HANNAH ARENDT
On Revolution
|
HANNAH ARENDT
On Revolution
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published in the United States of America by
The Viking Press 1963
First published in Great Britain by Faber & Faber 1964
Viking Compass Edition, containing minor but
important changes and additions made by the author
both in the text and in the documentation, published 1965
Published in Pelican Books in Great Britain 1973
Published in Pelican Books in the United States of America 1977
Reprinted in Penguin Books in 1990
17
Copyright © Hannah Arendt, 1963, 1965
All rights reserved
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TO GERTRUD AND KARL JASPERS
In reverence - in friendship - in love
Contents
introduction:
War and Revolution n
i. The Meaning of Revolution 21
2. The Social Question 59
3. The Pursuit of Happiness 115
4. Foundation I : Constitutio Libertatis 141
5. Foundation II : Novus Ordo Saeclorum 179
6. The Revolutionary Tradition and Its Lost
Treasure 215
notes 283
bibliography 331
INDEX 341
Acknowledgements
The topic of this book was suggested to me by a
seminar on 'The United States and the Revolutionary
Spirit', held at Princeton University in the spring of
1959 under the auspices of the Special Program in
American Civilization. For the completion of the work
I am indebted to a grant from the Rockefeller Founda-
tion in i960 and to my stay as Fellow of the Center for
Advanced Studies at Wesleyan University in the fall of
1961.
Hannah Arendt
NewYor\, September 1962
INTRODUCTION
War and Revolution
Wars and revolutions - as though events had only hurried up
to fulfil Lenin's early prediction - have thus far determined
the physiognomy of the twentieth century. And as distinguished
from the nineteenth-century ideologies - such as nationalism
and internationalism, capitalism and imperialism, socialism and
communism, which, though still jynvoked by many as justifying
causes, have lost contact with the major realities of our world -
war and revolution still constitute its two central political issues.
They have outlived all their ideological justifications. In a con-
stellation that poses the threat of total annihilation through war
against the hope for the emancipation of all mankind through
revolution - leading one people after the other in swift succession
'to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and
equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God
entide them' - no cause is left but the most ancient of all, the
one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has deter-
mined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus
tyranny.
This in itself is surprising enough. Under the concerted assault
of the modern debunking 'sciences', psychology and sociology,
nothing indeed has seemed to be more safely buried than the
concept of freedom. Even the revolutionists, whom one might
have assumed to be safely and even inexorably anchored in a
tradition that could hardly be told, let alone made sense of, with-
out the notion of freedom, would much rather degrade freedom
to the rank of a lower-middle-class prejudice than admit that
the aim of revolution was, and always has been, freedom. Yet if
it was amazing to see how the very word freedom could dis-
appear from the revolutionary vocabulary, it has perhaps been
12 On Revolution
no less astounding to watch how in recent years the idea of
freedom has intruded itself into the centre of the gravest of all
present political debates, the discussion of war and of a justifiable
use of violence. Historically, wars are among the oldest pheno-
mena of the recorded past while revolutions, properly speaking,
did not exist prior to the modern age; they are among the
most recent of all major political data. In contrast to revolution,
the aim of war was only in rare cases bound up with the notion
of freedom; and while it is true that warlike uprisings against a
foreign invader have frequently been felt to be sacred, they have
never been recognized, either in theory or in practice, as the
only just wars.
Justifications of wars, even on a theoretical level, are quite
old, although, of course, not as old as organized warfare. Among
their obvious prerequisites is the conviction that political
relations in their normal course do not fall under the sway of
violence, and this conviction we find for the first time in Greek
antiquity, in so far as the Greek polis, the city-state, defined itself
explicitly as a way of life that was based exclusively upon per-
suasion and not upon violence. (That these were no empty
words, spoken in self-deception, is shown, among other things,
by the Athenian custom of 'persuading' those who had been
condemned to death to commit suicide by drinking the hemlock
cup, thus sparing the Athenian citizen under all circumstances
the indignity of physical violation.) However, since for the
Greeks political life by definition did not extend beyond the
walls of the polis, the use of violence seemed to them beyond the
need for justification in the realm of what we today call foreign
affairs or international relations, even though their foreign affairs,
with the one exception of the Persian wars, which saw all Hellas
united, concerned hardly more than relations between Greek
cities. Outside the walls of the polis, that is, outside the realm of
politics in the Greek sense of the word, 'the strong did what they
could, and the weak suffered what they must' (Thucydides).
Hence we must turn to Roman antiquity to find the first
justification of war, together with the first notion that there are
just and unjust wars. Yet the Roman distinctions and justifica-
tions were not concerned with freedom and drew no line between
War and Revolution 13
aggressive and defensive warfare. 'The war that is necessary is
just,' said Livy, 'and hallowed are the arms where no hope
exists but in them.' ('Iustum enim est bellum quibus neces-
sarium, et pia arma ubi nulla nisi in armis spes est.') Necessity,
since the time of Livy and through the centuries, has meant
many things that we today would find quite sufficient to dub a
war unjust rather than just. Conquest, expansion, defence o£
vested interests, conservation of power in view of the rise of new
and threatening powers, or support of a given power equilibrium
- all these well-kown realities of power politics were not only
actually the causes of the outbreak of most wars in history, they
were also recognized as 'necessities', that is, as legitimate motives
to invoke a decision by arms. The notion that aggression is a
crime and that wars can be justified only if they ward off aggres-
sion or prevent it acquired its practical and even theoretical
significance only after the First World War had demonstrated
the horribly destructive potential of warfare under conditions of
modern technology.
Perhaps it is because of this noticeable absence of the freedom
argument from the traditional justifications of war as the last
resort of international politics that we have this curiously jarring
sentiment whenever we hear it introduced into the debate of the
war question today. To sound off with a cheerful 'give me liberty
or give me death' sort of argument in the face of the unprece-
dented and inconceivable potential of destruction in nuclear
warfare is not even hollow; it is downright ridiculous. Indeed it
seems so obvious that it is a very different thing to risk one's
own life for the life and freedom of one's country and one's
posterity from risking the very existence of the human species
for the same purpose that it is difficult not to suspect the
defenders of the 'better dead than red' or 'better death than
slavery' slogans of bad faith. Which of course is not to say the
reverse, 'better red than dead', has any more to recommend itself;
when an old truth ceases to be applicable, it does not become any
truer by being stood on its head. As a matter of fact, to the extent
that the discussion of the war question today is conducted in
these terms, it is easy to detect a mental reservation on both sides.
Those who say 'better dead than red' actually think : The losses
14 On Revolution
may not be as great as some anticipate, our civilization will
survive; while those who say 'better red than dead' actually
think: Slavery will not be so bad, man will not change his
nature, freedom will not vanish from the earth forever. In other
words, the bad faith of the discussants lies in that both dodge the
preposterous alternative they themselves have proposed; they are
not serious. 1
It is important to remember that the idea of freedom was
introduced into the debate of the war question after it had
become quite obvious that we had reached a stage of technical
development where the means of destruction were such as to ex-
clude their rational use. In other words, freedom has appeared in
this debate like a deus ex machina to justify what on rational
grounds has become unjustifiable. Is it too much to read into the
current rather hopeless confusion of issues and arguments a
hopeful indication that a profound change in international rela-
tions may be about to occur, namely, the disappearance of war
from the scene of politics even without a radical transformation
of international relations and without an inner change of men's
hearts and minds? Could it not be that our present perplexity in
this matter indicates our lack of preparedness for a disappearance
of war, our inability to think in terms of foreign policy without
having in mind this 'continuation with other means' as its last
resort?
Quite apart from the threat of total annihilation, which con-
ceivably could be eliminated by new technical discoveries such
as a 'clean' bomb or an anti-missile missile, there are a few signs
pointing in this direction. There is -first the fact that the seeds of
total war developed as early as the First World War, when the
distinction between soldiers and civilians was no longer respected
because it was inconsistent with the new weapons then used. To
be sure, this distinction itself had been a relatively modern
achievement, and its practical abolition meant no more than the
reversion of warfare to the days when the Romans wiped
Carthage off the face of the earth. Under modern circumstances,
however, this appearance or reappearance of total war has a very
important political significance in so far as it contradicts the
basic assumptions upon which the relationship between the
War and Revolution 15
military and the civilian branches of government rests : it is the
function of the army to protect and to defend the civilian
population. In contrast, the history of warfare in our century
could almost be told as the story of the growing incapacity of the
army to fulfil this basic function, until today the strategy of
deterrence has openly changed the role of the military from that
of protector into that of a belated and essentially futile avenger.
Closely connected with this perversion in the relationship
between state and army is second the little-noticed but quite
noteworthy fact that since the end of the First World War we
almost automatically expect that no government, and no state or
form of government, will be strong enough to survive a defeat
in war. This development could be traced back into the nine-
teenth century when the Franco-Prussian War was followed by
the change from the Second Empire to the Third Republic of
France; and the Russian Revolution of 1905, following upon
defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, certainly was an ominous
sign of what lay in store for governments in case of a military
defeat. However that may be, a revolutionary change in govern-
ment, either brought about by the people themselves, as after the
First World War, or enforced from the outside by the victorious
powers with the demand of unconditional surrender and the
establishment of war trials, belongs today among the most cer-
tain consequences of defeat in war - short, of course* of total
annihilation. In our context it is immaterial whether this state of
affairs is due to a decisive weakening of government as such, to
a loss of authority in the powers that be, or whether no state and
no government, no matter how well established and trusted by
its citizens, could withstand the unparalleled terror of violence
unleashed by modern warfare upon the whole population. The
truth is that even prior to the horror of nuclear warfare, wars
had become politically, though not yet biologically, a matter of
life and death. And this means that under conditions of modern
warfare, that is since the First World War, all governments
have lived oh borrowed time.
The third fact seems to indicate a radical change in the very
nature of war through the introduction of the deterrent as the
guiding principle in the armament race. For it is indeed true
16 On Revolution
that the strategy of deterrence 'aims in effect at avoiding rather
than winning the war it pretends to be preparing. It tends to
achieve its goal by a menace which is never put into execution,
rather than by the act itself.' 2 To be sure, the insight that peace
is the end of war, and that therefore a war is the preparation for
peace, is at least as old as Aristotle, and the pretence that the aim
of an armament race is to safeguard the peace is even older,
namely as old as the discovery of propaganda lies. But the point
of the matter is that today the avoidance of war is not only the
true or pretended goal of an over-all policy but has become the
guiding principle of the military preparations themselves. In
other words, the military are no longer preparing for a war
which the statesmen hope will never break out; their own goal
has become to develop weapons that will make war impossible.
Moreover, it is quite in line with these, as it were, paradoxical
efforts that a possible serious substitution of 'cold' wars for 'hot*
wars becomes clearly perceptible at the horizon of international
politics. I do not wish to deny that the present and, let us hope,
temporary resumption of atomic tests by the big powers aims
primarily at new technical developments and discoveries; but it
seems to me undeniable that these tests, unlike those that pre-
ceded them, are also instruments of policy, and as such they
have the ominous aspect of a new kind of manoeuvre in peace-
time, involving in their exercise not the make-believe pair of
enemies of ordinary troop manoeuvres but the pair who, poten-
tially at least, are the real enemies. It is as though the nuclear
armament race has turned into some sort of tentative warfare in
which the opponents demonstrate to each other the destructive-
ness of the weapons in their possession; and while it is always
possible that this deady game of ifs and whens may suddenly
turn into the real thing, it is by no means inconceivable that one
day victory and defeat may end a war that never exploded into
reality.
Is this sheer fantasy? I think not. Potentially, at least, we
were confronted with this kind of hypothetical warfare the very
moment the atom bomb made its first appearance. Many people
then thought, and still think, it would have been quite sufficient
to demonstrate the new weapon to a select group of Japanese
War and Revolution 17
scientists to force their government into unconditional surrender,
for such a demonstration to those who knew would have con-
stituted compelling evidence of an absolute superiority which no
changing luck or any other factor could hope to alter. Seventeen
years after Hiroshima, our technical mastery of the means of
destruction is fast approaching the point where all non-technical
factors in warfare, such as troop morale, strategy, general com-
petence, and even sheer chance, are completely eliminated so
that results can be calculated with perfect precision in advance.
Once this point is reached, the results of mere tests and demon-
strations could be as conclusive evidence to the experts for victory
or defeat as the battlefield, the conquest of territory, the break-
down of communications, et cetera have formerly been to the
military experts on either side.
There is finally, and in our context most importantly, the fact
that the interrelationship of war and revolution, their recipro-
cation and mutual dependence, has steadily grown, and that the
emphasis in the relationship has shifted more and more from
war to revolution. To be sure, the interrelatedness of wars and
revolutions as such is not a novel phenomenon; it is as old as the
revolutions themselves, which either were preceded and accom-
panied by a war of liberation like the American Revolution, or
led into wars of defence and aggression like the French Revolu-
tion. But in our own century there has arisen, in addition to such
instances, an altogether different type of event in which it is as
though even the fury of war was merely the prelude, a prepara-
tory stage to the violence unleashed by revolution (such clearly
was Pasternak's understanding of war and revolution in Russia
in Doctor Zhwago), or where, on the contrary, a world war
appears like the consequences of revolution, a kind of civil war
raging all over the earth as even the Second World War was
considered by a sizeable portion of public opinion and with con-
siderable justification. Twenty years later, it has become almost a
matter of course that the end of war is revolution, and that the
only cause which possibly could justify it is the revolutionary
cause of freedom. Hence, whatever the outcome of our present
predicaments may be, if we don't perish altogether, it seems
more than likely that revolution, in distinction to war, will stay
1 8 On Revolution
with us into the foreseeable future. Even if we should succeed in
changing the physiognomy of this century to the point where it
would no longer be a century of wars, it most certainly will
remain a century of revolutions. In the contest that divides the
world today and in which so much is at stake, those will prob-
ably win who understand revolution, while those who still put
their faith in power politics in the traditional sense of the term
and, therefore, in war as the last resort of all foreign policy may
well discover in a not too distant future that they have become
masters in a rather useless and obsolete trade. And such under-
standing of revolution can be neither countered nor replaced
with an expertness in counter-revolution; for counter-revolution
- the word having been coined by Condorcet in the course of the
French Revolution - has always remained bound to revolution
as reaction is bound to action. De Maistre's famous statement:
'La contrerevolution ne sera point une revolution contraire, mais
le contraire de la revolution' (The counter-revolution will not
be a revolution in reverse but the opposite of revolution') has
remained what it was when he pronounced it in 1796, an empty
witticism. 3
Yet, however needful it may be to distinguish in theory and
practice between war and revolution despite their close interre-
latedness, we must not fail to note that the mere fact that revolu-
tions and wars are not even conceivable outside the domain of
violence is enough to set them both apart from all other political
phenomena. It would be difficult to deny that one of the reasons
why wars have turned so easily into revolutions and why revolu-
tions have shown this ominous inclination to unleash wars is
that violence is a kind of common denominator for both. The
magnitude of the violence let loose in the First World War
might indeed have been enough to cause revolutions in its after-
math even without any revolutionary tradition and even if no
revolution had ever occurred before.
To be sure, not even wars, let alone revolutions, are ever com-
pletely determined by violence. Where violence rules absolutely,
as for instance in the concentration camps of totalitarian regimes*
not only the laws - les lots se taisent, as the French Revolution
phrased it - but everything and everybody must fall silent. It is
War and Revolution 19
because of this silence that violence is a marginal phenomenon
in the political realm; for man, to the extent that he is a
political being, is endowed with the power of speech. The two
famous definitions of man by Aristotle, that he is a political
being and a being endowed with speech, supplement each other
and both refer to the same experience in Greek polis life. The
point here is that violence itself is incapable of speech, and not
merely that speech is helpless when confronted with violence.
Because of this speechlessness political theory has little to say
about the phenomenon of violence and must leave its discussion
to the technicians. For political thought can only follow the
articulations of the political phenomena themselves, it remains
bound to what appears in the domain of human affairs; and
these appearances, in contradistinction to physical matters, need
speech and articulation, that is, something which transcends
mere physical visibility as well as sheer audibility, in order to be
manifest at all. A theory of war or a theory of revolution, there-
fore, can only deal with the justification of violence because this
justification constitutes its political limitation; if, instead, it
arrives at a glorification or justification of violence as such, it is
no longer political but antipolitical.
In so far as violence plays a predominant role in wars and
revolutions, both occur outside the political realm, strictly speak-
ing, in spite of their enormous role in recorded history. This fact
led the seventeenth century, which had its share of experience in
wars and revolutions, to the assumption of a prepolitical state,
called 'state of nature' which,. of course, never was meant to be
taken as a historical fact. Its relevance even today lies in the
recognition that a political realm does not automatically come
into being wherever men live together, and that there exist events
which, though they may occur in a strictly historical context, are
not really political and perhaps not even connected with politics.
The notion of a state of nature alludes at least to a reality that
cannot be comprehended by the nineteenth-century idea of
development, no matter how we may conceive of it - whether in
the form of cause and effect, or of potentiality and actuality, or
of a dialectical movement, or even of simple coherence and
sequence in occurrences. For the hypothesis of a state of nature
20 On Revolution
implies the existence of a beginning that is separated from every-
thing following it as though by an unbridgeable chasm.
The relevance of the problem of beginning to the phenomenon
of revolution is obvious. That such a beginning must be inti-
mately connected with violence seems to be vouched for by the
legendary beginnings of our history as both biblical and classical
antiquity report it : Cain slew Abel, and Romulus slew Remus;
violence was the beginning and, by the same token, no begin*
ning could be made without using violence, without violating.
The first recorded deeds in our biblical and our secular tradition,
whether known to be legendary or believed in as historical fact,
have travelled through the centuries with the force which human
thought achieves in the rare instances when it produces cogent
metaphors or universally applicable tales. The tale spoke clearly :
whatever brotherh o od human being s may be capable of h as
grown out of fratri cide, whatever political or ganization men may
Have achieved has its origin in crime . The conviction, in the
beginning was a crime - for which the phrase 'state of nature*
is only a theoretically purified paraphrase - has carried through
the centuries no less self-evident plausibility for the state of
human affairs than the first sentence of St John, 'In the begin-
ning was the Word', has possessed for the affairs of salvation.
CHAPTER ONE
The Meaning of Revolution
We are not concerned here with the war question. The meta-
phor I mentioned, and the theory of a state of nature which
spelled and spun out this metaphor theoretically - though they
have often served to justify war and its violence on the grounds
of an origina l evil inherent in human affairs and manifest in the
criminal beginning of human history - are of even greater rele-
vance to the problem of revolution, because revolutions are the
only political events which confront us directly and inevitably
with the problem of beginning. For revolutions, however we
may be tempted to define them, are not mere changes. Modern
revolutions have little in common with the mutatio rerum of
Roman history or the oidai?, the civil strife which disturbed the
Greek polls. We cannot equate them with Plato's uswxpoXai
the quasi-natural transformation of one form of government into
another, or with Polybius's no\iTe(©v&wKiL)KX©ai£>the appointed
recurring cycle into which human affairs are bound by reason of
their always being driven to extremes. 1 Antiquity was well
acquainted with politcal change and the violence that went with
change, but neither of them appeared to it to bring about some-
thing altogether new. Changes did not interrupt the course of
what the modern age has called history, which, far from starting
with a new beginning, was seen as falling back into a different
stage of its cycle, prescribing a course which was preordained by
the very nature of human affairs and which therefore itself was
unchangeable.
There is, however, another aspect to modern revolutions for
which it may be more promising to find precedents prior to the
modern age. Who could deny the enormous role the social
question has come to play in all revolutions, and who could fail
•* point*. 1 0ft s^yklOifZ
22 On Revolution
to recall that Aristotle, when he began to interpret and explain
Plato's ueTapoXai, had already discovered the importance of
what we call today economic motivation - the overthrow of
government by the rich and the establishment of an oligarchy,
or the overthrow of government by the poor and the establish-
ment of a democracy? Equally well known to antiquity was that
tyrants rise to power through the support of the plain or the
poor people, and that their greatest chance to keep power lies in
the people's desire for equality of condition. The connection be-
tween wealth and government in any given country and the
insight that forms of government are interconnected with the
distribution of wealth, the suspicion that political power may
simply follow economic power, and, finally, the conclusion that
interest may be the moving force in all political strife - all this is
of course not the invention of Marx, nor for that matter of Har-
rington : 'Dominion is property, real or personal'; or of Rohan :
The kings command the people and interest commands kings/
If one wishes to blame any single author for the so-called
materialistic view of history, one must go as far back as Aristotle,
who was the first to claim that interest, which he called the
cuucpepov, that which is useful for a person or for a group or
for a people, does and should rule supreme in political matters.
However, these overthrows and upheavals, prompted by in-
terest, though they could not but be violent and full of blood-
shed until a new order was established, depended on a distinc-
tion between poor and rich which itself was deemed to be as
natural and unavoidable in the body politic as life is in the
human body. The social question began to play a revolutionary
role only when, in the modern age and not before, men began
to doubt that poverty is inherent in the human condition, to
doubt that the distinction between the few, who through cir-
cumstances or strength or fraud had succeeded in liberating
themselves from the shackles of poverty, and the labouring
poverty-stricken multitude was inevitable and eternal. This
doubt, or rather the conviction that life on earth might be
blessed with abundance instead of being cursed by scarcity, was
prerevolutionary and American in origin; it grew directly out of
the American colonial experience. Symbolically speaking, one
The Meaning of Revolution 23
may say that the stage was set for revolutions in the modern
sense of a complete change of society, when John Adams, more
than a decade before the actual outbreak of the American
Revolution, could state: 'I always consider the settlement of
America as the opening of a grand scheme and design in Provi-
dence for the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation
of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.' 2 Theoretically
speaking, the stage was set when first Locke - probably under the
influence of the prosperous conditions of the colonies in the New
World - and then Adam Smith held that labour and toil, far
from being the appanage of poverty, the activity to which poverty
condemned those who were without property, were, on the
contrary, the source of all wealth. Under these conditions, the
rebellion of the poor, of 'the slavish part of mankind', could
indeed aim at more than liberation of themselves and enslave-
ment of the other part of mankind.
America had become the symbol of a society without poverty
long before the modern age in its unique technological de-
velopment had' actually discovered the means to abolish that
abject misery of sheer want which had always been held to
be eternal. And only after this had happened and had become
known to European mankind could the social question and the
rebellion of the poor come to play a truly revolutionary role.
The ancient cycle of sempiternal recurrences had been based
upon an assumedly 'natural' distinction of rich and poor; 8 the
factual existence of American society prior to the outbreak of
the Revolution had broken this cycle once and for all. There
exists a great body of learned discussion about the influence of
the American on the French Revolution (as well as about the
decisive influence of European thinkers on the course of the
American Revolution itself). Yet, justified and illuminating as
these inquiries are bound to be, no demonstrable influence on
the course of the French Revolution - such as the fact that it
started with the Constituent Assembly or that the Declaration
des Droits de I'Homme was modelled on the example of Vir-
ginia's bill of rights - can equal the impact of what the Abbe
Raynal had already called the 'surprising prosperity' of the lands
which still were the English colonies in North America.*
24 On Revolution
We shall still have ample opportunity to discuss the influence,
or rather the non-influence, of the American Revolution upon
the course of modern revolutions. That neither the spirit of
this revolution nor the thoughtful and erudite political theories
of the Founding Fathers had much noticeable impact upon the
European continent is a fact beyond dispute. What the men of
the American Revolution counted among the greatest innova-
tions of the new republican government, the application and
elaboration of Montesquieu's theory of a division of powers
within the body politic, played a very minor role in the thought
of European revolutionists at all times; it was rejected at once,
even before the French Revolution broke out, by Turgot, for
considerations of national sovereignty, 5 whose 'majesty' - and
majestas was Jean Bodin's original word, which he then trans-
lated into souverainetS - allegedly demanded undivided centra-
lized power. National sovereignty, that is, the majesty of the
public realm itself as it had come to be understood in the long
centuries of absolute kingship, seemed in contradiction to the
establishment of a republic. In other words, it is as though the
nation-state, so much older than any revolutions, had defeated
the revolution in Europe even before it had made its appear-
ance,. What on the other hand posed the most urgent and the
politically least solvable problem to all other revolutions, the
social question in the form of the terrifying predicament of mass
poverty, played hardly any role in the course of the American
Revolution. Not the American Revolution, but the existence of
conditions in America that had been established and were well
known in Europe long before the Declaration of Independence,
nourished the revolutionary Slan in Europe.
