Paul A. Rahe, the Jay P. Walker Professor of History at the University of Tulsa, delivered the fifth of AEI's 1996-1997 Bradley Lectures on January 13, 1997. Excerpts follow.

America's Founding Fathers had little doubt regarding the revolutionary character of their undertaking. They took at face value Thomas Paine's claim that their struggle for independence marked "the birthday of a new world" and that they actually had it in their power "to begin the world over again." Indeed, they embedded within the Great Seal of the United States an explicit assertion of breathtaking presumption: America's struggle for independence was not simply a local matter of concern to a handful of colonists on the shores of North America but a world-historical event, and the year 1776 would therefore be remembered as the beginning of a novus ordo seclorum--"a new order of the ages."

The grounds for this bold statement can perhaps best be clarified by reviewing the claims advanced in the late seventeenth century by the English philosopher John Locke. The American Revolution was rendered revolutionary in part by its proponents' fierce desire to prove Locke right by demonstrating the human capacity for self-government.

In his Second Treatise of Government, Locke rejected the widespread suspicion that "all Government in the World is the product only of Force and Violence, and that Men live together by no other Rules but that of Beasts, where the strongest carries it." Instead, to be legitimate, government must rest on the consent of the governed.

Like their cousins on the other side of the Atlantic, educated Americans tended to be familiar with Locke's writings, and these works confirmed their inclination toward an independence of mind in matters religious, moral, and political. No political work was to be found in more colonial libraries than Locke's Two Treatises of Government. During the decisive period stretching from 1760 to 1776, none was as often cited, quoted, paraphrased, plagiarized, and applied to the crisis that arose.

Against Recognizing an American "Revolution"

Historians have not always been willing to concede the justice of the bold claims that America's Founding Fathers advanced on behalf of their Revolution. In this century, not a few have wondered whether these claims were extravagant and whether the American Revolution was not a tempest in a teapot, a mere struggle for home rule with no revolutionary implications as to who should rule at home. This tendency persists: the most recent study of the Revolution treats it as a mere contest for power, pitting colonial elites against those of the mother country.

It is easy to see why later observers should harbor doubts as to the Revolution's radicalism. The French Revolution cast a long shadow on the events that had transpired in the late eighteenth century on the margins of the European world in England's North American colonies. In the aftermath of that great upheaval, its critics and admirers alike--for perfectly understandable reasons--were inclined to regard the establishment of the American republic as a far less cataclysmic event than the overthrow of the ancien régime.

After all, there was in America considerable continuity between the old order and the new--and not simply in population, language, manners, mores, and the like. In local affairs, the American colonists were self-governing before 1776, much as they would be thereafter. The principles on which they governed themselves were akin to those espoused by their British cousins across the seas, as they always had been. Some property changed hands in the course of their struggle for independence, and the laws of inheritance underwent an alteration in a number of locales. But one can hardly describe either event as a great social transformation on the order of the French or the Russian Revolution. If the Americans consistently termed their little war for home rule a revolution, it was arguably a sign of their inflated sense of their own self-importance.

The Case for the Affirmative

A stronger case can be made for the view that in opting for independence, the Americans embarked on a journey that would eventually require them to jettison all that smacked of the old order. In their Declaration of Independence, the former colonists recognized certain "Truths to be self-evident":

that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness--That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, 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.

Here, compressed within a single paragraph replete with phrases lifted almost verbatim from the pages of Locke's Second Treatise, lay the assertion that made the Americans' war of national liberation a revolution with radical implications, requiring that they "begin the world all over again" and institute "a new order of the ages."

The former colonists' eventual success in establishing constitutions obscures the audacity required of them at the time. There had been republics before, and the Americans took heart from their example and sought, as best they could, to learn the lessons evident from their various histories. But all previous republics had failed. The republican experiment undertaken in mid-seventeenth-century England after the execution of Charles I had proved an embarrassment. And however impressive and splendid the republics of ancient Greece and Rome may have been, the example they set did not merit emulation.

Conclusion

If the American Revolution has any unequivocal meaning at all, it is that the citizens, acting individually with regard to their private affairs and collectively with regard to the public interest, take full responsibility for their own well-being. Great revolutions that followed in Europe and elsewhere, though putatively more radical and certainly more violent, aimed at or at least resulted in the substitution of one form of tutelage for another, preserving the essence of the old order while pretending its overthrow. Arguably in their purposes, certainly in their accomplishments, these upheavals fell short of what was attempted and largely achieved in America; for this reason perhaps foremost, they could not be sustained as revolutions. It is in no way fortuitous that, of all the modern revolutions, only the American can still be appealed to as providing a standard for judging political regimes and the conduct of government within them. That revolution really did usher in a novus ordo seclorum.