Diamond, we can find the Revolution’s sobriety in the distinctiveness of these two moments: the Declaration answers “why” independence while the Constitution explains “how” we will govern ourselves once free. The Declaration’s silence on the latter question did not overcommit the Americans to a specific form of government. It also revealed that they did not “think themselves in possession of the simple and complete political truth, capable of instant application as a panacea for government.”
It is true that the founders did not assume they had finally found a political panacea immediately applicable for all times and places. Yet is the Declaration as neutral on the question of governmental form as Diamond claims? Jaffa argues that this reputed “silence” rests on a misreading and a misunderstanding of that document. The crucial passage is this one:
That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Diamond takes “any form” to be the object of “to institute” but according to Jaffa, it is not — it is the object of “to alter” or “to abolish.” And the “such principles” and “such form” in the next clause is not equivalent to “any” according to Jaffa. After all, in Federalist 39, Madison asserts that no other form than the republican form of government “would be reconcilable…with the fundamental principles of the Revolution.”
Further, Diamond suggests that although the Declaration insists that consent be the mode by which legitimate government is instituted, the Declaration’s openness on form means that consent need not be the mode by which government operates. Thus the Declaration’s burden was to establish that George III had been acting tyrannically — he was not an illegitimate ruler merely because he was a king. As Jaffa, however, points out, the colonists understood the British monarch to be operating according to the Whiggish principles of the Glorious Revolution. In his Summary View of the Rights of British America, Jefferson had referred to “his Majesty” as “no more than the chief officer of the people, appointed by the laws, and circumscribed with definitive powers, to assist in working the great machine of government, erected for their use, and consequently subject to their superintendence.” Jaffa also reminds us that the Declaration includes three instances of “consent;” the first one relates to instituting government, but the latter two refer to its operation. Jaffa is correct that “a pure implementation of the principles of the Declaration of Independence — one unmediated by any prudential accommodation to circumstances — would then result in a purely republican — or democratic — form of government.”
Does this mean that the American Revolution was not, after all, a sober affair? No: the appellation “sober” is accurate. Irving Kristol, in his argument, tried to pinpoint something similar to what Diamond saw. He acknowledged the Revolution was full of enthusiasm and confidence that government rooted in natural rights and consent could dramatically improve the political world in many startling and enduring ways. But he suggested that doubt and introspection tempered this enthusiasm. In a critique more concise but no less direct than his critique of Diamond, Jaffa argued that Kristol “confused the cautious and prudent temper in which the business of the Revolution was conducted, with the boundless confidence of its votaries in the beneficent power of its principles to transform the political life of man on earth.” Here I think Jaffa errs.
For Jaffa, the Revolution’s principles would become more transformative to the extent that knowledge of them would be more widespread. Prudence dictates that peoples might give their consent to governments beset by some evils. But the more enlightened the people, the more they will be disposed towards a purely republican government. Once human beings truly understand their rights they will be less and less likely to consent to governments which do not secure their rights effectively. In Jaffa’s understanding (which he imputes to Jefferson), consent is not “mere acquiescence of the will.” Rather, consent in its full meaning is “consent enlightened by full consciousness of natural rights, and by the aptness of governments to secure those rights.” That the awareness and embrace of one’s rights would lead a people to demand certain things of its government is true enough. And that a government that secured those rights would in turn assist a people in coming to appreciate such rights is also true. But the relationship between consciousness of rights and the government’s “aptness” or capacity to secure rights is much less clear. One need not agree with Hamilton that ambition more often lurks behind a zeal for rights than behind a zeal for governmental firmness (Federalist 1) to appreciate that finding a balance between governmental energy and limits is not solved by recurrence to consent as government’s legitimate ground.
Most of the founders did not have “boundless confidence” that principles alone could transform the political world. Principles would only become transformative with a certain kind of political thinking dedicated to both limited and effectual government. It was a genuine revolution, and it was indeed sober. Diamond makes an important point in this regard. As he puts it, “The American truth was undeniably as abstract as, say, Robespierre’s tyrannizing truth or Lenin’s tyrannizing truth.” Wherein lies the difference then among these modern revolutions? “The answer,” Diamond says, “lies not in degrees of devotion to abstractness, but in the substantive nature of the principle each was abstractly devoted to.” The goal of civil liberty constrains those who pursue it — they must blend consent with rule of law and constitutionalism. Equality of the Jacobin or Leninist sort liberates its adherents from constraints and legitimizes violence and terror.
I would add that it is not simply the principle’s substance that makes the American Revolution distinctive, but the fact that the principle seemed to bring in its train a manner of political thinking. It is a mode comfortable moving back and forth between principle and institutional design (hence, pace Lerner, the founders’ penchant for constitutional making) and understanding concrete policy as illustrative of principle. Lerner takes John Adams as representative here: “His ardor for the revolutionary cause typically expressed itself in a discussion of particulars, concrete proposals and policies, not in a general effusion of sentiment.” What obscures this revolutionary and sober approach is the concept of ideology. Lerner saw this problem fifty years ago in the prologue to The Thinking Revolutionary where he took the measure of the dominant scholarship on the Revolution. Underlying the various ways scholars might deploy the term ideology is one key assumption: “Ideas may be important at a given moment or place, but they are not and can never be the central reality or the independent variable. An underlying reality — strain, anxiety, interest, whatever — uses thought and shapes it to its ends.” Thus does the concept “bar our ever recognizing the power of thought and of thoughtfulness.”
When we reduce their appeals to principle to merely reflecting an “ideology,” we deny them the power to make a revolution — to do what they said they were doing. They deemed their devotion to these principles worthy of revolutionary action. Such action would in turn require thoughtful application of principle — a mode of thinking at once theoretical and practical — characterized by judgments about human nature and meeting the demands of institutional design. It is this deep, dynamic, and supple thoughtfulness that is the the American Revolution’s distinctive marker, and it is indeed both revolutionary and sober. To be worthy inheritors of such a revolution we must recapture their fervent attachment to the transformative power of principled constitutionalism and recommit ourselves to their distinctive mode of thought.