The new continent had become a refuge, an 'asylum* and a
meeting ground of the poor; there had arisen a new race of men,
'united by the silken bands of mild government' and living un-
der conditions of *a pleasing uniformity' from which 'absolute
poverty worse than death 1 had been banished. Yet Crevecceur,
from whom this is quoted, was radically opposed to the Ameri-
can Revolution, which he saw as a kind of conspiracy of 'great
personages' against 'the common ranks of men'. 6 Not the
American Revolution and its preoccupation with the establish-
The Meaning of Revolution 25
ment of a new body politic, a new form of government, but
America, the 'new continent', the American, a 'new man', 'the
lovely equality', in Jefferson's words, 'which the poor enjoy with
the rich', revolutionized the spirit of men, first in Europe and
then all over the world - and this to such an extent that from
the later stages of the French Revolution up to the revolutions
of our own time it appeared to revolutionary men more impor-
tant to change the fabric of society, as it had been changed in
America prior to its Revolution, than to change the structure of
the political realm. If it were true that nothing else was at stake
in the revolutions of the modern age than the radical change of
social conditions, then indeed one might say that the discovery
of America and the colonization of a new continent constituted
their origins - as though the 'lovely equality', which had grown
up naturally and, as it were, organically in the New World,
could be achieved only through the violence and bloodshed of
revolution in the Old World, once word of the new hope for
mankind had spread to it. This view, in many and often quite
sophisticated versions, has indeed become rather common
among modern historians, who have drawn the logical con-
clusion that no revolution has ever taken place in America. It
is certainly noteworthy that this is somewhat supported by Karl
Marx, who seems to have believed that his prophecies for the
future of capitalism and the coming proletarian revolutions did
not apply to the social developments in the United States. What-
ever the merits of Marx's qualifications - and they certainly
show more understanding of factual reality than his followers
have ever been capable of - these theories themselves are re-
futed by the simple fact of the American Revolution. For facts
are stubborn; they do not disappear when historians or sociolo-
gists refuse to learn from them, though they may when every-
body has forgotten them. In our case, such oblivion would not
be academic; it would quite literally spell the end of the Ameri-
can Republic.
A few words need still to be said about the not infrequent
claim that all modern revolutions are essentially Christian in
origin, and this even when their professed faith is atheism. The
argument supporting this claim usually points to the clearly
26 On Revolution
rebellious nature of the early Christian sect with its stress on
the equality of souls before God, its open contempt for all pub-
lic powers, and its promise of a Kingdom of Heaven - notions
and hopes which are supposed to have been channelled into
modern revolutions, albeit in secularized fashion, through the
Reformation. Secularization, the separation of religion from
politics and the rise of a secular realm with a dignity of its
own, is certainly a crucial factor in the phenomenon of revolu-
tion. Indeed, it may ultimately turn out that what we call revo-
lution is precisely that transitory phase which brings about the
birth of a new, secular realm. But if this is true, then it is
secularization itself, and not the contents of Christian teach-
ings, which constitutes the origin of revolution. The first stage
of this secularization was the rise of absolutism, and not the
Reformation; for the 'revolution' which, according to Luther,
shakes the world when the word of God is liberated from the
traditional authority of the Church is constant and applies to
all forms of secular government; it does not establish a new
secular order but constantly and permanently shakes the foun-
dations of all worldly establishment. 7 Luther, it is true, because
he eventually became the founder of a new church, could be
counted among the great founders in history, but his foundation
was not, and never was intended to be, a novus or do saeclorum;
on the contrary, it was meant to liberate a truly Christian life
more radically from the considerations and worries of the secu-
lar order, whatever it might happen to be. This is not to deny
that Luther's dissolution of the bond between authority and
tradition, his attempt at basing authority on the divine word
itself, instead of deriving it from tradition, has contributed to
the loss of authority in the modern age. But this by itself, with-
out the foundation of a new church, would have remained as
ineffectual as the eschatological expectations and speculations of
the late Middle Ages from Joachim di Fiore to the Reformatio
Sigismundi. The latter, it has been suggested recendy, may be
considered to be the rather innocent forerunners of modern
ideologies, though I doubt it; 8 by the same token, one may see
in the eschatological movements of the Middles Ages the fore-
runners of modern mass hysterias Yet even a rebellion, let
The Meaning of Revolution 27
alone a revolution, is considerably more than a mass hysteria.
Hence, the rebellious spirit, which seems so manifest in certain
strictly religious movements in the modern age, always ended
in some Great Awakening or revivalism which, no matter how
much it might 'revive' those who were seized by it, remained
politically without consequences and historically futile. More-
over, the theory that Christian teachings are revolutionary in
themselves stands no less refuted by fact than the theory of
the non-existence of an American revolution. For the fact is that
no revolution was ever made in the name of Christianity prior
to the modern age, so that the best one can say in favour of
this theory is that it needed modernity to liberate the revolution-
ary germs of the Christian faith, which obviously is begging
the question.
There exists, however, another, claim which comes closer to
the heart of the matter. We have stressed the element of novelty
inherent in all revolutions, and it is maintained frequently that
our whole notion of history, because its course follows a recti-
linear development, is Christian in origin. It is obvious that
only under the conditions of a rectilinear time concept are such
phenomena as novelty, uniqueness of events, and the like con-
ceivable at all. Christian philosophy, it is true, broke with the
time concept of antiquity because the birth of Christ, occurring
in human secular time, constituted a new beginning as well as
a unique, unrepeatable event. Let the Christian concept of his-
tory, as it was formulated by Augustine, could conceive of a
new beginning only in terms of a transmundane event breaking
into and interrupting the normal course of secular history. Such
an event, as Augustine emphasized, had occurred once but
would never occur again until the end of time. Secular history
in the Christian view remained bound within the cycles of an-
tiquity - empires would rise and fall as in the past - except that
Christians, in the possession of an everlasting life, could break
through this cycle of everlasting change and must look with
indifference upon the spectacles it offered.
That change presides over all things mortal was of course not
a specifically Christian notion but a prevalent mood through-
out the last centuries of antiquity. As such, it had a greater
28 On Revolution
affinity with classical Greek philosophical and even prephilo-
sophical interpretations of human affairs than with the classical
spirit of the Roman res publica. In contradistinction to the
Romans, the Greeks were convinced that the changeability, oc-
curring in the realm of mortals in so far as they were mortals,
could not be altered because it was ultimately based on the fact
that v£oi, the young, who at the same time were 'new ones',
were constantly invading the stability of the status quo. Poly-
bius, who was perhaps die first writer to become aware of the
decisive factor of generations following one another through
history, looked upon Roman affairs with Greek eyes when he
pointed to this unalterable, constant coming and going in the
realm of the political, although he knew it was the business of
Roman, as distinguished from Greek, education to bind the
*new ones' to the old, to make the young worthy of their
ancestors. 9 The Roman feeling of continuity was unknown in'j
Greece, where the inherent changeability of all things mortal
was experienced without any mitigation or consolation; and it
was this experience which persuaded Greek philosophers that
they need not take the realm of human affairs too seriously,
that men should avoid bestowing upon this realm an altogether j
undeserved dignity. Human affairs changed constantly but
never produced anything entirely new; if there existed anything
new under the sun, then it was rather men themselves in so
far as they were born into the world. But no matter how new
the v£oi, the new and young, might turn out to be, they were all
born throughout the centuries to a natural or historical
spectacle that essentially was always the same.
The modern concept of revolution, inextricably bound up
with the notion that the course of history suddenly begins anew,
that an entirely new story, a story never known or told before,
is about to unfold, was unknown prior to the two great revolu-
tions at the end of the eighteenth century. Before they were
engaged in what then turned out to be a revolution, none of the
The Meaning of Revolution 29
actors had the slightest premonition of what the plot of the
new drama was going to be. However, once the revolutions had
begun to run their course, and long before those who were in-
volved in them could know whether their enterprise would end
in victory or disaster, the novelty of the story and the inner-
most meaning of its plot became manifest to actors and spec-
tators alike. As to the plot, it was unmistakably the emergence
of freedom : in 1793, four years after the outbreak of the French
Revolution, at a time when Robespierre could define his rule as
the 'despotism of liberty' without fear of being accused of speak-
ing in paradoxes, Condorcet summed up what everybody knew :
'The word "revolutionary" can be applied only to revolutions
whose aim is freedom.' 10 That revolutions were about to usher
in an entirely new era had been attested even earlier with the
establishment of the revolutionary .calendar in which the year of
the execution of the king and the proclamation of the republic
was counted as the year one.
Crucial, then, to any understanding of revolutions in the
modern age is that the idea of freedom and the experience of a
new beginning should coincide. And since the current notion
of the Free World is that freedom, and neither justice nor great-
ness, is the highest criterion for judging the constitutions of
political bodies, it is not only our understanding of revolution
but our conception of freedom, clearly revolutionary in origin,
on which may hinge the extent to which we are prepared to
accept or reject this coincidence. Even at this point, where we
still talk historically, it may therefore be wise to pause and re-
flect on one of the aspects under which freedom then appeared
- if only to avoid the more common misunderstandings and to
catch a first glance at the very modernity of revolution as such.
It may be a truism to say that liberation and freedom are not
the same; that liberation may be the condition of freedom but
by no means leads automatically to it; that the notion of liberty
implied in liberation can only be negative, and hence, that even
the intention of liberating is not identical with the desire for
freedom. Yet if these truisms are frequently forgotten, it is be-
cause liberation has always loomed large and the foundation of
freedom has always been uncertain, if not altogether futile.
30 On Revolution
Freedom, moreover, has played a large and rather controversial
role in the history of both philosophic and religious thought,
and this throughout those centuries - from the decline of the
ancient to the birth of the modern world - when political free-
dom was non-existent, and when, for reasons which do not in-
terest us here, men were not concerned with it. Thus it has be-
come almost axiomatic even in political theory to understand by
political freedom not a political phenomenon, but on the con-
trary, the more or less free range of non-political activities which
a given body politic will permit and guarantee to those who
constitute it.
Freedom as a political phenomenon was coeval with the rise
of the Greek city-states. Since Herodotus, it was understoodLas
a form of political organization in which the citizens lived
together under conditions of no-rule, without a division between
rulers and ruled. 11 This notion of no-rule was expressed by the
word isonomy, whose outstanding characteristic among the
forms of government, as the ancients had enumerated them, was
that the notion of rule (the 'archy' from fipxeiv in monarchy
and oligarchy, or the 'cracy' from Kpaieiv in democracy) was
entirely absent from it. The polis was supposed to be an ison-
omy, not a democracy. The word 'democracy', expressing even
then majority rule, the rule of the many, was originally coined
by those who were opposed to isonomy and who meant to say :
What you say is 'no-rule' is in fact only another kind of ruler-
ship; it is the worst form of government, rule by the demos. 12
Hence, equality, which we, following Tocqueville's insights,
frequently see as a danger to freedom, was originally almost
identical with it. But this equality within the range of the law,
which the word isonomy suggested, was not equality of con-
dition - though this equality, to an extent, was the condition
for all political activity in the ancient world, where the political
realm itself was open only to those who owned property and
slaves - but the equality of those who form a body of peers.
Isonomy guaranteed taoTriq, equality, but not because all men
were born or created equal, but, on the contrary, because men
were by nature ((puasi) not equal, and needed an artificial
institution, the polis, which by virtue of its v6uoc, would make
The Meaning of Revolution 31
them equal. Equality existed only in this specifically political
realm, where men met one another as citizens and not as private
persons. The difference between this ancient concept of equality
and our notion that men are born or created equal and become
unequal by virtue of social and political, that is man-made,
institutions can hardly be over-emphasized. The equality of the
Greek polis, its isonomy, was an attribute of the polis and not
of men, who received their equality by virtue of citizenship,
not by virtue of birth. Neither equality nor freedom was under-
stood as a quality inherent in human nature, they were both not
qrikiet, given by nature and growing out by themselves; they
were vducp, that is, conventional and artificial, the products of
human effort and qualities of the man-made world.
The Greeks held that no one can be free except among his
peers, that therefore neither the tyrant nor the despot nor the
master of a household - even though he was fully liberated and
was not forced by others - was free. The point of Herodotus's
equation of freedom with no-rule was that the ruler himself
was not free; by assuming the rule over others, he had deprived
himself of those peers in whose company he could have been
free. In other words, he had destroyed the political space itself,
with the result that there was no freedom extant any longer,
either for himself or for those over whom he ruled. The reason
for this insistence on the interconnection of freedom and
equality in Greek political thought was that freedom was under-
stood as being manifest in certain, by no means all, human
activities, and that these activities could appear and be real
only when others saw them, judged them, remembered them.
The life of a free man needed the presence of others. Freedom;
itself needed therefore a place where people could come together
- the agora, the market-place, or the polis, the political space!
proper.
If we think of this political freedom in modern terms, trying
to understand what Condorcet and the men of the revolutions
had in mind when they claimed that revolution aimed at free-
dom and that the birth of freedom spelled the beginning of an
entirely new story, we must first notice the rather obvious fact
that they could not possibly have had in mind merely those liber-
32 On Revolution
ties which we today associate with constitutional government
and which are properly called civil rights. For none of these
rights, not even the right to participate in government because
taxation demands representation, was in theory or practice the
result of revolution. 13 They were the outcome of the 'three great
and primary rights': life, liberty, property, with respect to
which all other rights were 'subordinate rights [that is] the
remedies or means which must often be employed in order to
fully obtain and enjoy the real and substantial liberties' (Black-
stone). 14 Not 'life, liberty, and property' as such, but their be-
ing inalienable rights of man, was the result of revolution. But
even in the new revolutionary extension of these rights to all
men, liberty meant no more than freedom from unjustified
restraint, and as such was fundamentally identical with free-
dom of movement - 'the power of locomotion . . . without im-
prisonment or restraint, unless by due course of law' - which
Blackstone, in full agreement with ancient political thought,
held to be the most important of all civil rights. Even the right
of assembly, which has come to be the most important positive
political freedom, appears still in the American Bill of Rights
as 'the right of people peacefully to assemble, and to petition
the government for a redress of grievances' (First Amendment)
\ whereby 'historically the right to petition is the primary right*
I and the historically correct interpretation must read : the right
! to assemble in order to petition. 15 All these liberties, to which we
\ might add our own claims to be free from want and fear, are of
| course essentially negative; they are the results of liberation but
they are by no means the actual content of freedom, which, as
we shall see later, is participation in public affairs, or admission
to the public realm. If revolution had aimed only at the guaran-
tee of civil rights, then it would not have aimed at freedom but
at liberation from governments which had over-stepped their
powers and infringed upon old and well-established rights.
The difficulty here is that revolution as we know it in the
modern age has always been concerned with both liberation and
freedom. And since liberation, whose fruits are absence of re-
straint and possession of 'the power of locomotion', is indeed a
condition of freedom - nobody would ever be able to arrive at a
The Meaning of Revolution 33
place where freedom rules if he could not move without restraint
- it is frequently very difficult to say where the mere desire for
liberation, to be free from oppression, ends, and the desire for
freedom as the political way of life begins. The point of the
matter is that while the former, the desire to be free from op-
pression, could have been fulfilled under monarchical - though
not under tyrannical, let alone despotic - rulership, the latter
necessitated the formation of a new, or rather rediscovered form
of government; it demanded the constitution of a republic.
Nothing, indeed, is truer, more clearly borne out by facts which,
alas, have been almost totally neglected by the historians of
revolutions, than 'that the contests of that day were contests of
principle, between the advocates of republican, and those of
kingly government'. 16
But this difficulty in drawing the line between liberation and
freedom in any set of historical circumstances does not mean
that liberation and freedom are the same, or that those liberties
which are won as the result of liberation tell the whole story of
freedom, even though those who tried their hand at both libera-
tion and the foundation of freedom more often than not did not
distinguish between these matters very clearly either. The men of
the eighteenth-century revolutions had a perfect right to this
lack of clarity; it was in the very nature of their enterprise that
they discovered their own capacity and desire for the 'charms of
liberty', as John Jay once called them, only in the very act of
liberation. For the acts and deeds which liberation demanded
from them threw them into public business, where, inten-
tionally or more often unexpectedly, they began to constitute
that space of appearances where freedom can unfold its charms
and become a visible, tangible reality. Since they were not in the
least prepared for these charms, they could hardly be expected to
be fully aware of the new phenomenon. It was nothing less
than the weight of the entire Christian tradition which pre-
vented them from owning up to the rather obvious fact that they
were enjoying what they were doing far beyond the call of duty.
Whatever the merits of the opening claim of the American
Revolution - no taxation without representation - it certainly
could not appeal by virtue of its charms. It was altogther dif-
34 On Revolution
ferent with the speech-making and decision-taking, the oratory
and the business, the thinking and the persuading, and the
actual doing which proved necessary to drive this claim to its
logical conclusion : independent government and the foundation
of a new body politic. It was through these experiences that
those who, in the words of John Adams, had been 'called with-
out expectation and compelled without previous inclination* dis-
covered that 'it is action, not rest, that constitutes our pleasure'. 17
What the revolutions brought to the fore was this experience
of being free, and this was a new experience, not, to be sure,
in the history of Western mankind - it was common enough in
both Greek and Roman antiquity - but with regard to the cen-
turies which separate the downfall of the Roman Empire from
the rise of the modern age. And this relatively new experience,
new to those at any rate who made it, was at the same time the
experience of man's faculty to begin something new. These two
things together - a new experience which revealed man's cap-
acity for novelty - are at the root of the enormous pathos which
we find in both the American and the French Revolutions, this
ever-repeated insistence that nothing comparable in grandeur
and significance had ever happened in the whole recorded his-
tory of mankind, and which, if we had to account for it in
terms of successful reclamation of civil rights, would sound
entirely out of place.
Only where this pathos of novelty is present and where
novelty is connected with the idea of freedom are we entitled to
speak of revolution. This means of course that revolutions are
more than successful insurrections and that we are not justified
in calling every coup d'etat a revolution or even in detecting
one in each civil war. Oppressed people have often risen in
rebellion, and much of ancient legislation can be understood
only as safeguards against the ever-feared, though rarely occur-
ring, uprising of the slave population. Civil war and factional
strife, moreover, seemed to the ancients the greatest dangers to
every body politic, and Aristotle's <piX.ia, that curious friendship
he demanded for the relationships between the citizens, was
conceived as the most reliable safeguard against them. Coups
d'etat 2x16. palace revolutions, where power changes hands from
The Meaning of Revolution 35
one man to another, from one clique to another, depending
on the form of government in which the coup d'tiat occurs, have
been less feared because the change they bring is circumscribed
to the sphere of government and carries a minimum of unquiet
to the people at large, but they have been equally well known
and described.
All these phenomena have in common with revolution that
they are brought about by violence, and this is the reason why
they are so frequently identified with it. But violence is no more
adequate to describe the phenomenon of revolution than change;
only where change occurs in the sense of a new beginning,
where violence is used to constitute an altogether different form
of government, to bring about the formation of a new body
politic, where the liberation from oppression aims at least at the
constitution of freedom can we spcajc of revolution. And the fact
is that although history has always known those who, like
Alcibiades, wanted power for themselves or those who, like
Catiline, were rerum not/arum cupidi, eager for new things, the
revolutionary spirit of the last centuries, that is the eagerness to
liberate and to build a new house where freedom can dwell, is
unprecedented and unequalled in all prior history.
One way to date the actual birth of such general historical
phenomena as revolutions - or for that matter nation-states or
imperialism or totalitarian rule and the like - is, of course, to
find out when the word which from then on remains attached
to the phenomenon appears for the first time. Obviously, each
new appearance among men stands in need of a new word,
whether a new word is coined to cover the new experience or
an old word is used and given an entirely new meaning. This is
doubly true for the political sphere of life, where speech rules
supreme.
It is therefore of more than mere antiquarian interest to note
that the word 'revolution* is still absent where we are most
inclined to think we could find it, namely, in the historiography
36 On Revolution
and political theory of the early Renaissance in Italy. It is especi-
ally striking that Machiavelli still uses Cicero's mutatio rerum,
his mutaziom del stato, in his descriptions of forcible overthrow
of rulers and the substitution of one form of government for
another, in which he is so passionately and, as it were, prema-
turely interested. For his thought on this oldest problem of
political theory was no longer bound by the traditional answer
according to which one-man rule leads to democracy, democracy
leads to oligarchy, oligarchy leads to monarchy and vice versa -
the famous six possibilities which Plato first envisaged, Aristotle
first systematized, and even Bodin still described with hardly
any fundamental change. Machiavelli's chief interest in the in-
numerable mutazioni, variazioni> and alterazioni, of which his
work is so full that interpreters could mistake his teachings for
a 'theory of political change', was precisely the immutable, the
invariable, and the unalterable, in short, the permanent and the
enduring. What makes him so relevant for a history of revolu-
tion, in which he was but a forerunner, is that he was the first to
think about the possibility of founding a permanent, lasting,
enduring body politic. The point here is not even that he is
already so well acquainted with certain outstanding elements of
modern revolutions - with conspiracy and factional strife, with
the stirring up of the people to violence, with the turmoil and
lawlessness that eventually will throw the whole body politic
out of gear, and, last, not least, with the chances which revolu-
tions open to newcomers, to Cicero's homines novi> to Machia-
velli's condottieri, who rise from low conditions into the splen-
dour of the public realm and from insignificance to a power to
which they previously had been subjected. More important in
our context is that Machiavelli was the first to visualize the rise
of a purely secular realm whose laws and principles of action
were independent of the teachings of the Church in particular,
and of moral standards, transcending the sphere of human
affairs, in general. It was for this reason that he insisted that
people who entered politics should first learn 'how not to be
good', that is, how not to act according to Christian precepts. 18
What chiefly distinguished him from the men of the revolutions
was that he understood his foundation - the establishment of
The Meaning of Revolution 37
a united Italy, of an Italian nation-state modelled after the
French and the Spanish examples - as a rinovazione, and
renovation was to him the only alterazione a salute^ the only
beneficial alteration he could conceive of. In other words, the
specific revolutionary pathos of the absolutely new, of a begin-
ning which would justify starting to count time in the year of
the revolutionary event, was entirely alien to him. Yet, even in
this respect he was not so far removed from his successors in the
eighteenth century as it may seem. We shall see later that the
revolutions started as restorations or renovations, and that the
revolutionary pathos of an entirely new beginning was born only
in the course of the event itself. It was in more than one respect
that Robespierre was right when he asserted that 'the plan of the
French Revolution was written large in the books ... of Machia-
velli'; 19 for he could easily have* added: We too 'love our
country more than the safety of our soul'. 20
Indeed, the greatest temptation to disregard the history of
the word and to date the phenomenon of revolution from the
turmoil in the Italian city-states during the Renaissance arises
with Machiavelli's writings. He certainly was not the father of
political science or political theory, but it is difficult to deny that
one may well see in him the spiritual father of revolution. Not
only do we find in him already this conscious, passionate effort
to revive the spirit and the institutions of Roman antiquity
which then became so characteristic of eighteenth-century politi-
cal thought; even more important in this context is his famous
insistence on the role of violence in the realm of politics which
has never ceased to shock his readers, but which we also find
in the words and deeds of the men of the French Revolution. In
both instances, the praise of violence is strangely at odds with
the professed admiration for all things Roman, since in the
Roman republic it was authority, and not violence, which ruled
the conduct of the citizens. However, while these similarities
might explain the high regard for Machiavclli in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, they are not enough to outbalance the
more striking differences. The revolutionary turning towards
ancient political thought did not aim at, and did not succeed in,
reviving antiquity as such; what in the case of Machiavelli was
38 On Revolution
only the political aspect of Renaissance culture as a whole,
whose arts and letters outshone by far all political developments
in the Italian city-states, was in the case of the men of the
revolutions, on the contrary, rather out of tune with the spirit
of their age which, since the beginning of the modern age and
the rise of modern science in the seventeenth century, had
claimed to outdistance all ancient achievements. And no mat-
ter how much the men of the revolutions might admire the
splendour that was Rome, none of them would have felt at
home in antiquity as Machiavelli did; they would not have been
able to write : 'On the coming of evening, I return to my house
and enter my study; and at the door I take off the day's cloth-
ing, covered with mud and dust, and put on garments regal and
courtly; and reclothed appropriately, I enter the ancient courts
of ancient men, where, received by them with affection, I feed
on that food which only is mine and which I was born for.' 21 If
one reads these and similar sentences, one will willingly follow
the discoveries of recent scholarship which sees in the Renais-
sance only the culmination of a series of revivals of antiquity
that began immediately after the truly dark ages with the Carol-
ingian renaissance and ended in the sixteenth century. By the
same token, one will agree that politically the unbelievable tur-
moil of the city-states in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
was an end and not a beginning; it was the end of the medieval
townships with their self-government and their freedom of
political life. 22
Machiavelli's insistence on violence, on the other hand, is
more suggestive. It was the direct consequence of the twofold
perplexity in which he found himself theoretically and which
later became the very practical perplexity besetting the men of
the revolutions. The perplexity consisted in the task of founda-
tion, the setting of a new beginning, which as such seemed to
demand violence and violation, the repetition, as it were, of the
old legendary crime (Romulus slew Remus, Cain slew Abel) at
the beginning of all history. This task of foundation, morever,
was coupled with the task of lawgiving, of devising and impos-
ing upon men a new authority, which, however, had to be
designed in such a way that it would fit and step into the shoes
The Meaning of Revolution 39
of the old absolute that derived from a God-given authority,
thus superseding an earthly order whose ultimate sanction had
been the commands of an omnipotent God and whose final
source of legitimacy had been the notion of an incarnation of
God on earth. Hence Machiavelli, the sworn enemy of religious
considerations in political affairs, was driven to ask for divine
assistance and even inspiration in legislators - just like the 'en-
lightened* men of the eighteenth century, John Adams and
Robespierre for example. This 'recourse to God', to be sure, was
necessary only in the case of 'extraordinary laws', namely of
laws by which a new community is founded. We shall see later
that this latter part of the task of revolution, to find a new
absolute to replace the absolute of divine power, is insoluble
because power under the condition of human plurality can never
amount to omnipotence, and laws residing on human power
can never be absolute. Thus Machiavelli's 'appeal to high Hea-
ven', as Locke would have called it, was not inspired by any
religious feelings but exclusively dictated by the wish 'to escape
this difficulty 1 ; 23 by the same token, his insistence on the role of
violence in politics was due not so much to his so-called realistic
insight into human nature as to his futile hope that he could
find some quality in certain men to match the qualities we asso-
ciate with the divine.
