The Higher Law and the Rights of Man in a Revolutionary Society

Affiliation: Henry M. Butzel professor of law at the University of Michigan Law School

Venue: Old North Church, Boston, MA

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Excerpt:

As we approach the bicen­tennial of the American Revolution, we find ourselves in a para­doxical and embarrassing situation. A celebration of some kind certainly seems to be in order, but the urge to celebrate is not exactly overwhelming. Though many will doubtless ascribe this mood to various dispiriting events of the recent past or to an acute public consciousness of present problems, I think this would be a superficial judgment. The truth is that, for several decades now, there has been a noticeable loss of popular interest in the Revolu­tion, both as a historical event and as a political symbol. The idea and very word, “revolution,” are in good repute today; the American Revolution is not. We are willing enough, on occasion, to pick up an isolated phrase from the Declaration of Indepen­dence, or a fine declamation from a Founding Father-Jefferson, usually-and use these to point up the shortcomings of American society as it now exists. Which is to say, we seem to be prompt to declare that the Revolution was a success only when it permits us to assert glibly that we have subsequently failed it. But this easy exercise in self-indictment, though useful in some respects, is on the whole a callow affair. It does not tell us, for instance, whether there is an important connection between that successful Revolu­ tion and our subsequent delinquencies. It merely uses the Revolu­tion for rhetorical-political purposes, making no serious effort at either understanding it or understanding ourselves. One even gets the impression that many of us regard ourselves as too sophisticated to take the Revolution seriously-that we see it as one of those naive events of our distant childhood which we have since long outgrown but which we are dutifully reminded of, at certain moments of commemoration, by insistent relatives who are less liberated from the past than we are.

I think I can make this point most emphatically by asking the simple question: what ever happened to George Washington? He used to be a Very Important Person-indeed, the most important person in our history. Our history books used to describe him, quite simply, as the “Father of his Country” and in the popular mind he was a larger-than-life figure to whom piety and reverence were naturally due. In the past fifty years, however, this figure has been radically diminished in size and virtually emptied of substance. In part, one supposes, this is because piety is a sentiment we seem less and less capable of, most especially piety toward fathers. We are arrogant and condescending toward all ancestors because we are so convinced we understand them better than they understood themselves-whereas piety assumes that they still under­ stand us better than we understand ourselves. Reverence, too, is a sentiment which we, in our presumption, find somewhat un­ natural. Woodrow Wilson, like most Progressives of his time, complained about the “blind worship” of the Constitution by the American people. No such complaint is likely to be heard today. We debate whether or not we should obey the laws of the land, whereas for George Washington-and Lincoln too, who in his lifetime reasserted this point most eloquently-obedience to law was not enough: they thought that Americans, as citizens of a self-governing polity, ought to have reverence for their laws. Behind this belief, of course, was the premise that the collective wisdom incarnated in our laws, and especially in the fundamental law of the Constitution, understood us better than any one of us could ever hope to understand it. Having separated ourselves from our historic traditions and no longer recognizing the power in­herent in tradition itself, we find this traditional point of view close to incomprehensible.

Equally incomprehensible to us is the idea that George Wash­ington was the central figure in a real, honest-to-God revolution­ the first significant revolution of the modern era and one which can lay claim to being the only truly successful revolution, on a large scale, in the past two centuries. In his own lifetime, no one doubted that he was the central figure of that revolution. Subse­quent generations did not dispute the fact and our textbooks, until about a quarter of a century ago, took it for granted, albeit in an ever-more routine and unconvincing way. We today, in contrast, find it hard to take George Washington seriously as a successful revolutionary. He just does not fit our conception of what a revolutionary leader is supposed to be like. It is a concep­ tion that easily encompasses Robespierre, Lenin, Mao Tse-tung, or Fidel Castro-but can one stretch it to include a gentleman (and a gentleman he most certainly was) like George Washington? And so we tend to escape from that dilemma by deciding that what we call the American Revolution was not an authentic revolution at all, but rather some kind of pseudo-revolution, which is why it could be led by so un-revolutionary a character as George Wash­ ington.

Hannah Arendt, in her very profound book On Revolution, to which I am much indebted, has written:

Revolutionary political thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has proceeded as though there never had occurred a revolution in the New World and as though there never had been any American notions and experiences in the realm of politics and government worth thinking about.

It is certainly indisputable that the world, when it contemplates the events of 1776 and after, is inclined to see the American Revo­lution as a French Revolution that never quite came off, whereas the Founding Fathers thought they had cause to regard the French Revolution as an American Revolution that had failed. Indeed, the differing estimates of these two revolutions are definitive of one’s political philosophy in the modern world: there are two conflicting conceptions of politics, in relation to the human condi­tion, which are symbolized by these two revolutions. There is no question that the French Revolution is, in some crucial sense, the more “modern” of the two. There is a question, however, as to whether this is a good or bad thing.

It is noteworthy that, up until about fifteen years ago, most American historians of this century tended to look at the American Revolution through non-American eyes. They saw it as essentially an abortive and incomplete revolution, in comparison with the French model. But more recently, historians have become much more respectful toward the American Revolution, and the work of Bernard Bailyn, Edmund S. Morgan, Caroline Robbins, Gordon S. Wood, and others is revealing to us once again what the Found­ing Fathers had, in their day, insisted was the case: that the American Revolution was an extremely interesting event, rich in implication for any serious student of politics. These historians have rediscovered for us the intellectual dimensions of the Ameri­can Revolution, and it is fair to say that we are now in a position to appreciate just how extraordinarily self-conscious and reflective a revolution it was.

All revolutions unleash tides of passion, and the American Revolution was no exception. But it was exceptional in the degree to which it was able to subordinate these passions to serious and nuanced thinking about fundamental problems of political philoso­phy. The pamphlets, sermons, and newspaper essays of the revolu­tionary period-only now being reprinted and carefully studied­ were extraordinarily “academic,” in the best sense of that term. Which is to say, they were learned and thoughtful and generally sober in tone. This was a revolution infused by mind to a degree never approximated since, and perhaps never approximated before. By mind, not by dogma. The most fascinating aspect of the American Revolution is the severe way it kept questioning itself about the meaning of what it was doing. Enthusiasm there cer­tainly was-a revolution is impossible without enthusiasm-but this enthusiasm was tempered by doubt, introspection, anxiety, skep­ticism. This may strike us as a very strange state of mind in which to make a revolution; and yet it is evidently the right state of mind for making a successful revolution. That we should have any difficulty in seeing this tells us something about the immaturity of our own political imagination, an immaturity not at all incom­patible with what we take to be sophistication.

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