Yet these were only premonitions, and Machiavelli's thoughts
by far outran all actual experience of his age. The fact is that
no matter how we may be inclined to read our own experiences
into those prompted by the civil strife raging in the Italian city-
states, the latter were not radical enough to suggest the need
for a new word or the reinterpretation of an older word to those
who acted in them or were their witnesses. (The new word which
Machiavelli introduced into political theory and which had
come into usage even before him was the word 'state', lo stato*
Despite his constant appeals to the glory that was Rome and his
constant borrowings from Roman history, he apparently felt
that a united Italy would constitute a political body so different
from ancient or fifteenth-century city-states as to warrant a new
name.)
The words which of course always occur are 'rebellion' and
40 On Revolution
'revolt*, whose meanings have been determined and even de-
fined since the later Middle Ages. But these words never indi-
cated liberation as the revolutions understood it, and even less
did they point to the establishment of a new freedom. For libera-
tion in the revolutionary sense came to mean that those who not
only at present but throughout history, not only as individuals
but as members of the vast majority of mankind, the low and
the poor, all those who had always lived in darkness and sub-
jection to whatever powers there were, should rise and become
the supreme sovereigns of the land. If for clarity's sake we think
o£ such an event in terms of ancient conditions, it is as though
not the people of Rome or Athens, the populus or the demos,
the lower orders of the citizenry, but the slaves and resident
aliens, who formed the majority of the population without ever
belonging to the people, had risen and demanded an equality of
rights. This, as we know, never happened. The very idea of
equality as we understand it, namely that every person is born as
an equal by the very fact of being born andthat_equality is a
idrthright* was .utterly unknown prior to the modern age.
It is true, medieval and post-medieval theory knew of legiti-
mate rebellion, of rise against established authority, of open
defiance and disobedience. But the aim of such rebellions was
not a challenge of authority or the established order of things
as such; it was always a matter of exchanging the person who
happened to be in authority, be it the exchange of a usurper for
the legitimate king or the exchange of a tyrant who had abused
his power for a lawful ruler. Thus, while the people might be
admitted to have the right to decide who should not rule them,
they certainly were not supposed to determine who should, and
even less do we ever hear of a right of people to be their own
rulers or to appoint persons from their own rank for the busi-
ness of government. Where it actually happened that men of
the people rose from low conditions to the splendour of the
public realm, as in the case of the coniottieri in the Italian
city-states, their admission to public business and power was
due to qualities by which they distinguished themselves from
the people, by a virtk which was all the more praised and
admired as it could not be accounted for through social origin
The Meaning of Revolution 41
and birth. Among the rights, the old privileges and liberties of
the people, the right to a share in government was conspicuously
absent. And such a right of self-government is not even fully
present in the famous right of representation for the purposes of
taxation. In order to rule, one had to be a born ruler, a free-born
man in antiquity, a member of the nobility in feudal Europe,
and although there were enough words in premodern political
language to describe the uprising of subjects against a ruler,
there was none which would describe a change so radical that
the subjects became rulers themselves.
That the phenomenon of revolurion is unprecedented in pre-
modern history is by no means a matter of course. To be sure^
many people would agree that eagerness for new things com-
bined with the conviction that novelty as such is desirable are
highly characteristic of the world we live in, and to equate this
mood of modern society with a so-called revolutionary spirit is
very common indeed. However, if we understand by revolution-
ary spirit the spirit which actually grew out of revolution, then
this modern yearning for novelty at any price must be carefully
distinguished from it. Psychologically speaking, the experience
of foundation combined with the conviction that a new story is
about to unfold in history will make men •conservative* rather
than 'revolutionary', eager to preserve what has been done and
to assure its stability rather than open for new things, new
developments, new ideas. Historically speaking, moreover, the
men of the first revolutions - that is, those who not only made a
revolution but introduced revolutions on to the scene of politics -
were not at all eager for new things, for a novus ordo saeclorum>
and it is this disinclination for novelty which still echoes in the
very word 'revolution', a relatively old term which only slowly
acquired its new meaning. In fact, the very usage of this word
indicates most clearly the lack of expectation and inclination on
the side of the actors, who were no more prepared for anything
unprecedented than were the contemporary spectators. The
42 On Revolution
point of the matter is that the enormous pathos of a new era
which wc find in almost identical terms and in endless variations
uttered by the actors of the American as of the French Revolu-
tion came to the fore only after they had come, much against
their will, to a point of no return.
The word 'revolution' was originally an astronomical term
which gained increasing importance in the natural sciences
through Copernicus's De revolutionibus orbium coelestium* In
this scientific usage it retained its precise Latin meaning, desig-
nating the regular, lawfully revolving motion of the stars, which,
since it was known to be beyond the influence of man and hence
irresistible, was certainly characterized neither by newness nor
by violence. On the contrary, the word clearly indicates a recur-
ring, cyclical movement; it is the perfect Latin translation of
Polybius's duaKUK^coo-t?, a term which also originated in
astronomy and was used metaphorically in the realm of
politics. If used for the affairs of men on earth, it could only
signify that the few known forms of government revolve among
the mortals in eternal recurrence and with the same irresistible
force which makes the stars follow their preordained paths in
the skies. Nothing could be farther removed from the original
meaning of the word 'revolution' than the idea of which all
revolutionary actors have been possessed and obsessed, namely,
that they are agents in a process which spells the definite end of
an old order and brings about the birth of a new world.
If the case of modern revolutions were as clear-cut as a text-
book definition, the choice of the word 'revolution* would be
even more puzzling than it actually is. When the word first
descended from the skies and was introduced to describe what
happened on earth among mortal men, it appeared clearly as a
metaphor, carrying over the notion of an eternal, irresistible,
ever-recurring motion to the haphazard movements, the ups and
downs of human destiny, which have been likened to the rising
and setting of sun, moon, and stars since times immemorial. In
the seventeenth century, where we find the word for the first
time as a political term, the mctaphoric content was even closer
to the original meaning of the word, for it was used for a move-
ment of revolving back to some pre-established point and, by
The Meaning of Revolution 43
implication, of swinging back into a preordained order. Thus,
the word was first used not when what we call a revolution
broke out in England and Cromwell rose to the first revolution-
ary dictatorship, but on the contrary, in 1660, after the overthrow
of the Rump Parliament and at the occasion of the restoration
of the monarchy. In precisely the same sense, the word was used
in 1688, when the Stuarts were expelled and the kingly power
was transferred to William and Mary. 26 The 'Glorious Revolu-
tion', the event through which very paradoxically the term found
its definite place in political and historical language, was not
thought of as a revolution at all, but as a restoration of
monarchical power to its former righteousness and glory.
The fact that the word 'revolution' meant originally restora-
tion, hence something which to us is its very opposite, is not a
mere oddity of semantics. The revolutions of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, which to us appear to show all evidence
of a new spirit, the spirit of the modern age, were intended to be
restorations. It is true, the civil wars in England foreshadowed a
great many tendencies which we have come to associate with
what was essentially new in the revolutions of the eighteenth
century : the appearance of the Levellers and the formation of a
party composed exclusively of lowly people, whose radicalism
came into conflict with the leaders of the revolution, point clearly
to the course of the French Revolution; while the demand for a
written constitution as 'the foundation for just government',
raised by the Levellers and somehow fulfilled when Cromwell
introduced an 'Instrument of Government' to set up the Pro-
tectorate, anticipates one of the most important achievements,
if not the most important one, of the American Revolution. Yet
the fact is that the short-lived victory of this first modern revolu-
tion was officially understood as a restoration, namely as 'free-
dom by God's blessing restored', as the inscription runs on the-
great seal of 1 65 1.
In our context it is even more important to note what hap-
pened more than a century later. For we are not here concerned
with the history of revolutions as such, with their past, their
origins, and course of development. If we want to learn what a
revolution is - its. general implications for man as a political
44 On Revolution
being, its political significance for the world we live in, its role in
modern history - we must turn to those historical moments when
revolution made its full appearance, assumed a kind of definite
shape, and began to cast its spell over the minds of men, quite
independent of the abuses and cruelties and deprivations of
liberty which might have caused them to rebel. We must turn,
in other words, to the French and the American Revolutions,
and we must take into account that both were played in their
initial stages by men who were firmly convinced that they would
do no more than restore an old order of things that had been
disturbed and violated by the despotism of absolute monarchy or
the abuses of colonial government. They pleaded in all sincerity
that they wanted to revolve back to old times when things had
been as they ought to be.
This has given rise to a great deal of confusion, especially
with respect to the American Revolution, which did not devour
its own children and where therefore the men who had started
the 'restoration' were the same men who began and finished the
Revolution and even lived to rise to power and office in the new
order of things. What they had thought was a restoration, the
retrieving of their ancient liberties, turned into a revolution, and
their thoughts and theories about the British constitution, the
rights of Englishmen, and the forms of colonial government
ended with a declaration of independence. But the movement
which led to revolution was not revolutionary except by inad-
vertence, and 'Benjamin Franklin, who had more firsthand in-
formation about the colonies than any other man, could later
write in all sincerity, "I never had heard in any Conversation
from any Person drunk or sober, the least Expression of a wish
for a Separation, or Hint that such a Thing would be advan-
tageous to America." ,2? Whether these men were 'conservative*
or 'revolutionary' is indeed impossible to decide if one uses these
words outside their historic context as generic terms, forgetting
that conservatism as a political creed and an ideology owes its
existence to a reaction to the French Revolution and is meaning-
ful only for the history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
And the same point, though perhaps somewhat less unequivo-
cally/ can be made for the French Revolution; here too, in
The Meaning of Revolution 45
Tocqueyille's words, 'one might have believed the aim of the
coming revolution was not the overthrow of the old regime but
its restoration'. 28 Even when in the course of both revolutions
the actors became aware of the impossibility of restoration and
of the need to embark upon an entirely new enterprise, and
when therefore the very word 'revolution' had already acquired
its new meaning, Thomas Paine could still, true to the spirit of
a bygone age, propose in all earnestness to call the American
and the French Revolutions by the name of 'counter-revolu-
tions'. 29 This proposition, odd indeed from the mouth of one of
the most 'revolutionary' men of the time, shows in a nutshell
how dear the idea of revolving back, of restoration, was to the
hearts and minds of the revolutionaries. Paine wanted no more
than to recapture the old meaning of the word 'revolution* and
to express his firm conviction that the events of the time had
caused men to revolve back to an 'early period' when they had
been in the possession of rights and liberties of which tyranny
and conquest had dispossessed them. And his 'early period' is
by no means the hypothetical prehistorical state of nature, as the
seventeenth century understood it, but a definite, though un-
defined, period in history.
Paine, we should remember, used the term 'counter-revolution'
in reply to Burke's forceful defence of the rights of an English-
man, guaranteed by age-old custom and history, against the new-
fangled idea of the rights of man. But the point is that Paine, no
less than Burke, felt absolute novelty would be an argument
against, not for, the authenticity and legitimacy of such rights.
Needless to add that, historically speaking, Burke was right and
Paine was wrong. There is no period in history to which the
Declaration of the Rights of Man could have harkened back.
Former centuries might have recognized that men were equal
with respect to God or the gods, for this recognition is not
Christian but Roman in origin; Roman slaves could be full-
fledged members of religious corporations and, within the limits
of sacred law, their legal status was the same as that of the free
man. 80 But inalienable political rights of all men by virtue of
birth would have appeared to all ages prior to our own as they
appeared to Burke - a contradiction in terms. And it is interest-
46 On Revolution
ing to note that the Latin word homo, the equivalent of 'man',
signified originally somebody who was nothing but a man, a
rightless person, therefore, and a slave.
For our present purpose and especially for our ultimate effort
to understand the most elusive and yet the most impressive facet
of modern revolutions, namely, the revolutionary spirit, it is of
importance to remember that the whole notion of novelty and
newness as such existed prior to the revolutions, and yet was
essentially absent from their beginnings. In this, as in other
respects, one is tempted to argue that the men of the revolutions
were old-fashioned in terms of their own time, certainly old-
fashioned when compared with the men of science and philo-
sophy of the seventeenth century, who, with Galileo, would
stress 'the absolute novelty' of their discoveries, or, with Hobbes,
claim that political philosophy was 'no older than my own book
De Cive\ or, with Descartes, insist that no philosopher before
had succeeded in philosophy. To be sure, reflections on the 'new
continent', which had given rise to a 'new man', such as I quoted
from Crevecceur and John Adams and which we could have
found in any number of other, less distinguished writers, were
common enough. But in contradistinction to the claims of the
scientists and philosophers, the new man no less than the new
land was felt to be a gift of Providence, not a product of men. In
other words, the strange pathos of novelty, so characteristic of
the modern age, needed almost two hundred years to leave the
relative seclusion of scientific and philosophic thought and to
reach the realm of politics. (In the words of Robespierre : 'Tout
a change dans l'ordre physique; et tout doit changer dans l'ordre
moral ^et politique.') But when it reached this realm, in which
events concern the many and not the few, it not only assumed
a more radical expression, but became endowed with a reality
peculiar to the political realm alone. It was only in the course of
the eighteenth-century revolutions that men began to be aware
that a new beginning could be a political phenomenon, that it
could be the result of what men had done and what they could
consciously set out to do. From then on, a 'new continent' and
a 'new man' rising from it were no longer needed to instil hope
for a new order of things. The novus ordp saeclorum was no
The Meaning of Revolution 47
longer a blessing given by the 'grand scheme and design in
Providence', and novelty was no longer the proud and, at the
same time, frightening possession of the few. When newness
had reached the market-place, it became the beginning of a new
story, started - though unwittingly - by acting men, to be en-
acted further, to be augmented and spun out by their posterity.
While the elements of novelty, beginning, and violence, all
intimately associated with our notion of revolution, are con-
spicuously absent from the original meaning of the word as well
as from its first metaphoric use in political language, there exists
another connotation of the astronomic term which I have already
mentioned briefly and which has remained very forceful in our
own use of the word. I mean the notion of irresistibility, the fact
that the revolving motion of the stars follows a preordained path
and is removed from all influence of human power. We know,
or believe we know, the exact date when the word 'revolution'
was used for the first time with an exclusive emphasis on
irresistibility and without any connotation of a backward revolv-
ing movement; and so important does this emphasis appear to
our own understanding of revolutions that it has become com-
mon practice to date the new political significance of the old
astronomic term from the moment of this new usage.
The date was the night of the fourteenth of July 1789, in Paris,
when Louis XVI heard from the Due de La Rochefoucauld-
Liancourt of the fall of the Bastille, the liberation of a few
prisoners, and the defection of the royal troops before a popular
attack. The famous dialogue that took place between the king
and his messenger is very short and very revealing. The king,
we are told, exclaimed, 'C'est une revolte', and Liancourt cor-
rected him : 'Non, Sire, c'est une revolution.' Here we hear the
word still, and politically for the last time, in the sense of the
old metaphor which carries its meaning from the skies down
to the earth; but here, for the first time perhaps, the emphasis
has entirely shifted from the lawfulness of a rotating, cyclical
48 On Revolution
movement to its irresistibility. 31 The motion is still seen in the
image of the movements of the stars, but what is stressed now is
that it is beyond human power to arrest it, and hence it is a law
unto itself. The king, when he declared the storming of the
Bastille was a revolt, asserted his power and the various means at
his disposal to deal with conspiracy and defiance of authority;
Liancourt replied that what had happened there was irrevocable
and beyond the power of a king. What did Liancourt see, what
must we see or hear, listening to this strange dialogue, that he
thought, and we know, was irresistible and irrevocable?
The answer, to begin with, seems simple. Behind these words,
we still can see and hear the multitude on their march, how they
burst into the streets of Paris, which then still was the capital
not merely of France but of the entire civilized world - the up-
heaval of the populace of the great cities inextricably mixed with
the uprising of the people for freedom, both together irresistible
in the sheer force of their number. And this multitude, appearing
for the first time in broad daylight, was actually the multitude of
the poor and the downtrodden, who every century before had
hidden in darkness and shame. What from then on has been
irrevocable, and what the agents and spectators of revolution
immediately recognized as such, was that the public realm -
reserved, as far as memory could reach, to those who were free,
namely carefree of all the worries that are connected with life's
necessity, with bodily needs - should offer its space and its light
to this immense majority who are not free because they are
driven by daily needs.
The notion of an irresistible movement, which the nineteenth
century soon was to conceptualize into the idea of historical
necessity, echoes from beginning to end through the pages of the
French Revolution. Suddenly an entirely new imagery begins to
cluster around the old metaphor and an entirely new vocabulary
is introduced into political language. When we think of revolu-
tion, we almost automatically still think in terms of this imagery,
born in these years - in terms of Desmoulins' torrent revolution-
naire un whose rushing waves the actors of the revolution were
borne and carried away until its undertow sucked them from the
surface and they perished together with their foes, the agents of
The Meaning of Revolution 49
the counter-revolution. For the mighty current of the revolution,
in the words of Robespierre, was constantly accelerated by the
'crimes of tyranny', on one side, by the 'progress of liberty', on
the other, which inevitably provoked each other, so that move-
ment and counter-movement neither balanced nor checked or
arrested each other, but in a mysterious way seemed to add up
to one stream of 'progressing violence', flowing in the same
direction with an ever-increasing rapidity. 32 This is 'the majestic
lava stream of the revolution which spares nothing and which
nobody can arrest', as Georg Forster witnessed it in 1793 ; 33 it is
the spectacle that has fallen under the sign of Saturn: 'The
revolution devouring its own children', as Vergniaud, the great
orator of the Gironde, put it. This is the 'revolutionary tempest'
which sent the revolution on its march, Robespierre's tempete
revolutionnaire and his marche de la Revolution, that mighty
stormwind which swept away or submerged the unforgettable
and never entirely forgotten beginning, the assertion of 'the
grandeur of man against the pettiness of the great', as Robes-
pierre put it, 34 or 'the vindication of the honour of the human
race', in the words of Hamilton. 35 It seemed as though a force
greater than man had interfered when men began to assert their
grandeur and to vindicate their honour.
In the decades following the French Revolution, this associa-
tion of a mighty undercurrent sweeping men with it, first to the
surface of glorious deeds and then down to peril and infamy,
was to become dominant. The various metaphors in which the
revolution is seen not as the work of men but as an irresistible
process, the metaphors of stream and torrent and current, were
still coined by the actors themselves, who, however drunk they
might have become with the wine of freedom in the abstract,
clearly no longer believed that they were free agents. And -
given but a moment of sober reflection - how could they have
believed they were or had ever been the authors of their own
deeds? What but the raging storm of revolutionary events had
changed them and their innermost convictions in a matter of a
few years? Had they not all been royalists in 1789 who, in 1793,
were driven not merely to the execution of a particular king
(who might or might not have been a traitor), but to the denun-
50 On Revolution
ciation of kingship itself as *an eternal crime* (Saint-Just)? Had
they not all been ardent advocates of the rights of private
property who in the laws of Ventose in 1794 proclaimed the con-
fiscation of the property not merely of the Church and of the
emigre's but of all 'suspects', that it might be handed over to the
'unfortunates'? Had they not been instrumental in the formula-
tion of a constitution whose main principle was radical decen-
tralization, only to be driven to discard it as utterly worthless,
and to establish instead a revolutionary government through
committees which was more centralized than anything the
ancien regime had ever known or dared to practise. Were they
not engaged in, and even winning, a war which they had never
wanted and never believed they would be able to win? What
could there possibly remain in the end but the knowledge they
somehow had possessed even in the beginning, namely (in the
words of Robespierre writing to his brother in 1789) that 'the
present Revolution has produced in a few days greater events
than the whole previous history of mankind'? And in the" end,
one is tempted to think, this should have been enoughs
Ever since the French Revolution, it has been common to in-
terpret every violent upheaval, be it revolutionary or counter-
revolutionary, in terms of a continuation of the movement
originally started in 1789, as though the times of quiet and
restoration were only the pauses in which the current had gone
underground to gather force to break up to the surface again -
in 1830 and 1832, in 1848 and 1851, in 1871, to mention only the
more important nineteenth-century dates. Each time adherents
and opponents of these revolutions understood the events as
immediate consequences of 1789. And if it is true, as Marx said,
that the French Revolution had been played in Roman clothes,
it is equally true that each of the following revolutions, up to
and including the October Revolution, was enacted according
to the rules and events that led from the fourteenth of July to
the ninth of Thermidor and the eighteenth of Brumaire - dates
which so impressed themselves on the memory of the French
people that even today they are immediately identified by every-
body with the fall of the Bastille, the death of Robespierre, and
the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte. It was not in our time but in the
The Meaning of Revolution 51
middle of the nineteenth century that the term 'permanent
revolution', or even more tellingly revolution en permanence^
was coined (by Proudhon) and, with it, the notion that 'there
never has been such a thing as several revolutions, that there is
only one revolution, selfsame and perpetual'. 36
If the new metaphorical content of the word 'revolution'
sprang directly from the experiences of those who first made and
then enacted the Revolution in France, it obviously carried an
even greater plausibility for those who watched its course, as if it
were a spectacle, from the outside. What appeared to be most
manifest in this spectacle was that none of its actors could con-
trol the course of events, that this course took a direction which
had little if anything to do with the wilful aims and purposes of
the anonymous force of the revolution if they wanted to survive
at all. This sounds commonplace, to us today, and we probably
find it hard to understand that anything but banalities could
have been derived from it. Yet we need only remember the
course of the American Revolution, where the exact opposite
took place, and recall how strongly the sentiment that man is
master of his destiny, at least with respect to political govern-
ment, permeated all its actors, to realize the impact which the
spectacle of the impotence of man with regard to the course of
his own action must have made. The well-known shock of dis-
illusion suffered by the generation in Europe which lived
through the fatal events from 1789 to the restoration of the Bour-
bons transformed itself almost immediately into a feeling of awe
and wonder at the power of history itself. Where yesterday, that
is in the happy days of Enlightenment, only the despotic power
of the monarch had seemed to stand between man and his
freedom to act, a much more powerful force had suddenly arisen
which compelled men at will, and from which there was no
release, neither rebellion nor escape, the force of history and
historical necessity.
Theoretically, the most far-reaching consequence of the French
Revolution was the birth of the modern concept of history in
Hegel's philosophy. Hegel's truly revolutionary idea was that
the old absolute of the philosophers revealed itself in the realm
of human affairs, that is, in precisely that domain of human
52 On Revolution
experiences which the philosophers unanimously had ruled out
as the source or birthplace of absolute standards. The model for
this new revelation by means of a historical process was clearly
the French Revolution, and the reaso n w hy_Ge rman_p ost-
Kantian-philosophy came to exert its enormous influence on
European thought in the twentieth century, especially in coun-
tries exposed to revolutionary unrest - Russia, Germany, France
- was not its so-called idealism but, on jthe. contrary, the-facL.that
ithad left the sphere of mere speculation and attempted Jo. for-
mulate a philosophy which would correspond to and_com-
prehcnd conceptually the newest and most real experiences of
the time. However, this comprehension itself was theoretical in
the old, original sense of the word 'theory'; Hegel's philosophy,
though concerned with action and the realm of human affairs,
consisted in contemplation. Before the backward-directed glance
of thought, everything that had been political - acts, and words,
an<f events - became historical, with the result that the new
world which was ushered in by the eighteenth-century revolu-
tions did not receive, as Tocqueville still claimed, a *new science
of politics', 37 but a philosophy of history - quite apart from Jthe
perhaps even more momentous transformation of philosophy
into philosophy of history, which does not concern us here.
Politically, the fallacy of this new and typically modem
philosophy is relatively simple. It^yisjtts_jn_dejcjnL^^
understanding the : whole, realm, of hum not in terms
of the actor and the agent, but from, the standpoint of the
s.pectator„who watches a spectacle. But this fallacy is relatively
difficult to detect because of the truth inherent in it, which is
that all stories begun and enacted by men unfold their true mean-
ing only when they have come to their end, so that it may indeed
appear as though only the spectator, and not the agent, can hope
to understand what actually happened in any given chain of
deeds and events. It was to the spectator even more forcefully
than to the actor that the lesson of the French Revolution
appeared to spell out historical necessity or that Napoleon
Bonaparte became a destiny*. 38 Yet the point of the matter is
that all those who, throughout the nineteenth century and deep
into the twentieth, followed in the footsteps of the French
The Meaning of Revolution 53
Revolution saw themselves not merely as successors of the men
of the French Revolution but as agents of history and historical
necessity, with the obvious and yet paradoxical result that in-
stead of freedom necessity became the chief category of political
and revolutionary thought.
Still, without the French Revolution it may be doubted that
philosophy would ever have attempted to concern itself with
the realm of human affairs, that is, to discover absolute truth in
a domain which is ruled by men's relations and relationships
with one another and hence is relative by definition. Truth, even
though it was conceived 'historically', that is, was understood
to unfold in time and therefore did not necessarily need to be
valid for all times, still had to be valid for all men, regardless
of where they happened to dwell and of which country they
happened to be citizens. Truth, in other words, was supposed to
relate and to correspond not to citizens, in whose midst there
could exist only a multitude of opinions, and not to nationals,
whose sense for truth was limited by their own history and
national experience. Truth had to relate to man qua man, who
as a worldly, tangible reality, of course, existed nowhere. History,
therefore, if it was to become a medium of the revelation of
truth, had to be world history, and the truth which revealed
itself had to be a 'world spirit'. Yet while the notion of history
could attain philosophic dignity only under the assumption that
it covered the whole world and the destinies of all men, the idea
of world history itself is clearly political in origin; it was pre-
ceded by the French and the American Revolution, both of
which prided themselves on having ushered in a new era for all
mankind, on being events which would concern all men qua
men, no matter where they lived, what their circumstances were,
or what nationality they possessed. The very notion of world
history was born from the first attempt at world politics, and
although both the American and the French enthusiasm for the
'rights of man' quickly subsided with the birth of the nation-
state, which, short-lived as this form of government has proved
to be, was the only relatively lasting result of revolution in
Europe, the fact is that in one form or another world politics has
been an adjunct to politics ever since.
54 On Revolution
Another aspect of Hegel's teachings which no less obviously
derives from the experiences of the French Revolution is even
more important in our context, since it had an even more im-
mediate influence on the revolutionists of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries - all of whom, even if they did not learn their
lessons from Marx (still the greatest pupil Hegel ever had) and
never bothered to read Hegel, looked upon revolution through
Hegelian categories. This aspect concerns the character of histori-
cal motion, which, according to Hegel as well as all his fol-
lowers, is at once dialectical and driven by necessity : out of the
revolution and counter-revolution, from the fourteenth of July to
the eighteenth of Brumaire and the restoration of the monarchy,
was born the dialectical movement and counter-movement of
history which bears men on its irresistible flow, like a powerful
undercurrent, to which they must surrender the very moment
they attempt to establish freedom on earth. This is the meaning
of the famous dialectics of freedom and necessity in which both
eventually coincide - perhaps the most terrible and, humanly
speaking, least bearable paradox in the whole body of modern
thought. And yet, Hegel, who once had seen in the year 1789 the
moment when the earth and the heavens had become reconciled,
might still have thought in terms of the original metaphorical
content of the word 'revolution', as though in the course of the
French Revolution the lawfully irresistible movement of the
heavenly bodies had descended upon the earth and the affairs of
men, bestowing upon them a 'necessity' and regularity which
had seemed beyond the 'melancholy haphazardness' (Kant), the
sad 'mixture of violence and meaninglessness' (Goethe) which
up to then had seemed to be the outstanding quality of history
and of the course of the world. Hence, the paradox that freedom
is the fruit of necessity, in Hegel's own understanding, was
hardly more paradoxical than the reconciliation of heaven and
earth. Moreover, there was nothing facetious in Hegel's theory
and no empty witticism in his dialectics of freedom and neces-
sity. On the contrary, they must even then have forcefully
appealed to those who still stood under the impact of political
reality; the unabated strength of their plausibility has resided
ever since much less on theoretical evidence than on an experi-
The Meaning of Revolution 55
cnce repeated time and again in the centuries of wars and
revolution. The modern concept of history, with its unparalleled
emphasis on history as a process, has many origins and among
them especially the earlier modern concept of nature as a process.
As long as men took their cue from the natural sciences and
thought of this process as a primarily cyclical, rotating, ever-
recurring movement - and even Vico still thought of historical
movement in these terms - it was unavoidable that necessity
should be inherent in historical as it is in astronomical motion.
Every cyclica l movement JgAJiggessary movement by definition.
But the fact that necessity as an inherent characteristic of history
should survive the modern break in the cycle of eternal recur-
rences and make its reappearance in a movement that was essen-
tially rectilinear and hence did not revolve back to what was
known before but stretched out into an unknown future, this
fact owes its existence not to theoretical speculation but to
political experience and the course of real events.
It was the French and not the American Revolution that set
the world on fire, and it was consequently from the course of
the French Revolution, and not from the course of events in
America or from the acts of the Founding Fathers, that our
present use of the word 'revolution' received its connotations
and overtones everywhere, the United States not excluded. The
colonization of North America and the republican government
of the United States constitute perhaps the greatest, certainly the
boldest, enterprises of European mankind; yet the United States
has been hardly more than a hundred years in its history truly
on its own, in splendid or not so splendid isolation from the
mother continent. Since the end of the last century, it has been
subject to the threefold onslaught of urbanization, industrializa-
tion, and, perhaps most important of all, mass immigration.
Since then, theories and concepts, though unfortunately not
always their underlying experiences, have migrated once more
from the old to the new world, and the word 'revolution', with
its associations, is no exception to this rule. It is odd indeed ro
see that twentieth-century American even more than European
learned opinion is often inclined to interpret the American
Revolution in the light of the French Revolution, or to criticize
56 On Revolution
it because it so obviously did not conform to lessons learned from
the latter. The sad truth of the matter is that the French
Revolution, which ended in disaster, has made world history,
while the American Revolution, so triumphantly successful, has
remained an event of litde more than local importance.
For whenever in our own century revolutions appeared on the
scene of politics, they were seen in images drawn from the course
of the French Revolution, comprehended in concepts coined by
spectators, and understood in terms of historical necessity. Con-
spicuous by its absence in the minds of those who made the
revolutions as well as of those who watched and tried to come
to terms with them, was the deep concern with forms of govern-
ment so characteristic of the American Revolution, but also very
important in the initial stages of the French Revolution. It was
the men of the French Revolution who, overawed by the
spectacle of the multitude, exclaimed with Robespierre, 'La
(Republique? La Monarchic? Je ne connais que la question
sociale'; and they lost, together with the institutions and con-
stitutions which are 'the soul of the Republic' (Saint-Just), the
revolution itself. 19 Since then, men swept willy-nilly by revolu-
tionary stormwinds into an uncertain future have taken the
place of the proud architects who intended to build their new
houses by drawing upon an accumulated wisdom of all past
ages as they understood it; and with these architects went the
reassuring confidence that a novus ordo saeclorum could be
built on ideas, according to a conceptual blueprint whose very
age vouchsafed its truth. Not thought, only the practice, only the
application would be new. The time, in the words of Washing-
ton, was 'auspicious* because it had 'laid open for us ... the
treasures of knowledge acquired by labours of philosophers,
sages and legislators through a long succession of years'; with
their help, the men of the American Revolution felt, they could
begin to act after circumstances and English policy had left them
no other alternative than to found an entirely new body politic.
And since they had been given die chance to act, history and
circumstances could no longer be blamed : if the citizens of the
United States 'should not be completely free and happy, the fault
will be entirely their own'. 40 It would never have occurred to
The Meaning of Revolution 57
them that only a few decades later the keenest and most thought-
ful observer of what they had done would conclude : *I go back
from age to age up to the remotest antiquity, but I find no
parallel to what is occurring before my eyes; as the past has
ceased to throw its light upon the future, the mind of man
wanders in obscurity. 41
The magic spell which historical necessity has cast over the
minds of men since the beginning of the nineteenth century
gained in potency by the October Revolution, which for our cen-
tury has had the same profound meaningfulness of first crys-
tallizing the best of men's hopes and then realizing the full
measure of their despair that the French Revolution had for
its contemporaries. Only this time it was not unexpected ex-
periences which hammered the lesson home, but a conscious
modelling of a course of action upon the experiences of a by*
gone age and event. To be sure, only the two-edged compul-
sion of ideology and terror, one compelling men from within
and the other compelling them from without, can fully explain
the meekness with which revolutionists in all countries which
fell under the influence of the Bolshevik Revolution have gone
to their doom; but there the lesson presumably learned from
the French Revolution has become an integral part of the self-
imposed compulsion of ideological thinking today. The trouble
has always been the same: those who went into the school of
revolution learned and knew beforehand the course a revolution
must take. It was the course of events, not the men of the
Revolution, which they imitated. Had they taken the men of the
Revolution as their models, they would have protested their
innocence to their last breath. 42 But they could not do this
because they knew that a revolution must devour its own
children, just as they knew that a revolution would take its
course in a sequence of revolutions, or that the open enemy was
followed by the hidden enemy under the mask of the 'suspects',
or that a revolution would split into two extreme factions - the
indulgents and the enragis - that actually or 'objectively' worked
together in order to undermine the revolutionary government,
and that the revolution was 'saved 1 by the man in the middle,
who, far from being more moderate, liquidated the right and
58 On Revolution
the left as Robespierre had liquidated Danton and Hebert. What
the men of the Russian Revolution had learned from the
French Revolution - and this learning constituted almost their
entire preparation - was history and not action. They had
acquired the skill to play whatever part the great drama of
history was going to assign them, and if no other role was
available but that of the villain, they were more than willing
to accept their part rather than remain outside the play.
There is some grandiose ludicrousness in the spectacle of these
men - who had dared to defy all powers that be and to chal-
lenge all authorities on earth, whose courage was beyond the
shadow of a doubt - submitting, often from one day to the other,
humbly and without so much as a cry of outrage, to the call of '
historical necessity, no matter how foolish and incongruous the
outward appearance of this necessity must have appeared to
them. They were fooled, not because the words of Danton and
Vergniaud, of Robespierre and Saint-Just, and of all the others
still rang in their ears; they were fooled by history, and they
have become the fools of history.
CHAPTER TWO
The Social Question
Lcs malheureux sont la puissance de la terre. - Saint Just
The professional revolutionaries of the early twentieth century
may have been the fools of history, but they certainly were
themselves no fools. As a category of revolutionary thought, the
notion of historical necessity had more to recommend itself than
the mere spectacle of the French Revolution, more even than
the thoughtful remembrance of its course of events and the sub-
sequent condensation of happenings into concepts. Behind the
appearances was a reality, and this reality was biological and
not historical, though it appeared now perhaps for the first time
in the full light of history. The most powerful necessity of
which we are aware in self-introspection is the life process
which permeates our bodies and keeps them in a constant state
of a change whose movements are automatic, independent of
our own activities, and irresistible - i.e., of an overwhelming
urgency. The less we are doing ourselves, the less active we are,
the more forcefully will this biological process assert itself, im-
pose its inherent necessity upon us, and overawe us with the
fateful automatism of sheer happening that underlies all human
history. The^ec«sity ; of historical processes^ originally. seen in \ XJ \
the image of the revojyjng^ lawful, and necessary motion of ^^V
thejieayenly bodies, found its powerful counterpart in the
recurring necessity to which all human life is subject. When
this had happened, and it happened when the poor, driven by
the needs of their bodies, burst on to the scene of the French
Revolution, the astronomic metaphor so plausibly apposite to the
sempiternal change, the ups and downs of human destiny, lost
its old connotations and acquired the biological imagery which
60 On Revolution
underlies and pervades the organic and social theories of his-
tory, which all have in common that they see a multitude - the
factual plurality of a nation or a people or society - in the im-
age of one supernatural body driven by one superhuman, irres-
istible 'general will*.
The reality which corresponds to this modern imagery is
what, since the eighteenth century, we have come to call the
social question and what we may better and more simply call
the existence of poverty. Poverty is more than deprivation, it is a
state of constant want and acute misery whose ignominy con-
sists in its dehumanizing force; poverty, is abjec t because it puts
men u nder the absolute dictate of their bodie s, that is, u nder
^j^sojutejtotate.pf necessity as all men know it jrqm their
most intimate experience and outside all speculations. It was un-
der the rule of this necessity that the multitude rushed to the
assistance of the French Revolution, inspired it, drove it on-
ward, and eventually sent it to its doom,«for this was the multi-
tude of the poor. When they appeared on the scene of politics,
necessity appeared with them, and the result was that the power
of the old regime became impotent and the new republic was
stillborn; freedom had to be surrendered to necessity, to the
urgency of the life process itself. When Robespierre declared
that 'everything which is necessary to maintain life must be
common good and only the surplus can be recognized as private
property', he was not only reversing premodern political theory,
which held that it was precisely the citizens' surplus in time and
goods that must be given and shared in common; he was,
again in his own words, finally subjecting revolutionary
government to 'the most sacred of all laws, the welfare of the
people, the most irrefragable of all titles, necessity'. 1 In other
words, he had abandoned his own 'despotism of liberty', his
dictatorship for the sake of the foundation of freedom, to the
'rights of the Sans-Culottes', which were 'dress, food and the
reproduction of their species'. 2 It was necessity, the urgent needs
of the people, that unleashed the terror and sent the Revolution
to its doom. Robespierre, finally, knew well enough what had
happened though he formulated it (in his last speech) in the
form of prophecy: 'We shall perish because, in the history of
The Social Question 61
mankind, we missed the moment to found freedom/ Not the
conspiracy of kings and tyrants but the much more powerful
conspiracy of necessity and poverty distracted them long enough
to miss the 'historical moment'. Meanwhile, the revolution had
changed its direction; it aimed no longer at freedom, the goal
of the revolution had become the happiness of the people. 3
The transformation of the Rights of Man into the rights of
Sans-Culottes was the turning point not only of the French
Revolution but of all revolutions that were to follow. This is
due in no small measure to the fact that Karl Marx, the
greatest theorist the revolutions ever had, was so much more
interested in history than in politics and therefore neglected,
almost entirely, the original intentions of the men of the
revolutions, the foundation of freedom, and concentrated his
attention, almost exclusively, on the seemingly objective course
of revolutionary events. In other words, it took more than half
a century before the transformation of the Rights of Man into
the rights of Sans-Culottes, the abdication of freedom before the
dictate of necessity, had found its theorist. When this hap-
pened in the work of Karl Marx, the history of modern revolu-
tions seemed to have reached a point of no return : since noth-
ing even remotely comparable in quality on the level of
thought resulted from the course of the American Revolution,
revolutions had definitely come under the sway of the French
Revolution in general and under the predominance of the
social question in particular. (This is even true for Tocqueville,
whose main concern was to study in America the consequences
of that long and inevitable revolution of which the events of
1789 were only the first stage. In the American Revolution itself
and the theories of the founders, he remained curiously un-
interested.) The enormous impact of Marx's articulations and
concepts upon the course of revolution is undeniable, and while
it may be tempting, in view of the absurd scholasticism of
twentieth-century Marxism, to ascribe this influence to the
ideological elements in Marx's work, it may be more accurate
to argue the other way round and to ascribe the pernicious in-
fluence of Marxism to the many authentic and original dis-
coveries made by Marx. Be that as it may, there is no doubt
62 On Revolution
that the young Marx became convinced that the reason why
the French Revolution had failed to found freedom was that it
had failed to solve the social question. From this he concluded
that freedom and poverty were incompatible. His most explosive
and indeed most original contribution to the cause of revolution
was that he interpreted the compelling needs of mass poverty
in political terms as an uprising, not for the sake of bread or
wealth, but for the sake of freedom as well. What he learned
from the French Revolution was that poverty can be a political
force of the first order. The ideological elements in his teachings,
his belief in 'scientific' socialism, in historical necessity, in super-
structures, in 'materialism', et cetera, are secondary and deriva-
tive in comparison; he shared them with the entire modern age
and we find them today not only in the various brands of
socialism and communism but in the whole body of the social
sciences.
Marx's transformation of the social question into a political
force is contained in the term 'exploitation', that is, in the
notion that poverty is the result of exploitation through a
'ruling class' which is in the possession of the means of violence.
The value of this hypothesis for the historical sciences is small
indeed; it takes its cue from a slave economy where a 'class' o£
masters actually rules over a substratum of labourers, and it holds
true only for the early stages of capitalism, when poverty on an
unprecedented scale was the result of expropriation by force. It
certainly could not have survived more than a century of histori-
cal research if it had not been for its revolutionary rather than
its scientific content. It was for the sake of revolution that
Marx introduced an element of politics into the new science of
economics and thus made it what it pretended to be - political
economy, an economy which rested on political power and
hence could be overthrown by political organization and revolu-
tionary means. By reducing property relations to the old rela-
tionship which violence, rather than necessity, establishes
between men, he summoned up a spirit of rebelliousness
that can spring only from being violated, not from being under
the sway of necessity. If Marx helped in liberating the poor,
then it was not by telling them that they were the living em-
The Social Question 63
bodimcnts of some historical or other necessity, but by per-
suading them that poverty itself is a political, not a natural
phenomenon, the result of violence and violation rather than of
scarcity. For if the condition of misery - which by definition
never can produce 'free-minded people' because it is the con-
dition of being bound to necessity - was to generate revolutions
instead of sending them to their doom, it was necessary to
translate economic conditions into political factors and to ex-
plain them in political terms.
Marx's model of explanation was the ancient institution of
slavery, where clearly a 'ruling class', as he was to call it, had
possessed itself of the means with which to force a subject class
to bear life's toil and burden for it. Marx's hope, expressed with
the Hegelian term of class-consciousness, rose from the fact that
the modern age had emancipated this subject class to the point
where it might recover its ability to act, while its action at the
same time would become irresistible by virtue of the very neces-
sity under which emancipation had put the working class. For
the liberation of the labourers in the initial stages of the Indus-
trial Revolution was indeed to some extent contradictory : it had
liberated them from their masters only to put them under a
stronger taskmaster, their daily needs and wants, the force, in
other words, with which necessity drives and compels men and
which is more compelling than violence. Marx, whose general
and often inexplicit outlook was still firmly rooted in the insti-
tutions and theories of the ancients, knew this very well, and it
was perhaps the most potent reason why he was so eager to
believe with Hegel in a dialectical process in which freedom
would rise directly out of necessity.
Marx's place in the history of human freedom will always
remain equivocal. It is true that in his early work he spoke of
the social question in political terms and interpreted the pre-
dicament of poverty in categories of oppression and exploita-
tion; yet it was also Marx who, in almost all of his writings after
the Communist Manifesto^ redefined the truly revolutionary
6lan of his youth in economic terms. While he had first seen
man-made violence and oppression of man by man where others
had believed in some necessity inherent in the human condition,
64 On Revolution
he later saw the iron laws of historical necessity lurking behind '
every violence, transgression, and violation. And since he, un-
like his predecessors in the modern age but very much like his
teachers in antiquity, equated necessity with the compelling
urges of the life process, he finally strengthened more than any-
body else the politically most pernicious doctrine of the modern
age, namely that life is the highest good, and that the life pro-
cess of society is the very centre of human endeavour. Thus the
role of revolution was no longer to liberate men from the
oppression of their fellow men, let alone to found freedom, but
to liberate the life process of society from the fetters of scarcity
so that it could swell into a stream of abundance. Not freedom
but abundance became now the aim of revolution.
It would, however, be unjust to blame this well-known differ-
ence between the early and the later writings of Marx upon
psychological or biographical causes and to see it as a real change
of heart. Even as an old man, in 1871, Marx was still revolu-
tionary enough to welcome enthusiastically the Parisian Com-
mune, although this outbreak contradicted all his theories and
all his predictions. It is much more likely that the trouble was
of a theoretical nature. After he had denounced economic and
social conditions in political terms, it very soon must have
dawned upon him that his categories were reversible and that
theoretically it was just as possible to interpret politics in
economic terms as vice versa. (This reversibility of concepts is
inherent in all stricdy Hegelian categories of thought.) Once an
actually existing relation between violence and necessity was
established, there was no reason why he should not think of
violence in terms of necessity and understand oppression as
caused by economic factors, even though originally this rela-
tionship had been discovered the other way round, namely by
unmasking necessity as man-made violence. This interpretation
must have appealed very strongly to his theoretical sense be-
cause the reduction of violence to necessity offers the undeniable
theoretical advantage that it is much more elegant; it simplifies
matters to the point where an actual distinction between vio-
lence and necessity has become superfluous. For violence can
indeed be easily understood as a function or a surface phenome-
The Social Question fe
non of an underlying and overruling necessity, but necessity,
which we invariably carry with us in the very existence of our
bodies and their needs, can never be simply reduced to and
completely absorbed by violence and violation. It was the scien-
tist in Marx, and the ambition to raise his *science' to the rank
of natural science, whose chief category then was still neces-
sity, that tempted him into the reversal of his own categories.
Politically, this development led Marx into an actual sur-
render of freedom to necessity. He did what his teacher in
revolution, Robespierre, had done before him and what his
greatest disciple, Lenin, was to do after him in the most momen-
tous revolution his teachings have yet inspired.
It has become customary to view all these surrenders, and es-
pecially the last one through Lenin, as foregone conclusions,
chiefly because we find it difficultfo judge any of these men, and
again most of all Lenin, in their own right, and not as mere
forerunners. (It is perhaps noteworthy that Lenin, unlike
Hitler and Stalin, has not yet found his definitive biographer,
although he was not merely a *bctter' but an incomparably simp-
ler man; it may be because his role in twentieth-century his-
tory is so much more equivocal and difficult to understand.) Yet
even Lenin, despite his dogmatic Marxism, might perhaps have
been capable of avoiding this surrender; it was after all the same
man who once, when asked to state in one sentence the essence
and the aims of the October Revolution, gave the curious and
long-forgotten formula: Electrification plus Soviets .' This
answer is remarkable first for what it omits: the role of the
party, on one side, the building of socialism on the other. In
their stead, we are given an entirely un-Marxist separation of
economics and politics, a differentiation between electrification
as the solution of Russia's social question, and the soviet system
as her new body politic that had emerged during the revolution
outside all parties. What is perhaps even more surprising in a
Marxist is the suggestion that the problem of poverty is not to
be solved through socialization and socialism, but through tech-
nical means; for technology, in contrast to socialization, is of
course politically neutral; it neither prescribes nor precludes
any specific form of government. In other words, the liberation
66 On Revolution
from the curse of poverty would come about through electrifica-
tion, but the rise of freedom through a new form of govern-
ment, the Soviets. This was one of the not infrequent instances
when Lenin's gifts as a statesman overruled his Marxist train-
ing and ideological convictions.
Not for long, to be sure. He surrendered the possibilities for
a rational, non-ideological economic development of the
country together with the potentialities of new institutions for
freedom when he decided that only the Bolshevik party could
be the driving force for both electrification and Soviets; he him-
self thus established the precedent for the later development in
which the party and the party apparatus became literally omni-
potent. However, he probably surrendered his earlier position
for economic rather than political reasons, less for the sake of the
party's power than for the sake of electrification. He was con-
vinced that an incompetent people in a backward country would
be unable to conquer poverty under conditions of political free-
dom, unable, at any rate, to defeat poverty and to found free-
dom simultaneously. Lenin was the last heir of the French
Revolution; he had no theoretical concept of freedom, but when
he was confronted with it in factual reality he understood what
was at stake, and when he sacrificed the new institutions of
freedom, the soviets i to the party which he thought would liber-
ate the poor, his motivation and reasoning were still in accord
with the tragic failures of the French revolutionary tradition.
The idea that poverty should help men to break the shackles
of oppression, because the poor have nothing to lose but their
chains, has become so familiar through Marx's teachings that
we are tempted to forget that it was unheard of prior to the
actual course of the French Revolution. True, a common pre-
judice, dear to the hearts of those who loved freedom, told men
of the eighteenth century that 'Europe for more than twelve
centuries past, has presented to view ... a constant effort, on the
part of the people to extricate themselves from the oppression of
The Social Question 67
their rulers.' 4 But by people these men did not mean the poor,
and the prejudice of the nineteenth century that all revolutions
are social in origin was still quite absent from eighteenth-cen-
tury theory or experience. As a matter of fact, when the men of
the American Revolution came to France and were actually con-
fronted with the social conditions on the continent, with those of
the poor as well as of the rich, they no longer believed with
Washington that 'the American Revolution . . . seems to have
opened the eyes of almost every nation in Europe, and [that]
a spirit of equal liberty appears fast to be gaining ground every-
where.' Some of them, even before, had warned the French
officers, who had fought with them in the War of Independ-
ence, lest their 'hopes be influenced by our triumphs on this
virgin soil. You will carry our sentiments with you, but if you
try to plant them in a country that has been corrupt for cen-
turies, you will encounter obstacles more formidable than ours.
Our liberty has been wOn with blood; yours will have to be
shed in torrents before liberty can take root in the old world.'*
But their chief reason was much more concrete. It was (as
Jefferson wrote two years before the outbreak of the French
Revolution) that 'of twenty millions of people ... there are
nineteen millions more wretched, more accursed in every circum-
stance of human existence than the most conspicuously wretched
individual of the whole United States.' (Thus Franklin before
him had found himself in Paris thinking 'often of the happiness
of New England, where every man is a Freeholder, has a vote
in publick Affairs, lives in a tidy warm House, has plenty of
good Food and Fewel . . .') Nor did Jefferson expect any great
deeds from the rest of society, from those who lived in comfort
and luxury; their conduct in his view was ruled by 'manners',
the adoption of which would be 'a step to perfect misery' every-
where. 6 Not for a moment did it occur to him that people so
'loaded with misery' - the twofold misery of poverty and cor-
ruption - would be able to achieve what had been achieved in
America. On the contrary, he warned that these were 'by no
means the free-minded people we suppose them in America',
and John Adams was convinced that a free republican govern-
ment 'was as unnatural, irrational, and impracticable as it would
68 On Revolution
be over elephants, lions, tigers, panthers, wolves, and bears, in
the royal menagerie at Versailles'. 7 And when, some twenty-
five years later, events to an extent had proved him right, and
Jefferson thought back to 'the canaille of the cities of Europe' in
whose hands any degree of freedom 'would be instantly per-
verted to the demolition and destruction of everything private
and public', 8 he had in mind both the rich and the poor, cor-
ruption and misery.
Nothing could be less fair than to take the success of the
American Revolution for granted and to sit in judgement over
the failure of the men of the French Revolution. The success
was not due merely to the wisdom of the founders of the re-
public, although this wisdom was of a very high calibre indeed.
The point to remember is that the American Revolution suc-
ceeded, and still did not usher in the novus or do saeclorum,
that the Constitution could be established 'in fact*, as 'a real
existence . . . , in a visible form', and still did not become 'to
Liberty what grammar is to language'. 9 The reason for succesi
and failure was that the predicament of poverty was absent froir
the American scene but present everywhere else in the worldi
This is a sweeping statement and stands in need of a twofold
qualification.
What were absent from the American scene were misery and
want rather than poverty, for 'the controversy between the
rich and the poor, the laborious and the idle, the learned and
the ignorant* was still very much present on the American
scene and preoccupied the minds of the founders, who, despite
the prosperity of their country, were convinced that these dis-
tinctions - 'as old as the creation and as extensive as the globe'
- were eternal. 10 Yet, since the laborious in America were poor
but not miserable - the observations of English and Continental
travellers are unanimous and unanimously amazed : 'In a course
of 1,200 miles I did not see a single object that solicited charity'
(Andrew Burnaby) - they were not driven by want, and the
revolution was not overwhelmed by them. The problem they
posed was not social but political, it concerned not the order of
society but the form of government. The point was that the
'continual toil' and want of leisure of the majority of the popu-
The Social Question 69
lation would automatically exclude them from active participa-
tion in government - though, of course, not from being repre-
sented and from choosing their representatives. But representa-
tion is no more than a matter of 'self-preservation' or self-interest,
necessary to protect the lives of the labourers and to shield them
against the encroachment of government; these essentially nega-
tive safeguards by no means open the political realm to the
many, nor can they arouse in them that 'passion for distinction*
- the 'desire not only to equal or resemble, but to excel' -
which, according to John Adams, 'next to self-preservation will
forever be the great spring of human actions'. 11 Hence the pre-
dicament of the poor after their self-preservation has been
assured is that their lives are without consequence, and that
they remain excluded from the light of the public realm where
excellence can shine; they stand in darkness wherever they go.
As John Adams saw it : The poor man's conscience is clear; yet
he is ashamed ... He feels himself out of the sight of others,
groping in the dark. Mankind takes no notice of him. He
rambles and wanders unheeded. In the midst of a crowd, at
church, in the market ... he is in as much obscurity as he would
be in a garret or a cellar. He is not disapproved, censured, or
reproached; he is only not seen ... To be wholly overlooked,
and to know it, are intolerable. If Crusoe on his island had
the library of Alexandria, and a certainty that he should never
again see the face of man, would he ever open a volume?' 12
I have quoted these words at some length because the feeling
of injustice they express, the conviction that darkness rather
than want is the curse of poverty, is extremely rare in the litera-
ture of the modern age, although one may suspect that Marx's
effort to rewrite history in terms of class struggle was partially
at least inspired by the desire to rehabilitate posthumously those
to whose injured lives history had added the insult of oblivion.
Obviously, it was the absence of misery which enabled John
Adams to discover the political predicament of the poor, but his
insight into the crippling consequences of obscurity, in contrast
to the more obvious ruin which want brought to human life,
could hardly be shared by the poor themselves; and since it re-
mained a privileged knowledge it had hardly any influence
70 On Revolution
upon the history of revolutions or the revolutionary tradition.
When, in America and elsewhere, the poor became wealthy,
they did not become men of leisure whose actions were
prompted by a desire to excel, but succumbed to the boredom
of vacant time, and while they too developed a taste for 'con-
sideration and congratulation', they were content to get these
'goods' as cheaply as possible, that is, they eliminated the passion
for distinction and excellence that can exert itself only in the
broad daylight of the public. The end of government remained
for them self-preservation, and John Adams' conviction that 'it
is a principal end of government to regulate [the passion for dis-
tinction] ' 13 has not even become a matter of controversy, it is
simply forgotten. Instead of entering the market-place, where
excellence can shine, they preferred, as it were, to throw open
their private houses in 'conspicuous consumption', to display
their wealth and to show what, by its very nature, is not fit to
be seen by all.
However, these present-day worries of how to prevent the
poor of yesterday from developing their own code of behaviour
and from imposing it on the body politic, once they have become
rich, were still quite absent from the eighteenth century, and
even today these American cares, though real enough under the
conditions of affluence, may appear sheer luxury in comparison
with the cares and worries of the rest of the world. Moreover,
modern sensibility is not touched by obscurity, not even by the
frustration of 'natural talent' and of the 'desire of superiority*
which goes with it. And the fact that John Adams was so deeply
moved by it, more deeply than he or anyone else of the Found-
ing Fathers was ever moved by sheer misery, must strike us as
very strange indeed when we remind ourselves that the absence
of the social question from the American scene was, after all,
quite deceptive, and that abject and degrading misery was pres-
ent everywhere in the form of slavery and Negro labour.
History tells us that it is by no means a matter of course for
the spectacle of misery to move men to pity; even during the
long centuries when the Christian religion of mercy determined
moral standards of Western civilization, compassion operated
outside the political realm and frequently outside the estab-
The Social Question 71
lished hierarchy of the Church. Yet we deal here with men of
the eighteenth century, when this age-old indifference was about
to disappear, and when, in the words of Rousseau, an 'innate
repugnance at seeing a fellow creature suffer' had become com-
mon in certain strata of European society and precisely among
those who made the French Revolution. Since then, the pas-
sion of compassion has haunted and driven the best men of all
revolutions, and the only revolution in which compassion played
no role in the motivation of the actors was the American Revo-
lution. If it were not for the presence of Negro slavery on the
American scene, one would be tempted to explain this striking
aspect exclusively by American prosperity, by Jefferson's 'lovely
equality', or by the fact that America was indeed, in William
Penn's words, 'a good poor Man's country'. As it is, we are
tempted to ask ourselves if the goodness of the poor white man's
country did not depend to a considerable degree upon black
labour and black misery - there lived roughly 400,000 Negroes
along with approximately 1,850,000 white men in America in the
middle of the eighteenth century, and even in the absence of re-
liable statistical data we may be sure that the percentage of
complete destitution and misery was considerably lower in the
countries of the Old World. From this, we can only conclude
that the institution of slavery carries an obscurity even blacker
than the obscurity of poverty; the slave, not the poor man, was
'wholly overlooked'. For if Jefferson, and others to a lesser
degree, were aware of the primordial crime upon which the
fabric of American society rested, if they 'trembled when [they]
thought that God is just' (Jefferson), they did so because they
were convinced of the incompatibility of the institution of
slavery with the foundation of freedom, not because they were
moved by pity or by a feeling of solidarity with their fellow
men. And this indifference, difficult for us to understand, was
not peculiar to Americans and hence must be blamed on slavery
lather than on any perversion of the heart or upon the domin-
ance of self-interest. For European witnesses in the eighteenth
century, who were moved to compassion by the spectacle of
European social conditions, did not react differently. They too
thought the specific difference between America and Europe lay
72 On Revolution
'in the absence of that abject state which condemns [a part of
the human race] to ignorance and poverty'. 1 * Slavery was no
more part of the social question for Europeans than it was for
Americans, so that the social question, whether genuinely ab-
sent or only hidden in darkness, was non-existent for all prac-
tical purposes, and with it, the most powerful and perhaps the
most devastating passion motivating revolutionaries, the pas- -
sion of compassion.
In order to avoid misunderstandings: the social question
with which we are concerned here because of its role in revolu-
tion must not be equated with the lack of equality of oppor-
tunity or the problem of social status which in the last few
decades has become a major topic of the social sciences. The
game of status-seeking is common enough in certain strata of
our society, but it was entirely absent from the society of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and no revolutionary ever
thought it his task to introduce mankind to it or to teach the
underprivileged the rules of the game. How alien these present-
day categories would have been to the minds of the founders of
the republic can perhaps best be seen in their attitude to the
question of education, which was of great importance to them,
not, however, in order to enable every citizen to rise on the
social ladder, but because the welfare of the country and the
functioning of its political institutions hinged upon education of
all citizens. They demanded 'that every citizen should receive
an education proportioned to the condition and pursuits of his
life', whereby it was understood that for the purpose of educa-
tion the citizens would 'be divided into two classes - the labour-
ing and the learned' since it would be 'expedient for promoting
the public happiness that those persons, whom nature hath
endowed with genius and virtue, should be rendered . . . able
to guard the sacred deposit of the rights and liberties of their
fellow citizens ... without regard to wealth, birth, or other
accidental condition and circumstance'. 15 Even the nineteenth-
century liberals' concern with the individual's right to full
development of all his gifts was clearly absent from these con-
siderations, as was their special sensitivity to the injustice
inherent in the frustration of talent, closely connected with their
The Social Question 73
worship o£ genius, let alone the present-day notion that every-
body has a right to social advancement and hence to education,
not because he is gifted but because society owes him the de-
velopment of skills with which to improve his status.
The realistic views of the Founding Fathers with regard to
the shortcomings of human nature are notorious, but the new
assumptions of social scientists that those who belong to the
lower classes of society have, as it were, a right to burst with
resentment, greed, and envy would have astounded them, not
only because they would have held that envy and greed are
vices no matter where we find them, but perhaps also because
their very realism might have told them that such vices are
much more frequent in the upper than in the lower social
strata. 16 Social mobility was of course relatively high even in
eighteenth-century America, but it was not promoted by the
Revolution; and if the French Revolution opened careers to
talent, and very forcefully indeed, this did not occur until after
the Directory and Napoleon Bonaparte, when it was no longer
freedom and the foundation of a republic which were at stake
but the liquidation of the Revolution and the rise of the bour-
geoisie. In our context, the point of the matter is that only the
predicament of poverty, and not either individual frustration or
social ambitions, can arouse compassion. And with the role of
compassion in revolutions, that is, in all except the American
Revolution, we must now concern ourselves.
To avert one's eyes from the misery and unhappiness of the
mass of humankind was no more possible in eighteenth-century
Paris, or in nineteenth-century London, where Marx and Engels
were to ponder the lessons of the French Revolution, than it is
today in some European, most Latin American, and nearly all
Asian and African countries. To be sure, the men of the French
Revolution had been inspired by hatred of tyranny, and they had
no less risen in rebellion against oppression than the men who,
in the admiring words of Daniel Webster, 'went to war for a
74 On Revolution
preamble 1 , and 'fought seven years for a declaration*. Against
tyranny and oppression, not against exploitation and poverty,
they had asserted the rights of the people from whose consent
- according to Roman antiquity, in whose school the revo-
lutionary spirit was taught and educated - all power must de-
rive its legitimacy. Since they themselves were clearly politically
powerless and hence among the oppressed, they felt they be-
longed to the people, and they did not need to summon up any
solidarity with them. If they became their spokesmen, it was not
in the sense that they did something for the people, be it for the
sake of power over them or out of love for them; they spoke
and acted as their representatives in a common cause. However,
what turned out to remain true through the thirteen years of the
American Revolution was quickly revealed to be mere fiction in
the course of the French Revolution.
In France the downfall of the monarchy did not change the
relationship between rulers and ruled, between government and
the nation, and no change of government seemed able to heal
the rift between them. The revolutionary governments, in this
respect not unlike their predecessors, were neither of the people
nor by the people, but at best for the people, and at worst a
'usurpation "of sovereign power' by self-styled representatives
who had put themselves 'in absolute independence with respect
to the nation'. 17 The trouble was that the chief difference be-
tween the nation and its representatives in all factions had very
little to do with 'virtue and genius', as Robespierre and others
had hoped, but lay exclusively in the conspicuous difference of
social condition which came to light only after the revolution
had been achieved. The inescapable fact was that liberation from
tyranny spelled freedom only for the few and was hardly felt
by the many who remained loaded down by their misery. These
had to be liberated once more, and compared' to this liberation
from the yoke of necessity, the original liberation from tyranny
must have looked like child's play. Moreover, in this liberation,
the men of the Revolution and the people whom they repre-
sented were no longer united by objective bonds in a common
cause; a special effort was required of the representatives, an
effort of solidarization which Robespierre called virtue, and this
The Social Question 75
virtue was not Roman, it did not aim at the res publica and had
nothing to do with freedom. Virtue meant to have the welfare
of the people in mind, to identify one's own will with the will
of the people - il faut une volonte UNE - and this effort was
directed primarily toward the happiness of the many. After the
downfall of the Gironde, il was no longer freedom but happi-
ness that became the 'new idea in Europe' (Saint-Just).
The words le peuple are the key words for every under-
standing of the French Revolution, and their connotations were
determined by those who were exposed to the spectacle of the
people's sufferings, which they themselves did not share. For
the first time, the word covered more than those who did not
participate in government, not the citizens but the low people. 18
The very definition of the word was born out of compassion,
and the term became the equivalent for misfortune and un-
happiness - le peuple, les malheureux m'applaudissent, as Robes-
pierre was wont to say; le peuple toujour s malheureux, as even
Sieyes, one of the least sentimental and most sober figures of
the Revolution, would put it. By the same token, the personal
legitimacy of those who represented the people and were con-
vinced that all legitimate power must derive from them, could
reside only in ce zele compatissant, in 'that imperious impulse
which attracts us towards les hommes faibles\ 19 in short, in the
capacity to suffer with the 'immense class of the poor', accom-
panied by the will to raise compassion to the rank of the
supreme political passion and of the highest political virtue.
Historically speaking, compassion became the driving force of
the revolutionaries only after the Girondins had failed to pro-
duce a constitution and to establish a republican government.
The Revolution had come to its turning point when the Jaco-
bins, under the leadership of Robespierre, seized power, not be-
cause they were more radical but because they did not share
the Girondins' concern with forms of government, because they
believed in the people rather than in the republic, and 'pinned
their faith on the natural goodness of a class' rather than on
institutions and constitutions: 'Under the new Constitution',
Robespierre insisted, laws should be promulgated "in the name
of the French people" instead of the "French Republic".' 20
j6 On Revolution
This shift of emphasis was caused not by any theory but by
the course of the Revolution. However, it is obvious that under
these circumstances ancient theory, with its emphasis on popular
consent as a prerequisite of lawful government, could no longer
be adequate, and to the wisdom of hindsight it appears almost
as a matter of course that Rousseau's volonti generate should
have replaced the ancient notion of consent which, in Rousseau's
theory, may be found as the volontS de tous? 1 The latter,
the will of all, or consent, was not only not dynamic or revolu-
tionary enough for the constitution of a new body politic, or the
establishment of government, it obviously presupposed the very
existence of government and hence could be deemed sufficient
only for particular decisions and the settling of problems as
they arose within a given body politic. These formalistic con-
siderations, however, are of secondary importance. It was of
greater relevance that the very word Consent', with its overtones
of deliberate choice and considered opinion, was replaced by the
word 'will', which essentially excludes all processes of exchange
of opinions and an eventual agreement between them. The will,
if it is to function at all, must indeed be one and indivisible, 'a
divided will would be inconceivable'; there is no possible media-
tion between wills as there is between opinions. The shift from
the republic to the people meant that the enduring unity of
the future political body was guaranteed not in the worldly
institutions which this people had in common, but in the will
of the people themselves. The outstanding quality of this popu-
lar will as volonte genSrale was its unanimity, and when Robes-
pierre constantly referred to 'public opinion', he meant by it the
unanimity of the general will; he did not think of an opinion
upon which many publicly were in agreement.
This enduring unity of a people inspired by one will must not
be mistaken for stability. Rousseau' took his metaphor of a
general will seriously and literally enough to conceive of the
nation as a body driven by one will, like an individual, which
also can change direction at any time without losing its identity.
It was precisely in this sense that Robespierre demanded: 'II
faut une volonte UNE ... II faut qu'elle soit republicaine ou
royaliste.' Rousseau therefore insisted that it would 'be absurd
The Social Question 77
for the will to bind itself for the future*, 22 thus anticipating the
fateful instability and faithlessness of revolutionary governments
as well as justifying the old fateful conviction of the nation-
state that treaties are binding only so long as they serve the so-
called national interest. This notion of raison d'etat is older than
the French Revolution for the simple reason that the concept of
one will, presiding over the destinies and representing the in-
terests of the nation as a whole, was the current interpretation
of the national role to be played by an enlightened monarch
whom the revolution had abolished. The problem was indeed
how 'to bring twenty-five millions of Frenchmen who had never
known or thought of any law but the King's will to rally round
any free constitution at all', as John Adams once remarked.
Hence, the very attraction of Rousseau's theory for the men of
the French Revolution was that- he apparently had found a
highly ingenious means to put a multitude into the place of a
single person; for the general will was nothing more or less
than what bound the many into one.
For his construction of such a many-headed one, Rousseau
relied on a deceptively simple and plausible example. He took
his cue from the common experience that two conflicting in-
terests will bind themselves together when they are confronted
by a third that equally opposes them both. Politically speaking,
he presupposed the existence and relied upon the unifying
power of the common national enemy. Only in the presence of
the enemy can such a thing as la nation une et indivisible, the
ideal of French and of all other nationalism, come to pass.
Hence, national unity can assert itself only in foreign affairs,
under circumstances of, at least, potential hostility. This conclu-
sion has been the seldom-admitted stock-in-trade of national
politics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; it is so ob-
viously a consequence of the general-will theory that Saint-Just
was already quite familiar with it: only foreign affairs, he in-
sisted, can properly be called 'political', while human relations
as such constitute 'the social'. ('Seules les affaires etrangeres
relevaient de la "politique", tandis que les rapports humains
formaient "le social".') 23
Rousseau himself, however, went one step further. He wished
78 On Revolution
to discover a unifying principle within the nation itself that
would be valid for domestic politics as well. Thus, his problem
was where to detect a common enemy outside the range of
foreign affairs, and his solution was that such an enemy existed
within the breast of each citizen, namely, in his particular will
and interest; the point of the matter was that this hidden,
particular enemy could rise to the rank of a common enemy -
unifying the nation from within - if one only added up all
particular wills and interests. The common enemy within the
nation is the sum total of the particular interests of all citizens.
* "The agreement of two particular interests" ', says Rousseau,
quoting the Marquis d'Argenson, ' "is formed by opposition to
a third." [Argenson] might have added that the agreement of
all interests is formed by opposition to that of each. If there were
no different interests, the common interest would be barely felt,
as it would encounter no obstacle; all would go on of its own
accord, and politics would cease to be an art' 24 (my italics).
The reader may have noted the curious equation of will and
interest on which the whole body of Rousseau's political theory
rests. He uses the terms synonymously throughout the Social
Contract, and his silent assumption is that the will is some sort
of automatic articulation of interest. Hence, the general will is
the articulation of a general interest, the interest of the people
or the nation as a whole, and because this interest or will is
general, its very existence hinges on its being opposed to each
interest or will in particular. In Rousseau's construction, the
nation need not wait for an enemy to threaten its borders in
order to rise 'like one man' and to bring about the union sacree;
the oneness of the nation is guaranteed in so far as each citizen
carries within himself the common enemy as well as the general
interest which the common enemy brings into existence; for
the common enemy is the particular interest or the particular
will of each man. If only each particular man rises against him-
self in his particularity, he will be able to arouse in himself his
own antagonist, the general will, and thus he will become a
true citizen of the national body politic. For 'if one takes away
from [all particular] wills the plusses and minuses that cancel
one another, the general will remains the sum of the differ-
The Social Question 79
ences.* To partake in the body politic of the nation, each
national must rise and remain in constant rebellion against
himself.
To be sure, no national statesman has followed Rousseau to
this logical extreme, and while the current nationalist concepts of
citizenship depend to a very large extent upon the presence of
the common enemy from abroad, we find nowhere the assump-
tion that the common enemy resides in everybody's heart. It is
different, however, with the revolutionists and the tradition of
revolution. It was not only in the French Revolution but in all
revolutions which its example inspired that the common interest
appeared in the guise of the common enemy, and the theory of
terror from Robespierre to Lenin and Stalin presupposes that the
interest of the whole must automatically, and indeed per-
manently, be hostile to the particular interest of the citizen. 25
One has often been struck by the peculiar selflessness of the revo-
lutionists, which should not be confused with 'idealism* or
heroism. Virtue has indeed been equated with selflessness ever
since J^Qbespierre, preached a virtue that was borrowed from
Rousseau, and it is the equation which has put, as it were, its in-
delible stamp upon the revolutionary man and his innermost
conviction that the value of a policy may be gauged by the
extent to which it will contradict all particular interests, and that
rhft value <>f a man may hp judged hy the extent to which he
actsagajnstjusjown jLnterestand.against hisjawn will.
Whatever theoretically the explanations and consequences of
Rousseau's teachings might be, the point of the matter is that the
actual experiences underlying Rousseau's selflessness and Robes-
pierre's 'terror of virtue* cannot be understood without taking
into account the crucial role compassion had come to play in the
minds and hearts of those who prepared and of those who acted
in the course of the French Revolution. To Robespierre, it was
obvious that the one force which could and must unite the differ-
ent classes of society into one nation was the compassion of those
who did not suffer with those who were malheureux, of the
higher classes with the low people. The goodness of man in a
state of nature had become axiomatic for Rousseau because he
80 On Revolution
found compassion to be the most natural human reaction to the
suffering of others, and therefore the very foundation of all
authentic 'natural' human intercourse. Not that Rousseau, or
Robespierre for that matter, had ever experienced the innate
goodness of natural man outside society; they deduced his
existence from the corruption of society, much as one who has
intimate knowledge of rotten apples may account for their
rottenness by assuming the original existence of healthy ones.
What they knew from inner experience was the eternal play
between reason and the passions, on one side, the inner dialogue
of thought in which man converses with himself, on the other.
And since they identified thought with reason, they concluded
that reason interfered with passion and compassion alike, that
it 'turns man's mind back upon itself, and divides him from
everything that could disturb or afflict him'. Reason makes man
selfish; it prevents nature 'from identifying itself with the unfor-
tunate sufferer*; or, in the words of Saint-Just : 'II faut ramener
toutes les definitions a la conscience; l'esprit est un sophiste qui
conduit toutes les vertus a l'echafaud.' 26
We are so used to ascribing the rebellion against reason to the
early romanticism of the nineteenth century and to under-
standing, in contrast, the eighteenth century in terms of an 'en-
lightened* rationalism, with the Temple of Reason as its
somewhat grotesque symbol, that we are likely to overlook or
to underestimate the strength of these early pleas for passion,
for the heart, for the soul, and especially for the soul torn into
two, for Rousseau's dme dechirie. It is as though Rousseau, in
his rebellion against reason, had put a soul, torn into two, into
the place of the two-in-one that manifests itself in the silent
dialogue of the mind with itself which we call thinking. And
since the two-in-one of the soul is a conflict and not a dialogue,
it engenders passion in its twofold sense of intense suffering and
of intense passionateness. It was this capacity for suffering that
Rousseau had pitted against the selfishness of society on one side,
against the undisturbed solitude of the mind, engaged in a dia-
logue with itself, on the other. And it was to this emphasis on
suffering, more than to any other part of his teachings, that he
owed the enormous, predominant influence over the minds of
The Social Question 81
the men who were to make the Revolution and who found them-
selves confronted with the overwhelming sufferings of the poor
to whom they had opened the doors to the public realm and its
light for the first time in history. What counted here, in this
great effort of a general human solidarization, was selflessness,
the capacity to lose oneself in the sufferings of others, rather than
aciive goodness, and what appeared most odious and even most
dangerous was selfishness rather than wickedness. These men,
moreover, were much better acquainted with vice than they
were witlx^dJi they had seen the vices of the rich and their in-
credible selfishness, and they concluded that virtue must be 'the
appanage of misfortune and the patrimony' of the poor. They
had watched how 'the charms of pleasure were escorted by
crime', and they argued that the torments of misery must
engender goodness. 27 The magic* of compassion was that it
opened the heart of the sufferer to the sufferings of others,
whereby it established and confirmed the 'natural' bond between
men which only the rich had lost. Where passion, the capacity
for suffering, and compassion, the capacity for suffering with
others, ended, vice began. Selfishness was a kind of 'natural*
depravity. If Rousseau had introduced compassion into political
theory, it was Robespierre who brought it on to the market-place
with the vehemence of his great revolutionary oratory.
It was perhaps unavoidable that the problem of good and evil,
of their impact upon the course of human destinies, in its stark^
unsophisticated simplicity should have haunted the minds of
men at the very moment when they were asserting or reasserting
human dignity without any resort to institutionalized religion.
But the depth of this problem could hardly be sounded by those
who mistook for goodness the natural, 'innate repugnance of
man to see his fellow creatures suffer' (Rousseau), and who
thought that selfishness and hypocrisy were the epitome of
wickedness. More importantly even, the terrifying question of
good and evil, could not even be posed, at least not in the
frameworlTof Western traditions, without taking into account
the only completely valid, completely convincing experience
Western mankind had ever had with active love of goodness as
the inspiring principle of all actions, that is, without considers*
82 On Revolution
tion of the person of Jesus of Nazareth. This consideration came
to pass in the aftermath of the Revolution, and while it is true
that neither Rousseau nor Robespierre had been able to measure
up to the questions which the teachings of the one and the acts
of the other had brought onto the agenda of the following
generations, it may also be true that without them and without
the French Revolution neither Melville nor Dostoevski would
have dared to undo the haloed transformation of Jesus of
Nazareth into Christ, to make him return to the world of men -
the one in Billy Buddy and the other in 'The Grand Inquisitor* -
and to show openly and concretely, though of course poetically^
and metaphorically, upon what tragic and self-defeating enter-
prise the men of the French Revolution had embarked almost
without knowing it. If we want to know what absolute good-
ness would signify for the course of human affairs (as distin-
guished from the course of divine matters), we had better turn
to the poets, and we can do it safely enough as long as we
remember that 'the poet but embodies in verse those exaltations
of sentiment that a nature like Nelson's, the opportunity being
given, vitalizes into acts' (Melville). At least we can learn from
them that absolute goodness is hardly any less dangerous than
absoluteevil, that it does not consist in selflessness, for surely the
Grand Inquisitor is selfless enough, and that it is beyond virtue,
even the virtue of Captain Vere. Neither Rousseau nor Robes-
pierre was capable of dreaming of a goodness beyond virtue,
just as they were unable to imagine that jgdic aLgyU would
*partake nothing of the sordid or sensual' (Melville), that there
could be wickedness beyond vice.
That the men of the French Revolution should have been un-
able to think in these terms, and therefore never really touched
the heart of the matter which their own actions had brought to
the fore, is actually almost a matter of course. Obviously, they
knew at most the principles that inspired their acts, but hardly
the meaning of the story which eventually was to result from
them. Melville and Dostoevski, at any rate, even if they had not
been the great writers and thinkers they actually both were, cer-
tainly were in a better position to know what it all had been
about. Melville especially, since he could draw from a much
The Social Question 83
richer range of political experience than Dostoevski, knew how
to talk back directly to the men of the French Revolution and to
their proposition that man is good in a state of nature and be*
comes wickedj n society. This he did in Billy Budd, where it is
as though he said : Let us assume you are right and your 'natural
man*, born outside the ranks of society, a '.foundling' endowed
with nothing but a barbarian' innocence and goodness, were to
walk the earth again - for surely it would be a return, a second
coming; you certainly remember that this happened before; you
can't have forgotten the story which became the foundation
legend of Christian civilization. But in case you have forgotten,
let me retell you the story in the context of your own circum-
stances and even in your own terminology.
Compassion and goodness may be related phenomena, but they
are not the same. Compassion plays a role, even an important
one, in Billy Budd, but its topic is goodness beyond virtue and
eviLb eyond vice, and the plot of the story consists in confronting
these two. Goodness beyond virtue is natural goodness and
wickedness beyond vice is 'a depravity according to nature'
which 'partakes nothing of the sordid or sensual'. Both are out-
side society, and the two men who embody them come, socially
speaking, from nowhere. Not only is Billy Budd a foundling;
Claggart, his antagonist, is likewise a man whose origin is un-
known. In the confrontation itself there is nothing tragic; natural
goodness, though it 'stammers' and cannot make itself heard
and understood, is stronger than wjc^ejdness because wi ckedn ess
is nature's depravity, and 'natural'" nature is stronger than de-
praved and perverted nature. The greatness of this part of the
story lies in that goodness, because it is part of 'nature', does
not act meekly but asserts itself forcefully and, indeed, violently
so that we are convinced : only the violent act with which Billy
Budd strikes dead the man who bore false witness against him is
adequate, it eliminates nature's 'depravity'. This, however, is
not the end but the beginning of the story. The story unfolds
after 'nature' has run its course, with the result that th^jvicked
man is dead and the good man has prevailed. The trouble now is
that the good man, because he encountered evil^ has become a
wrong-doer too, and this even if we assume that Billy Budd did
84 On Revolution
not lose his innocence, that he remained 'an angel of God'. It is
at this point that 'virtue 7 in the person of Captain Vere is intro-
duced into the conflict between absolute good and absolute evil,
and here the tragedy begins. Virtue - which perhaps is less than
goodness but still alone is capable 'of embodiment in lasting
institutions* - must prevail at the expense of the good man as
well; absolute, natural innocence, because it can only act
violently, is 'at war with the peace of the world and the true wel-
fare of mankind', so that virtue finally interferes not to prevent
the crime of j^vilbut to punish the violence of absolute innocence.
Claggart was 'struck by an angel of God ! Yet the angel must
hang ! * The tragedy is that the law is made for men, and neither
for angels nor for devils. Laws and all 'lasting institutions' break
down not only under the onslaught of elemental evil but under
the impact of absolute innocence as well. The law, moving be-
tween crime and virtue, cannot recognize what is beyond it, and
while it has no punishment to mete out to elemental evil, it
cannot but punish elemental goodness even if the virtuousman,
Captain Vere, recognizes that only the violence of this goodness
is adequate to the depraved power ofeyjl. The absolute - and to
Melville an absolute was incorporated in the Rights of Man -
spells doom to everyone when it is introduced into the political
realm.
We noted before that the passion of compassion was singularly
absent from the minds and hearts of the men who made the
American Revolution. Who would doubt that John Adams was
right when he wrote: "The envy and rancor of the multitude
against the rich is universal and restrained only by fear or neces-
sity. A beggar can never comprehend the reason why another
should ride in a coach while he has no bread'; 28 and still no one
familiar with misery can fail to be shocked by the peculiar cold-
ness and indifferent 'objectivity' of his judgement. Because he
was an American, Melville knew better how to talk back to the
theoretical proposition of the men of the French Revolution -
that man is good by nature - than how to take into account the
crucial passionate concern which lay behind their theories, the
concern with the suffering multitude. Envy in Billy Budd,
characteristically, is not envy of the poor for the rich but of
The Social Question 85
'depraved nature' for natural integrity - it is Claggart who is
envious of Billy Budd - and compassion is not the suffering of
the one who is spared with the man who is stricken in the flesh;
on the contrary, it is Billy Budd, the victim, who feels com-
passion for Captain Vere, for the man who sends him to his
doom.
The classical story of the other, non-theoretical side of the
French Revolution, the story of the motivation behind the words
and deeds of its main actors, is The Grand Inquisitor', in which
Dostoevski contrasts the mute compassion of Jesus with the
eloquent pity of the Inquisitor. For compassion, to be stricken
with the suffering of someone else as though it were contagious,
and pity, to be sorry without being touched in the flesh, are not
only not the same, they may not even be related. Compassion, by
its very nature, cannot be touched off by the sufferings of a whole
class or a people, or, least of all, mankind as a whole. It cannot
reach out farther than what is suffered by one person and still
remain what it is supposed to be, co-suffering. Its strength hinges
on the strength of passion itself, which, in contrast to reason, can
comprehend only the particular, but has no notion of the general
and no capacity for generalization. The sin of the Grand In-
quisitor was that he, like Robespierre, was 'attracted toward
les hommes jaibles\ not only because such attraction was in-
distinguishable from lust for power, but also because he had
depersonalized the sufferers, lumped them together into an
aggregate - the people toujour* malheureux, the suffering
masses, et cetera. To, Dostoevski, the sign of Jesus' s divinity
clearlyjwas^ his ability to have compassion .with, all _men in their
singularity, that is, without lumping them togedier_ into some
sucTTentity as one. suffering mankind. The greatness of the story,
apart from its theological implications, lies in that we are made
to feel how false the idealistic, high-flown phrases of the most
exquisite pity sound the moment they are confronted with
compassion.
Closely connected with this inability to generalize is the
curious muteness or, at least, awkwardness with words that, in
contrast to the eloquence of virtue, is the sign of goodness, as it
is the sign of compassion in contrast to the loquacity of pity.
86 On Revolution
Passion and compassion are not speechless, but their language
consists in gestures and expressions of countenance rather than
in words. It is because he listens to the Grand Inquisitor's speech
with compassion, and not for lack of arguments, that Jesus
remains silent, struck, as it were, by the suffering which lay
behind the easy flow of his opponent's great monologue. The
intensity of this listening transforms the monologue into a dia-
logue, but it can be ended only by a gesture, the gesture of the
kiss, not by words. It is upon the same note of compassion -
this time the compassion of the doomed man with the com-
passionate suffering felt for him by the man who doomed him -
that Billy Budd ends his life, and, by the same token, the argu-
ment over the Captain's sentence, and his 'God bless Captain
Vere!' is certainly closer to a gesture than to a speech. Com-
p^ssion^Jn^ this^ respert not unlike love,., abolishes the distance,
the in-between which always exists in human intercourse, and if
virtue will always be ready to assert that it is better to suffer
wrong than to do wrong, compassion will transcend this by
stating in complete and even naive sincerity that it is easier to
suffer than to see others suffer.
Because compassion abolishes the distance, the worldly space
between men where political matters, the whole realm of human
affairs, are located, it remains, politically speaking, irrelevant. ancT
without consequence. In the words of Melville, it is incapable
of establishing 'lasting institutions'. Jesus's silence in 'The Grand
Inquisitor' and Billy Budd's stammer indicate the same, namely
their incapacity (or unwillingness) for all kinds of predicative or
argumentative speech, in which someone talks to somebody
about something that is of interest to both because it inter-est, it
is between them. Such talkative and argumentative interest in
the world is entirely alien to compassion, which is directed solely,
and with passionate intensity, towards suffering man himself;
compassion speaks only to the extent that it has to reply directly
to the sheer expressionist sound and gestures through which
suffering becomes audible and visible in the world. As a rule, it
is not compassion which sets out to change worldly conditions in
order to ease human suffering, but if it does, it will shun the
drawn-out wearisome processes of persuasion, negotiation, and
The Social Question 87
compromise, which are the processes of law and politics,
and lend its voice to the suffering itself, which must claim for
swift and direct action, that is, for action with the means of
violence.
Here again, the relatedness of the phenomena of goodness and
compassion is manifest. For goodness that is beyond virtue, and
hence beyond temptation, ignorant of the argumentative reason-
ing by which man fends off temptations and, by this very pro-
cess, comes to know the ways, of wickedness, is also incapable of
learning the arts of persuading and arguing. The great maxim
of all civilized legal systems, that the burden of proof must
always rest with the accuser, sprang from the insight that only
guilt can be irrefutably proved. Innocence, on the contrary, to
the extent that it is more than 'not guilty', cannot be proved but
must be accepted on faith, whereby the trouble is that this faith
cannot be supported by the given word, which can be a lie. Billy
Budd could have ; spoken with the tongues of angels, and yet
would not have been able to refute the accusations of the 'ele-
ment al evi l 1 that confronted him; he could only raise his hand
and strike the accuser dead.
Clearly, Melville reversed the primordial legendary crime,
Cain slew Abel, which has played such an enormous role in our
tradition of political thought, but this reversal was not arbitrary;
it followed from the reversal the men of the French Revolution
had made of the proposition of original sin, which they had re-
placed by the proposition of original goodness. Melville states the
guiding question of his story himself in the Preface : How was it
possible that after 'the rectification of the Old World's hereditary
wrongs . . . straightway the Revolution itself became a wrong-
doer, one more oppressive than the Kings?' He found the answer
- surprisingly enough if one considers the common equations of
goodness with meekness and weakness - in that goodness is
strong, stronger perhaps even than wickedness , but that it shares
with ^elem ental evil ' the elementary violence inherent in all
strength and detrimental to all forms of political organization.
It is as though he said: Let us suppose that from now on the
foundation stone of our political life will be that Abel slew Cain.
Don't you see that from this deed of violence the same chain of
88 On Revolution
wrongdoing will follow, only that now mankind will not even
have the consolation that the violence it must call crime is
indeed characteristic of jy^Lmen only?
It is more than doubtful that Rousseau discovered compassion
out of suffering with others, and it is more than probable that in
this, as in nearly all other respects, he was guided by his rebellion
against high society, especially against its glaring indifference
towards the suffering of those who surrounded it. He had sum-
moned up the resources of the heart against the indifference of
the salon and against the 'heartlessness' of reason, both of which
will say 'at the sight of the misfortunes of others : Perish if you
wish, I am secure'. 29 Yet while the plight of others aroused his
heart, he became involved in his heart rather than in the suffer-
ings of others, and he was enchanted with its moods and caprices
as they disclosed themselves in the sweet delight of intimacy
which Rousseau was one of the first to discover and which from
then on began playing its important role in the formation of
modern sensibility. In this sphere of intimacy, compassion be-
came talkative, as it were, since it came to serve, together with
the passions and with suffering, as stimulus for the vitality of
the newly discovered range of emotions. Compassion, in other
words, was discovered and understood as an emotion or a senti-
ment, and the sentiment which corresponds to the passion of
compassion is, of course, pity.
Pity may be the perversion of compassion, but its alternative
is solidarity. It is out of pity that men are 'attracted toward les
hommes faibles\ but it is out of solidarity that they establish
deliberately and, as it were, dispassionately a community of
interest with the oppressed and exploited. The common interest
would then be 'the grandeur of man*, or 'the honour of the
human race', or the dignity of man. For solidarity, because it
partakes of reason, and hence of generality, is able to comprehend
a multitude conceptually, not only the multitude of a class or a
nation or a people, but eventually all mankind. But this solid-
The Social Question 89
arity, though it may be aroused by suffering, is not guided by
it, and it comprehends the strong and the rich no less than the
weak and the poor; compared with the sentiment of pity, it may
appear cold and abstract, for it remains committed to 'ideas' -
to greatness, or honour, or dignity - rather than to any 'love' of
men. Pity, because it is not stricken in the flesh and keeps its
sentimental distance, can succeed where compassion always will
fail; it can reach out to the multitude and therefore, like
solidarity, enter the market-place. But pity, in contrast to solid-
arity, does not look upon both fortune and misfortune, the
strong and the weak, with an equal eye; without the presence of
misfortune, pity could not exist, and it therefore has just as much
vested interest in the existence of the unhappy as thirst for
power has a vested interest in the existence of the weak. More-
over, by virtue of being a sentiment, pity can be enjoyed for its
own sake, and this will almost automatically lead to a glorifica-
tion of its cause, which is the suffering of others. Terminologi-
cally speaking, s olidari ty is a principlejhaLcan inspire and guide
action, compassion is one of the passions, and pity is. a, sentiment.
Robespierre^yglorification of the poor, at any rate, his praise of
suffering as the spring of virtue were sentimental in the strict
sense of the word, and as such dangerous enough, even if they
were not, as we are inclined to suspect, a mere pretext for lust
for power.
Pity, taken as the spring of virtue, has proved to possess a
greater capacity for cruelty than cruelty itself. c Par pitie, par
amour pour Thumanite, soyez inhumains !' - these words, taken
almost at random from a petition of one of the sections of the
Parisian Commune to the National Convention, are neither
accidental nor extreme; they are the authentic language of pity.
They are followed by a crude but nevertheless precise and very
common rationalization of pity's cruelty : 'Thus, the clever and
helpful surgeon with his cruel and benevolent, knife cuts off the
gangrened limb in order to save the body of the sick man.' 30
Moreover, sentiments, as distinguished from passion and prin-
ciple, are boundless, and even if Robespierre had been motivated
by the passion of compassion, his compassion would have be-
come pity when he brought it out into the open where he could
90 On Revolution
no longer direct it towards specific suffering and focus it on
particular persons. What had perhaps been genuine passions
turned into the boundlessness of an emotion that seemed to
respond only too well to the boundless suffering of the multitude
in their sheer overwhelming numbers. By the same token, he
lost the capacity to establish and hold fast to rapports with per-
sons in their singularity; the ocean of suffering around him
and the turbulent sea of emotion within him, the latter geared
to receive and respond to the former, drowned all specific con-
siderations, the considerations of friendship no less than con-
siderations of statecraft and principle. It is in these matters,
rather than in any particular fault of character, that we must
look for the roots of Robespierre's surprising faithlessness that
foreshadowed the greater perfidy which was to play such a mon-
strous role in the revolutionary tradition. Since the days of the
French Revolution, it has been the boundlessness of their sen-
timents that made revolutionaries so curiously insensitive to
reality in general and to the reality of persons in particular,
whom they felt no compunctions in sacrificing to their 'prin-
ciples', or to the course of history, or to the cause of revolution
as such. While this emotion-laden insensitivity to reality was
quite conspicuous already in Rousseau's own behaviour, his
fantastic irresponsibility and unreliability, it became a political
factor of importance only with Robespierre, who introduced it
into the factional strife of the Revolution. 31
Politically speaking, one may say that the^yjl of Robespierre's
virtue was that it did not accept any limitations. In Mon-
tesquieu's great insight that even virtue must have its limits, he
would have seen no more than the dictum of a cold heart.
Thanks to the doubtful wisdom of hindsight, we can be aware
of Montesquieu's greater wisdom of foresight and recall how
Robespierre's pity-inspired virtue, from the beginning of his
rule, played havoc with justice and made light of laws. 82
Measured against the immense sufferings of the immense maj-
ority of the people, the impartiality of justice and law, the
application of the same rules to those who sleep in palaces and
those who sleep under the bridges of Paris, was like a mockery.
Since the revolution had opened the gates of the political realm
The Social Question 91
to the poor, this realm had indeed become 'social'. It was over-
whelmed by the cares and worries which actually belonged in
the sphere of the household and which, even if they were per-
mitted to enter the public realm, could not be solved by political
means, since they were matters of administration, to be put
into the hands of experts, rather than issues which could be
settled by the twofold process of decision. and persuasion. It is
true that social and economic matters had intruded into the
public realm before the revolutions of the late eighteenth cen-
tury, and the transformation of government into administration,
the replacement of personal rule by bureaucratic measures,
even the attending transmutation of laws into decrees, had been
one of the outstanding characteristics of absolutism. But with
the downfall of political and legal authority and the rise of
revolution, it was people rather -than general economic and
financial problems that were at stake, and they did not merely
intrude into but burst upon the political domain. Their need
was violent, and, as it werej prepolitical; it seemed that only
violence could be strong and swift enough to help them.
By the same token, the whole question of politics, including
the then gravest problem, the problem of form of government,
became a matter of foreign affairs. Just as Louis XVI had been
beheaded as a traitor rather than as a tyrant, so the whole issue
of monarchy versus republic turned into an affair of armed
foreign aggression against the French nation. This is the same
decisive shift, occurring at the turning point of the Revolution,
which we identified earlier as the shift from forms of govern-
ment to 'the natural goodness of a class', or from the republic
to the people. Historically it was at this point that the Revolu-
tion disintegrated into war, into civil war within and foreign
wars without, and with it the newly won but never duly consti-
tuted power of the people disintegrated into a chaos of violence.
If the question of the new form of government was to be de-
cided on the battlefield, then it was violence, and not power, that
was to turn the scale. If liberation from poverty and the happi-
ness of the people were the true and exclusive aims of the
Revolution, then Saint-Just's youthfully blasphemous witticism,
'Nothing resembles virtue so much as a great crime', was no
92 On Revolution
more than an everyday observation, for then it followed indeed
that all must be 'permitted to those who act in the revolutionary
direction'. 33
It would be difficult to find, in the whole body of revolution-
ary oratory, a sentence that pointed with greater precision to the
issues about which the founders and the liberators, the men of
the American Revolution and the men in France, parted com-
pany. The direction of the American Revolution remained com-
mitted to the foundation of freedom and the establishment of
lasting institutions, and to those who acted in this direction
nothing was permitted that would have been outside the range
of civil law. The direction of the French Revolution was de-
flected almost from its beginning from this course of founda-
tion through the immediacy of suffering; it was determined by
the exigencies of liberation not from tyranny but from necessity,
and it was actuated by the limitless immensity of both the
people's misery and the pity this misery inspired. The lawless-
ness of the 'all is permitted' sprang here still from the senti-
ments of the heart whose very boundlessness helped in the
unleashing of a stream of boundless violence.
Not that the men of the American Revolution could have been
ignorant of the great force which violence, the purposeful viola-
tion of all laws of civil society, could release. On the contrary,
the fact that the horror and repulsion at the news of the reign
of terror in France were clearly greater and more unanimous in
the United States than in Europe can best be explained by the
greater familiarity with violence and lawlessness in a colonial
country. The first paths through the 'unstoried wilderness* of
the continent had been opened then, as they were to be
opened for a hundred more years, 'in general by the most vicious
elements', as though 'the first steps [could not be] trod, ..»
[the] first trees [not be] felled' without 'shocking violations'
and 'sudden devastations'. 3 * But although those who, for what-
ever reasons, rushed out of society into the wilderness acted as
if all was permitted to them who had left the range of enforce-
able law, neither they themselves nor those who watched them,
and not even those who admired them, ever thought that a
new law and a new world could spring from such conduct.
The Social Question 03
However criminal and even beastly the deeds might have been
that helped colonize the American continent, they remained
acts of single men, and if they gave cause for generalization
and reflection, these reflections were perhaps upon some beastly
potentialities inherent in man's nature, but hardly upon the
political behaviour of organized groups, and certainly not upon
a historical necessity that could progress only via crimes and
criminals.
To be sure, the men living on the American frontier also
belonged to the people for whom the new body politic was
devised and constituted, but neither they nor those who were
populating the settled regions ever became a singular to the
founders. The word 'people' retained for them the meaning of
manyness, of the endless variety of a multitude whose majesty
resided in its very plurality. Opposition to public opinion,
namely to the potential unanimity of all, was therefore one of
the many things upon which the men of the American Revolu-
tion were in complete agreement; they knew that the public
realm in a republic was constituted by an exchange of opinion
between equals, and that this realm would simply disappear
the very moment an exchange became superfluous because all
equals happened to be of the same opinion. They never referred
to public opinion in their argument, as Robespierre and the men
of the French Revolution invariably did to add force to their
own opinions; in their eyes, the rule of public opinion was a
form of tyranny. To such an extent indeed was the American
concept of people identified with a multitude of voices and
interests that Jefferson could establish it as a principle 'to make
us one nation as to foreign concerns, and keep us distinct in
domestic ones', 35 just as Madison could assert that their regula-
tion 'forms the principal task of . . . legislation, and involves
the spirit of party and faction in the operations of the govern-
ment'. The positive accent here on faction is noteworthy, since
it stands in flagrant contradiction to classical tradition, to which
the Founding Fathers otherwise paid the closest attention.
Madison must have been conscious of his deviation on so im-
portant a point, and he was explicit in stating its cause, which
was his insight into the nature of human reason rather than any
94 On Revolution
reflection upon the diversity of conflicting interests in society.
According to him, party and faction in government correspond
to the many voices and differences in opinion which must con-
tinue 'as long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is
at liberty to exercise it\ 36
The fact of the matter was, of course, that the kind of multi-
tude which the founders of the American republic first repre-
sented and then constituted politically, if it existed at all in
Europe, certainly ceased to exist as soon as one approached the
lower strata of the population. The malheureux whom the
French Revolution had brought out of the darkness of their
misery were a multitude only in the mere numerical sense.
Rousseau's image of a 'multitude . . . united in one body* and
driven by one will was an exact description of what they actu-
ally were, for what urged them on was the quest for bread,
and the cry for bread will always be uttered with one voice.
In so far as we all need bread, we are indeed all the same,
and may as well unite into one body. It is by no means merely
a matter of misguided theory that the French concept of le
peuple has carried, from its beginning, the connotation of a
multiheaded monster, a mass that moves as one body and acts as
though possessed by one will; and if this notion has spread to
the four corners of the earth, it is not because of any influence
of abstract ideas but because of its obvious plausibility under
conditions of abject poverty. The political trouble which misery
of the people holds in store is that manyness can in fact assume
the guise of oneness, that suffering indeed breeds moods and
emotions and attitudes that resemble solidarity to the point of
confusion, and that - last, not least - pity for the many is easily
confounded with compassion for one person when the 'com-
passionate zeal' (le zele compatissant) can fasten upon an ob-
ject whose oneness seems to fulfil the prerequisites of compas-
sion, while its immensity, at the same time, corresponds to the
boundlessness of sheer emotion. Robespierre once compared the
nation to the ocean; it was indeed the ocean of misery and the
ocean-like sentiments it aroused that combined to drown the
foundations of freedom.
The superior wisdom of the American founders in theory
The Social Question 95
and practice is conspicuous and impressive enough, and yet has
never carried with it sufficient persuasiveness and plausibility to
prevail in the tradition of revolution. It is as though the Ameri-
can Revolution was achieved in a kind of ivory tower into
which the fearful spectacle of human misery, the haunting
voices of abject poverty, never penetrated. And this was, and
remained for a long time, the spectacle and the voice not of
humanity but of humankind. Since there were no sufferings
around them that could have aroused their passions, no over-
whelmingly urgent needs that would have tempted them to
submit to necessity, no pity to lead them astray from reason,
the men of the American Revolution remained men of action
from beginning to end, from the Declaration of Independence
to the framing of the Constitution. Their sound realism was
never put to the test of compassion, their common sense was
never exposed to the absurd hope that man, whom Christianity
had held to be sinful and corrupt in his nature, might still be
revealed to be an angel. Since passion had never tempted them
in its noblest form as compassion, they found it easy to think
of passion in terms of desire and to banish from it any connota-
tion of its original meaning, which is rcaGetv, to suffer and to
endure. This lack of experience gives their theories, even if
they are sound, an air of lightheartedness, a certain weightless-
ness, which may well put into jeopardy their durability. For,
humanly speaking, it is endurance which enables man to create
durability and continuity. Their thought did not carry them
any further than to the point of understanding government in
the image of individual reason and construing the rule of
government over the governed according to the age-old model of
the rule of reason over the passions. To bring the irrationality'
of desires and emotions under the control of rationality was, of
course, a thought dear to the Enlightenment, and as such was
quickly found wanting in many respects, especially in its facile
and superficial equation of thought with reason and of reason
with rationality.
There is, however, another side to this matter. Whatever the
passions and the emotions may be, and whatever their true
connection with thought and reason, they certainly are located
g$ On Revolution
in the human heart. And not only is the human heart a place
of darkness which, with certainty, no human eye can pen-
etrate; the qualities of the heart need darkness and protection
against the light of the public to grow and to remain what
they are meant to be, innermost motives which are not for
public, display. However deeply heartfelt a motive may be, once
it is brought out and exposed for public inspection it becomes an
object of suspicion rather than insight; when the light of the
public falls upon it, it appears and even shines, but, unlike
deeds and words which are meant to appear, whose very exis-
tence hinges on appearance, the motives behind such deeds and
words are destroyed in their essence through appearance; when
they appear they become 'mere appearances' behind which again
other, ulterior motives may lurk, such as hypocrisy and deceit.
The same sad logic of the human heart, which has almost auto-
matically caused modern 'motivational research' to develop into
an eerie sort of filing cabinet for human vices, into a veritable
science of misanthropy, made Robespierre and his followers,
once they had equated virtue with the qualities of the heart, see
intrigue and calumny, treachery and hypocrisy everywhere. The
fateful mood of suspicion, so glaringly omnipresent through the
French Revolution even before a Law of Suspects spelled out
its frightful implications, and so conspicuously absent from even
the most bitter disagreements between the men of the American
Revolution, arose directly out of this misplaced emphasis on the
heart as the source of political virtue, on le cosur, une dme droite,
un caracthre moral.
The heart, moreover - as the great French moralists from
Montaigne to Pascal knew well enough even before the great
psychologists of the nineteenth century, Kierkegaard, Dostoev-
ski, Nietzsche - keeps its resources alive through a constant
struggle that goes on in its darkness and because of its darkness.
When we say that nobody but God can see (and, perhaps, can
bear to see) the nakedness of a human heart, 'nobody' includes
one's own self - if only because our sense of unequivocal reality
is so bound up with the presence of others that we can never be
sure of anything that only we ourselves know and no one else.
The consequence of this hiddenness is that our entire psycho-
The Social Question 97
logical life, the process of moods in our souls, is cursed with a
suspicion we constantly feel we must raise against ourselves,
against our innermost motives. Robespierre's insane lack of trust
in others, even in his close friends, sprang ultimately from his
not so insane but quite normal suspicion of himself. Since his
very credo forced him to play the 'incorruptible* in public every
day and to display his virtue, to open his heart as he understood
it, at least once a week, how. could he be sure that he was not the
one thing he probably feared most in his life, a hypocrite? The
heart knows many such intimate struggles, and it knows too
that what was straight when it was hidden must appear crooked
when it is displayed. It knows how to deal with these prob-
lems of darkness according to its own 'logic', although it has
no solution for them, since a solution demands light, and it is
precisely the light of the world that distorts the life of the heart.
The truth of Rousseau's dme dechiree, apart from its function in
the formation of the volonte genirale, is that the heart begins
to beat properly only when it has been broken or is being torn
in conflict, but this is a truth which cannot prevail outside the
life of the soul and within the realm of human affairs.
Robespierre carried the conflicts of the soul, Rousseau's dme
dichirie, into politics, where they became murderous because
they were insoluble. 'The hunt for hypocrites is boundless and
can produce nothing but demoralization.' 37 If, in the words of
Robespierre, patriotism was a thing of the heart', then the
reign of virtue was bound to be at worst the rule of hypocrisy,
and at best the never-ending fight to ferret out the hypocrites, a
fight which could only end in defeat because of the simple fact
that it was impossible to distinguish between true and false
patriots. When his heartfelt patriotism or his ever-suspicious
virtue were displayed in public, they were no longer principles
upon which to act or motives by which to be inspired; they
had degenerated into mere appearances and had become part of
a show in which TartufTe was bound to play the principal part.
It was as though the Cartesian doubt - je doute done je suis -
had become the principle of the political realm, and the reason
was that Robespierre had performed the same introversion upon
the deeds of action that Descartes had performed upon the
98 On Revolution
articulations of thought. To be sure, every deed has its motives
as it has its goal and its principle; but the act itself, though it
proclaims its goal and makes manifest its principle, does not
reveal the innermost motivation of the agent. His motives re-
main dark, they do not shine but are hidden not only from
others but, most of the time, from himself, from his self-inspec-
tion, as well. Hence, the search for motives, the demand that
everybody display in public his innermost motivation, since it
actually demands the impossible, transforms all actors into
hypocrites; the moment the display of motives begins, hypocrisy
begins to poison all human relations. The effort, moreover, to
drag the dark and the hidden into the light of day can only
result in an open and blatant manifestation of those acts whose
very nature makes them seek the protection of darkness; it is,
unfortunately, in the essence of these things that every effort to
make goodness manifest in public ends with the appearance of
crime and criminality on the political scene. In politics, mo re
^ajLanywhere else, wejiaye no possibility of distinguishing, be-
tween being and appearance. In the realm of human affairs,
being and appearance are indeed one and the same.
The momentous role that hypocrisy and the passion for its
unmasking came to play in the later stages of the French
Revolution, though it may never cease to astound the historian,
is a matter of historical record. The revolution, before it pro-
ceeded to devour its own children, had unmasked them, and
French historiography, in more than a hundred and fifty years,
has reproduced and documented all these exposures until no one
is left among the chief actors who does not stand accused, or
at least suspected, of corruption, duplicity, and mendacity. No
matter how much we may owe to the historians' learned con-
troversies and passionate rhetorics, from Michelct and Louis
Blanc to Aulard and Mathiez, if they did not fall under the
spell of historical necessity, they wrote as though they were
still hunting for hypocrites; in the words of Michelet, *at [their]
The Social Question 99.
touch the hollow idols were shattered and exposed, the carrion
kings appeared, unsheetcd and unmasked.' 38 They were still
rngaged in the war which Robespierre's virtue had declared
upon hypocrisy, just as the French people even today re-
member so well the treacherous cabals of those who once ruled
them that they will respond to every defeat in war or peace with
nous sommes trahis. But the relevance of these experiences has
by no means remained restricted to the national history of the
French people. We need only remember how, until very re-
cently, the historiography of the American Revolution, under
the towering influence of Charles Beard's Economic Interpreta-
tion of the Constitution of the United States (1913), was ob-
sessed by the unmasking of the Founding Fathers and by the
hunt for ulterior motives in the making of the Constitution.
This effort was all the more significant as there were hardly
any facts to back up the foregone conclusions. 39 It was a matter
of sheer 'history of ideas 1 - as though America's scholars and
intellectuals, when in the beginning of this century she emerged
from her isolation, felt they must at least repeat in ink and print
what in other countries had been written with blood.
It was the war upon hypocrisy that transformed Robespierre's
dictatorship into the Reign of Terror, and the outstanding char-
acteristic of thijs period was the self-purging of the rulers. The
terror with which the Incorruptible struck must not be mis-
taken for the Great Fear - in French both are called terreur -
the result of the uprising of the people beginning with the fall
of the Bastille and the women's march on Versailles, and end-
ing with the September Massacres three years later. The Reign
of Terror and the fear the uprising of the masses caused in the
ruling classes were not the same. Nor can terror be blamed ex-
clusively upon the revolutionary dictatorship, a necessary emer-
gency measure for a country at war with practically all its neigh-
bours.
Terror as an institutional device, consciously employed to
accelerate the momentum of the revolution, was unknown prior
to the Russian Revolution. No doubt the purges of the Bol-
shevik party were originally modelled upon, and justified by
reference to, the events that had determined the course of the
ioo On Revolution
French Revolution; no revolution, so it might have seemed to
the men of the October Revolution, was complete without self-
purges in the party that had risen to power. Even the language
in which the hideous process was conducted bore out the simi-
larity; it was always a question of uncovering what had been
hidden, of unmasking the disguises, of exposing duplicity and
mendacity. Yet the difference is marked. The eighteenth-century
terror was still enacted in good faith, and if it became boundless
it did so only because the hunt for hypocrites is boundless by
nature. The purges in the Bolshevik party, prior to its rise to
power, were motivated chiefly by ideological differences; in this
respect the interconnection between terror and ideology was
manifest from the very beginning. After its rise to power, and
still under the guidance of Lenin, the party then institutional-
ized purges as a means of checking abuses and incompetence in
the ruling bureaucracy. These two types of purges were different
and yet they had one thing in common; they were both guided
by the concept of historical necessity whose course was deter-
mined by movement and counter-movement, by revolution and
counter-revolution, so that certain 'crimes' against the revolu-
tion had to be detected even if there were no known criminals
who could have committed them. The concept of 'objective
enemies', so all-important for purges and show-trials in the
Bolshevik world, was entirely absent from the French Revolu-
tion, and so was the concept of historical necessity, which, as
we have seen, did not so much spring from the experiences and
thoughts of those who made the Revolution as it arose from the
efforts of those who desired to understand and to come to terms
with a chain of events they had watched as a spectacle from
the outside. Robespierre's 'terror of virtue' was terrible enough;
but it remained directed against a hidden enemy and a hidden
vice. It was not directed against people who, even from the
viewpoint of the revolutionary ruler, were innocent. It was a
question of stripping the mask off the disguised traitor, not of
putting the mask of the traitor on arbitrarily selected people in
order to create the required impersonators in the bloody mas-
querade of a dialectical movement.
It must seem strange that hypocrisy - one of the minor vices,
The Social Question 101
we are inclined to think - should have been hated more than
all the other vices taken together. Was not hypocrisy, since it
paid its compliment to virtue, almost the vice to undo the vices,
at least to prevent them from appearing and to shame them into
hiding? Why should the vice that covered up vices become the
vice of vices? Is hypocrisy then such a monster? we are tempted
to ask (as Melville asked, 'Is envy then such a monster?').
Theoretically, the answers to these questions may ultimately lie
within the range of one of the oldest metaphysical problems in
our tradition, the problem of the relationship between being and
appearance, whose implications and perplexities with respect to
the political realm have been manifest and caused reflection at
least from Socrates to Machiavelli. The core of the problem can
be stated briefly and, for our purpose, exhaustively by recalling
the two diametrically opposed positions which we connect with
these two thinkers.
Socrates, in the tradition of Greek thought, took his point of
departure from an unquestioned belief in the truth of appear-
ance, and taught : 'Be as you would wish to appear to others*,
by which he means : 'Appear to yourself as you wish to appear
to others.' Machiavelli, on the contrary, and in the tradition
of Christian thought, took for granted the existence of a trans-
cendent Being behind and beyond the world of appearances, and
therefore taught: 'Appear as you may wish to be*, by which
he meant : 'Never mind how you are, this is of no relevance in
the world and in politics, where only appearances, not "true"
being, count; if you can manage to appear to others as you
would wish to be, that is all that can possibly be required by the
judges of this world.* His advice sounds to our ears like the
counsel of hypocrisy, and the hypocrisy on which Robespierre
declared his futile and pernicious war indeed involves the prob-
lems of Machiavelli's teaching. Robespierre was modern enough
to go hunting for truth, though he did not yet believe, as some
of his late disciples did, that he could fabricate it. He no longer
thought, as Machiavelli did, that truth appeared of its own ac-
cord either in this world or in a world to come. And without a
faith in the revelatory capacity of truth, lying and make-believe
in all their forms change their character; they had not been
102 On Revolution
considered crimes in antiquity unless they involved wilful
deception and bearing false witness.
Politically, both Socrates and Machiavelli were disturbed not
by lying but by the problem of the hidden crime, that is, by the
possibility of a criminal act witnessed by nobody and remaining
unknown to all but its agent. In Plato's early Socratic dialogues,
where this question forms a recurring topic of discussion, it is
always carefully added that the problem consists in an action
'unknown to men and gods'. The addition is crucial, because
in this form the question could not exist for Machiavelli, whose
whole so-called moral teachings presuppose the existence of a
God who knows all and eventually will judge everybody. For
Socrates, on the contrary, it was an authentic problem whether
something that 'appeared' to no one except the agent did exist
at all. The Socratic solution consisted in the extraordinary dis-
covery that the agent and the onlooker, the one who does and
the one to whom the deed must appear in order to become real
- the latter, in Greek terms, is the one who can say 8oiceI uoi,
it appears to me, and then can form his 56£a, his opinion,
accordingly - were contained in the selfsame person. The iden-
tity of this person, in contrast to the identity of the modern
individual, was formed not by oneness but by a constant hither-
and-thither of two-in-one; and this movement found its highest
form and purest actuality in the dialogue of thought which
Socrates did not equate with logical operations such as in-
duction, deduction, conclusion, for which no more than one
'operator' is required, but with that form of speech which is
carried out between me and myself. What concerns us here is
that the Socratic agent, because he was capable of thought, car-
ried within himself a witness from whom he could not escape;
wherever he went and whatever he did, he had his audience,
which, like any other audience, would automatically constitute
itself into a court of justice, that is, into that tribunal which
later ages have called conscience. Socrates' solution to the prob-
lem of the hidden crime was that there is nothing, done by men,
which can remain 'unknown to men and gods'.
But before we proceed we must note that, in the Socratic
frame of reference, there exists hardly any possibility of becom-
The Social Question 103
ing aware of the phenomenon of hypocrisy. To be sure, the
polis, and the whole political realm, was a man-made space of
appearances where human deeds and words were exposed to
the public that testified to their reality and judged their worthi-
ness. In this sphere, treachery and deceit and lying were possible,
as though men, instead of Appearing' and exposing themselves,
created phantoms and apparitions with which to fool others;
these self-made illusions only covered up the true phenomena
(the true appearances or (paivousva), just as an optical illusion
might spread over the object, as it were, and prevent it from
appearing. Yet hypocrisy is not deceit, and the duplicity of the
hypocrite is different from the duplicity of the liar and the cheat.
The hypocrite, as the word indicates (it means in Greek 'play-
actor'), when he falsely pretends to virtue plays a role as con-
sistently as the actor in the play who also must identify himself
with his role for the purpose of play-acting; there is no alter
ego before whom he might appear in his true shape, at least not
as long as he remains in the act. His duplicity, therefore, boom-
erangs back upon himself, and he is no less a victim of his
mendacity than those whom he set out to deceive. Psychologic-
ally speaking, one may say that the hypocrite is too ambitious;
not only does he want to appear virtuous before others, he wants
to convince himself. By the same token, he eliminates from the
world, which he has populated with illusions and lying phan-
toms, the only core of integrity from which true appearance
could arise again, his own incorruptible self. For while probably
no living man, in his capacity as an agent, can claim not only to
be uncorrupted but to be incorruptible, the same may not be
true with respect to this other watchful and testifying self before
whose eyes not our motives and the darkness of our hearts but,
at least, what we do and say must appear. As witnesses not of
our intentions but of our conduct, we can be true or false, and
the hypocrite's crime is that he bears false witness against him-
self. What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the
vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover
of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it
is true, confront us with the perplexity o£ radical eyil; but only
the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.
104 On Revolution
We may now understand why even Machiavelli's counsel,
'Appear as you may wish to be', has little if any bearing upon
the problem of hypocrisy. Machiavelli knew corruption well
enough, especially the corruption of the Church, on which he
tended to blame the corruption of the people in Italy. But this
corruption he saw in the role the Church had assumed in
worldly, secular affairs, that is, in the domain of appearances,
whose rules were incompatible with the teachings of Christian-
ity. For Machiavelli, the one-who-is and the one-who-appears
remain separated, albeit not in the Socratic sense of the two-
in-one of conscience and consciousness, but in the sense that the
one-who-is can appear in his true being only before God; if he
tries to appear before men in the sphere of worldly appearances,
he has already corrupted his being. If, on the scene which is the
world, he appears in the disguise of virtue, he is no hypocrite
and does not corrupt the world, because his integrity remains
safe before the watchful eye of an omnipresent God, while the
virtues he displays have their meaningfulness not in hiding but
only in being displayed in public. No matter how God might
judge him, his virtues will have improved the world while his
vices remain hidden, and he will have known how to hide them
not because of any pretence to virtue but because he felt they
were not fit to be seen.
Hypocrisy is the vice through which corruption becomes
manifest. Its inherent duplicity, to shine with something that
is not, had shed its glittering specious light upon French society
ever since the kings of France had decided to assemble the
nobles of the kingdom at their court in order to engage and
entertain and corrupt them by a most elaborate play of follies
and intrigues, of vanities and humiliations and plain indecency.
Whatever we may wish to know about these origins of modern
society, of the high society of the eighteenth century, of genteel
society in the nineteenth, and, finally, mass society in our own
century, is written large in the chronicle of the Court of France
with its 'majestic hypocrisy' (Lord Acton) and reported only too
faithfully in the Memoirs of Saint-Simon, whereas the 'eternal*
and quintessential wisdom of this kind of worldliness has sur-
vived in the maxims of La Rochefoucauld, which to this day are
The Social Question 105
unsurpassed. There, indeed, gratitude was 'like business credit',
promises were made 'to the extent that [men] hoped and kept
to the extent that they feared', 40 each story was an intrigue and
every purpose became a cabal. Robespierre knew what he was
talking about when he spoke of 'vices surrounded with riches',
or exclaimed - still in the style of the earlier French narrators
of the customs and mores of society whom we call the moralists
- 'La reine du monde c'est l'intrigue P
The Reign of Terror, we should remember, followed upon
the period when all political developments had fallen under
the influence of Louis XVI's ill-fated cabals and intrigues. The
violence of terror, at least to a certain extent, was the reaction
to a series of broken oaths and unkept promises that were the
perfect political equivalent of the customary intrigues of Court
society, except that these wilfully corrupted manners, which
Louis XIV still knew how to keep apart from the style in
which he conducted affairs of state, had by now reached the
monarch as well. Promises and oaths were nothing but a rather
awkwardly construed frontage with which to cover up, and win
time for, an even more inept intrigue contrived towards the
breaking of all promises and all oaths. And though in this in-
stance the king promised to the extent that he feared, and broke
his promises to the extent that he hoped, one cannot but marvel
at the precise appositeness of La Rochefoucauld's aphorism. The
widespread opinion that the most successful modes of political
action are intrigue, falsehood, and machination, if they are not
outright violence, goes back to these experiences, and it is there-
fore no accident that we find this sort of Realpoliti\ today
chiefly among those who rose to statesmanship out of the
revolutionary tradition. Wherever society was permitted to in-
vade, to overgrow, and eventually to absorb the political realm,
it imposed its own mores and 'moral' standards, the intrigues
and perfidies of high society, to which the lower strata re-
sponded by violence and brutality.
War upon hypocrisy was war declared upon society as the
eighteenth century knew it, and this meant first of all war upon
the Court at Versailles as the centre of French society. Looked
at from without, from the viewpoint of misery and wretched-
106 On Revolution
ness, it was characterized by heartlessness; but seen from within,
and judged upon its own terms, it was the scene of corruption
and hypocrisy. That the wretched life of the poor was con-
fronted by the rotten life of the rich is crucial for an under-
standing of what Rousseau and Robespierre meant when they
asserted that men are good 'by nature' and become rotten by
means of society, and that the low people, simply by virtue of not
belonging to society, must always be 'just and good*. Seen from
this viewpoint, the Revolution looked like the explosion of an
uncorrupted and incorruptible inner core though an outward
shell of decay and odorous decrepitude; and it is in this context
that the current metaphor which likens the violence of revolu-
tionary terror to the birth-pangs attending the end of an old
and the coming-into-being of a new organism once had an
authentic and powerful meaning. But this was not yet the meta-
phor used by the men of the French Revolution. Their favoured
simile was that the Revolution offered the opportunity of tear-
ing the mask of hypocrisy off the face of French society, of ex-
posing its rottenness, and, finally, of tearing the facade of cor-
ruption down and of exposing behind it the unspoiled, honest
face of the peuple.
It is quite characteristic that, of the two similes currently used
for descriptions and interpretations of revolutions, the organic
metaphor has become dear to the historians as well as to the
theorists of revolution - Marx, indeed, was very fond of the
'birth-pangs of revolutions' - while the men who enacted the
Revolution preferred to draw their images from the language
of the theatre. 41 The profound meaningfulness inherent in tie
many political metaphors derived from the theatre is perhaps
best illustrated by the history of the Latin word persona. In its
original meaning, it signified the mask ancient actors used to
wear in a play. (The dramatis personae corresponded to the
Greek t& ioO Spduatoc, TipoocoTta.) The mask as such ob-
viously had two functions : it had to hide, or rather to replace,
the actor's own face and countenance, but in a way that would
make it possible for the voice to sound through. 42 At any rate, it
was in this twofold understanding of a mask through which a
voice sounds that the word persona became a metaphor and was
The Social Question 1( yj
carried from the language of the theatre into legal terminology.
The distinction between a private individual in Rome and a
Roman citizen was that the latter had a persona, a legal per-
sonality, as we would say; it was as though the law had affixed
to him the part he was expected to play on the public scene,
with the provision, however, that his own voice would be able
to sound through. The point was that 'it is not the natural Ego
which enters a court of law. It is a right-and-duty-bearing per-
. son, created by the law, which appears before the law.' 43 With-
out his persona, there would be an individual without rights
and duties, perhaps a 'natural man' - that is, a human being or
homo in the original meaning of the word, indicating someone
outside the range of the law and the body politic of the citizens,
as for instance a slave - but certainly a politically irrelevant
being.
When the French Revolution unmasked the intrigues of the
Court and proceeded to tear off the mask of its own children, it
aimed, of course, at the mask of hypocrisy. Linguistically, the
Greek fouojcpiTf|<;,'in its original meaning as well as in its late
metaphorical usage, signified the actor himself, not the mask,
the rcp6a©Jtov, he wore. In contrast, the persona, in its original
theatrical sense, was the mask affixed to the actor's face by the
exigencies of the play; hence, it meant metaphorically the 'per-
son', which the law of the land can affix to individuals as well
as to groups and corporations, and even to 'a common and con-
tinuing purpose', as in the instance of 'the "person" which owns
the property of an Oxford or Cambridge college [and which]
is neither the founder, now gone, nor the body of his living
successors'.** The point of this distinction and the appositeness
of the metaphor lie in that the unmasking of the 'person', the
deprivation of legal personality, would leave behind the 'natural'
human being, while the unmasking of the hypocrite would leave
nothing behind the mask, because the hypocrite is the actor
himself in so far as he wears no mask. He pretends to be the
assumed role, and when he enters the game of society it is with-
out any play-acting whatsoever. In other words, what made the
hypocrite so odious was that he claimed not only sincerity but
naturalness, and what made him so dangerous outside the
~&
108 On Revolution
social realm whose corruption he represented and, as it were,
enacted, was that he instinctively could help himself to every
'mask' in the political theatre, that he could assume every role
among its dramatis personae, but that he would not use this
mask, as the rules of the political game demand, as a sounding
board for the truth but, on the contrary, as a contraption for
deception.
However, the men of the French Revolution had no concep-
tion of the persona, and no respect for the legal personality
which is given and guaranteed by the body politic. When the
predicament of mass poverty had put itself into the road of the
Revolution that had started with the strictly political rebellion of
the Third Estate - its claim to be admitted to and even to rule
the political realm - ^;he men of the Revolution were no longer
concerned with the emancipation of citizens, or with equality in
the sense that everybody should be equally entided to his legal
personality, to be protected by it and, at the same time, to act
almost literally 'through' it. They believed that they had eman-
cipated nature herself, as it were, liberated the natural man in all
men, and given him the Rights of Man to which each was en-
titled, not by virtue of the body politic to which he belonged but
by virtue of being born. In other words, by the unending hunt
for hypocrites and through the passion for unmasking society,
they had, albeit unknowingly, torn away the mask of the
persona as well, so that the Reign of Terror eventually spelled
the exact opposite of true liberation and true equality; it equal-
ized because it left all inhabitants equally without the protecting
mask of a legal personality.
The perplexities of the Rights of Man are manifold, and
Burke's famous argument against them is neither obsolete nor
'reactionary'. In distinction from the American Bills of Rights,
upon which the Declaration of the Rights of Man was modelled,
they were meant to spell out primary positive rights, inherent
in man's nature, as distinguished from his political status, and
as such they tried indeed to reduce politics to nature. The Bills
of Rights, on the contrary, were meant to institute permanent
restraining controls upon all political power, and hence pre-
supposed the existence of a body politic and the functioning of
The Social Question 109
political power. The French Declaration of the Rights of Man,
as the Revolution came to understand it, was meant to constitute
the source of all political power, to establish not the control
but the foundation-stone of the body politic. The new body
politic was supposed to rest upon man's natural rights, upon his
rights in so far as he is nothing but a natural being, upon
his right to 'food, dress, and the reproduction of the species',
that is, upon his right to the necessities of life. And these rights
were not understood as prepolitical rights that no government
and no political power has the right to touch and to violate, but
as the very content as well as the ultimate end of government
and power. The ancien regime stood accused of having deprived
its subjects of these rights - the rights of life and nature rather
than the rights of freedom and citizenship;
When the malheureux appeared on the streets of Paris it must
have seemed as if Rousseau's 'natural man' with his 'real
wants' in his 'original state' had suddenly materialized, and as
though the Revolution had in fact been nothing but that
'experiment [which] would have to be made to discover' him. 45
For the people who now appeared were not 'artificially' hidden
behind any mask, since they stood just as much outside the
body politic as they stood outside society. No hypocrisy dis-
torted their faces and no legal personality protected them. Seen
from their standpoint, the social and the political were equally
'artificial', spurious devices with which to hide 'original men*
either in the nakedness of their selfish interests or in the naked-
ness of their unbearable misery. From then on, the 'real wants'
determined the course of the Revolution, with the result - as
Lord Acton so rightly observed - that 'in all the transactions,
which determined the future of France, the [Constituent]
Assembly had no share', that power 'was passing from them to
the disciplined people of Paris, and beyond them and their com-
manders to the men who managed the masses'.* 6 For the masses,
once they had discovered that a constitution was not a panacea
no On Revolution
for poverty, turned against the Constituent Assembly as they
had turned against the Court of Louis XVI, and they saw in the
deliberations of the delegates no less a play of make-believe,
hypocrisy, and bad faith, than in the cabals of the monarch.
Of the men of the Revolution only those survived and rose to
power who became their spokesmen and surrendered the 'arti-
ficial', man-made laws of a not yet constituted body politic to
the 'natural' laws which the masses obeyed, to the forces by
which they were driven, and which indeed were the forces of
nature herself, the force of elemental necessity.
When this force was let loose, when everybody had become
convinced that only naked need and interest were without hyp-
ocrisy, the malheureux changed into the enragis, for rage is
indeed the only form in which misfortune can become active.
Thus, after hypocrisy had been unmasked and suffering been
exposed, it was rage and not virtue that appeared - the rage of
corruption unveiled on one side, the rage of misfortune on the
other. It had been intrigue, the intrigues of the Court of France,
that had spun the alliance of the monarchs of Europe against
France, and it was fear and rage rather than policy that inspired
the war against her, a war of which even Burke could demand :
'If ever a foreign prince enters into France, he must enter it as
into a country of assassins. The mode of civilized war will not
be practised; nor are the French, who act on the present system,
entitled to expect it.' One could argue that it was this threat of
terror inherent in the revolutionary wars that 'suggested the use
to which terror maybe put in revolutions'; 47 at any rate, it was
answered with rare precision by those who called themselves les
cnragSs and who avowed openly that vengeance was the inspir-
ing principle of their actions : 'Vengeance is the only source of
liberty, the only goddess we ought to bring sacrifices to', as
Alexandre Rousselin, a member of Hebert's faction, put it. This
was perhaps not the true voice of the people, but certainly
the very real voice of those whom even Robespierre had iden-
tified with the people. And those who heard these voices, both
the voice of the great from whose faces the revolution had torn
the mask of hypocrisy and 'the voice of nature', of 'original
man' (Rousseau), represented in the raging masses of Paris,
The Social Question hi
must have found it hard to believe in the goodness of unmasked
Human nature and in the infallibility of the people.
It was the unequal contest of these rages, the rage of naked
misfortune pitted against the rage of unmasked corruption, that
produced the 'continuous reaction' of 'progressive violence' of
which Robespierre spoke; together they swept away rather
than 'achieved in a few years the work of several centuries'. 48
For rage is not only impotent by definition, it is the mode in
which impotence becomes active in its last stage of final despair.
The enrageSy inside or outside the sections of the Parisian Com-
mune, were those who refused to bear and endure their suf-
fering any longer, without, however, being able to rid them-
selves of it or even to alleviate it. And in the contest of
devastation they proved to be the stronger part, because their
rage was connected with and rose* directly out of their suffering.
Suffering, whose strength and virtue lie in endurance, explodes
into rage when it can no longer endure; this rage, to be sure, is
powerless to achieve, but it carries with it the momentum of
true suffering, whose devastating force is superior and, as it
were, more enduring than the raging frenzy of mere frustra-
tion. It is true that the masses of the suffering people had taken
to the street unbidden and uninvited by those who then became
their organizers and their spokesmen. But the suffering they ex-
posed transformed the malheureux into the enrages only when
'the compassionate zeal' of the revolutionaries - of Robespierre,
probably, more than of anybody else - began to glorify this suf-
fering, hailing the exposed misery as the best and even only
guarantee of virtue, so that - albeit without realizing it - the
men of the Revolution set out to emancipate the people not qua
prospective citizens but qua malheureux. Yet, if it was a ques-
tion of liberating the suffering masses instead of emancipating
the people, there was no doubt that the course of the Revolution
depended upon the release of the force inherent in suffering,
upon the force of delirious rage. And though the rage of im-
potence eventually sent the Revolution to its doom, it is true that
suffering, once it is transformed into rage, can release over-
whelming forces. The Revolution, when it turned from the
foundation of freedom to the liberation of man from suffering,
ii2 On Revolution
broke down the barriers of endurance and liberated, as it
were, the devastating forces of misfortune and misery instead.
Human life has been stricken with poverty since times im-
memorial, and mankind continues to labour under this curse in
all countries outside the Western Hemisphere. No revolution
has ever solved the 'social question' and liberated men frcm the
predicament of want, but all revolutions, with the exception of
the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, 49 have followed the ex-
ample of the French Revolution and used and misused the
mighty forces of misery and destitution in their struggle against
tyranny or oppression. And although the whole record of past
revolutions demonstrates beyond doubt that every attempt to
solve the social question with political means leads into terror,
and that it is terror which sends revolutions to their doom, it
can hardly be denied that to avoid this fatal mistake is almost
impossible when a revolution breaks out under conditions of
mass poverty. What has always made it so terribly tempting to
follow the French Revolution on its foredoomed path is not only
the fact that liberation from necessity, because of its urgency,
will always take precedence over the building of freedom, but
the even more important and more dangerous fact that the
uprising of the poor against the rich carries with it an altogether
different and much greater momentum of force than the re-
bellion of the oppressed against their oppressors. This raging
force may well nigh appear irresistible because it lives from
and is nourished by the necessity of biological life itself. (The
rebellions of the belly are the worst*, as Francis Bacon put it,
discussing 'discontentment' and 'poverty' as causes for sedition.)
No doubt the women on their march to Versailles 'played the
genuine part of mothers whose children were starving in squalid
homes, and they thereby afforded to motives which they neither
shared nor understood the aid of a diamond point that nothing
could withstand*. 50 And when Saint-Just out of these experiences
exclaimed, 'Les malheureux sont la puissance de la terre', we
might as well hear these grand and prophetic words in their
literal meaning. It is indeed as though the forces of the earth
were allied in benevolent conspiracy with this uprising, whose
end is impotence, whose principle is rage, and whose conscious
The Social Question 113
aim is not freedom but life and happiness. Where the break-
down of traditional authority set the poor of the earth on the
march, where they left the obscurity of their misfortunes and
streamed upon the market-place, their juror seemed as irresist-
ible as the motion of the stars, a torrent rushing forward with
elemental force and engulfing a whole world.
Tocqueville (in a famous passage, written decades before
Marx and probably without knowledge of Hegel's philosophy
of history) was the first to wonder why 'the doctrine of
necessity ... is so attractive to those who write history in
democratic ages'. The reason, he believed, lay in the anonymity
of an egalitarian society, where 'the traces of individual action
upon nations are lost', so that 'men are led to believe that . . ,
some superior force [is] ruling over them'. Suggestive as this
theory may appear, it will be found wanting upon closer reflec-
tion. The powerlessness of the individual in an egalitarian
society may explain the experience of a superior force determin-
ing his destiny; it hardly accounts for the element of motion
inherent in the doctrine of necessity, and without it the doctrine
would have been useless to historians. Necessity in motion, the
'close enormous chain which girds and binds the human race*
and can be traced back 'to the origin of the world', 51 was entirely
absent from the range of experiences of either the American
Revolution or American egalitarian society. Here Tocqueville
read something into American society which he knew from the
French . Revolution, where already Robespierre had substituted
an irresistible and anonymous stream of violence for the free
and deliberate actions of men, although he still believed - in
contrast to Hegel's interpretation of the French Revolution -
that this free-flowing stream could be directed by the strength of
human virtue. But the image behind Robespierre's belief in the
irresistibility of violence as well as behind Hegel's belief in the
irresistibility of necessity - both violence and necessity being in
motion and dragging everything and everybody into their
streaming movements - was the familiar view of the streets of
Paris during the Revolution, the view of the poor who came
streaming out into the street.
In this stream of the poor, the element of irresistibility, which
ii4 O* Revolution
we found so intimately connected with the original meaning of
the word 'revolution', was embodied, and in its metaphoric
usage it became all the more plausible as irresistibility again
was connected with necessity - with the necessity which we
ascribe to natural processes, not because natural science used to
describe the processes in terms of necessary laws, but because we
experience necessity to the extent that we find ourselves, as
organic bodies, subject to necessary and irresistible processes.
All rulership has its original and its most legitimate source in
man's wish to emancipate himself from life's necessity, and men
achieved such liberation by means of violence, by forcing others
to bear the burden of life for them. This was the core of slavery,
and it is only the rise of technology, and not the rise of modern
political ideas as such, which has refuted the old and terrible
truth that only violence and rule oyer others could make some
men free. Nothing, we might say today, could be more obsolet e
than to attempt to liberate manKrid^om poverty by political
means;' nothing could be more futile and more dangerous^ For
the violence which occurs between men who are emancipated
from necessity is different from, less terrifying, though often not
less cruel, than the primordial violence with which man pits
himself against necessity, and which appeared in the full day-
light of political, historically recorded events for the first time in
the moden age. The result was that necessity invaded the politi-
cal realm, the only realm where men can be truly free.
The masses of the poor, this overwhelming majority of all
men, whom the French Revolution called les malheureux, whom
it transformed into les enrag6s> only to desert them and let
them fall back into the state of les misirables, as the nineteenth
century called them, carried with them necessity, to which they
had been subject as long as memory reaches, together with the
violence that had always been used to overcome necessity. Both
together, necessity and violence, made them appear irresistible
- la puissance de la terre*
CHAPTER THREE
The Pursuit of Happiness
Necessity and violence, violence justified and glorified be-
cause it acts in the cause of necessity, necessity no longer either
rebelled against in a supreme effort of liberation or accepted in
pious resignation, but, on the contrary, faithfully worshipped as
the great all-coercing force which surely, in the words of Rous-
seau, will 'force men to be free' -we know how these two and
the interplay between them have become the hallmark of suc-
cessful revolutions in the twentieth century, and this to such
an extent that, for the learned and the unlearned alike, they
are now outstanding characteristics of all revolutionary events.
And we also know to our sorrow that freedom has been better
preserved in countries where no revolution ever broke out, no
matter how outrageous the circumstances of the powers that be,
and that there exist more civil liberties even in countries where
the revolution was defeated than in those where revolutions
have been victorious.
On this, we need not insist here, although we shall have to
come back to it later. Before we proceed, however, we must
call attention to those men whom I called the men of the revolu-
tions, as distinct from the later professional revolutionists, in
order to catch a first glimpse of the principles which might have
inspired and prepared them for the role they were to play. For
no revolution, no matter how wide it may have opened the
gates to the masses of the poor, was ever started by them, just
as no revolution, no matter how widespread discontent and
even conspiracy may have been in a given country, was ever the
result of sedition. Generally speaking, we may say that no
revolution is even possible where the authority of the body
politic is truly intact, and this means, under modern conditions,
n6 On Revolution
where the armed forces can be trusted to obey the civil authori-
ties. Revolutions always appear to succeed with amazing ease in
their initial stage, and the reason is that the men who make
them first only pick up the power of a regime in plain disinte-
gration; they are the consequences but never the causes of the
downfall of political authority.
From this, however, we are not entitled to conclude that
revolutions always occur where government is incapable of com-
manding authority and the respect that goes with it. On the
contrary, the curious and sometimes even weird longevity of
obsolete bodies politic is a matter of historical record and was
indeed an outstanding phenomenon of Western political history
prior to the First World War, Even where the loss of authority
is quite manifest, revolutions can break out and succeed only if
there exists a sufficient number of men who are prepared for its
collapse and, at the same time, willing to assume power, eager
to organize and to act together for a common purpose. The
number of such men need not be great; ten men acting together,
as Mirabeau once said, can make a hundred thousand tremble
apart from each other.
In contrast to the appearance of the poor on the political scene
during the French Revolution, which nobody had foreseen, this
loss of authority of the body politic had been a well-known
phenomenon in Europe and the colonies ever since the seven-
teenth century. Montesquieu, more than forty years before the
outbreak of die Revolution, knew well enough that ruin was
slowly eating away the foundations on which political structures
rested in the West, and he feared a return of despotism be-
cause Europe's peoples, though they were still ruled by habit
and custom, no longer felt at home politically, no longer trusted
the laws under which they lived, and no longer believed in the
authority of those who ruled them. He did not look forward to
a new age of freedom but, on the contrary, feared lest freedom
die out in the only stronghold it had ever found, since he was
convinced that customs, habits, and manners - in short mores
and morality, which are so important for the life of society and
so irrelevant for the body politic - would give way quickly in
any case of emergency. 1 And such estimates were by no means
The Pursuit of Happiness 1 17
restricted to France, where the corruption of the ancien rtgime
constituted the fabric of the social as well as the political body.
At about the same time, Hume observed in England that 'the
mere name of King commands litde respect; and to talk of a
king as God's vice-regent upon earth, or to give him any of
these magnificent tides which formerly dazzled mankind,
would but excite laughter in every one\ He does not trust the
tranquillity in the country but believes - using almost the same
words as Montesquieu - that with 'the least shock of con-
vulsion .•.the kingly power being no longer supported by
the settled principles and opinions of men, will immediately
dissolve*. It was essentially for the same reasons of insecurity
and diffidence about things as they then were in Europe that
Burke so enthusiastically greeted the American Revolution:
'Nothing less than a convulsion that will shake the globe to its
centre can ever restore the European nations to that liberty by
which they were once so much distinguished. The Western
world was the seat of freedom until another, more Western, was
discovered; and that other will be probably its asylum when it
is hunted down in every other part/ 9
Hence, what could be foreseen, what Montesquieu was only
the first to predict explicidy, was the incredible ease with which
governments would be overthrown; and the progressive loss of
authority of all inherited political structures which he had in
mind became plain to an increasing number of people every-
where throughout the eighteenth century. What also must have
been plain even then was that this political development was
part and parcel of the more general development of die modern
age. In its broadest terms, one can describe this process *s the
breakdown of the old Roman trinity of religion, tradition,
and authority, whose innermost principle had survived the
change of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire, as it
was to survive the change of the Roman Empire into the Holy
Roman Empire; it was the Roman principle that now was fall-
ing to pieces before the onslaught of the modern age. The down-
fall of political authority was preceded by the loss of tradition
and the weakening of institutionalized religious beliefs; it was
the decrease of traditional and religious authority that per-
n8 On Revolution
haps undermined political authority as well and certainly
forecast its ruin. Of the three elements which together, in
mutual accord, had ruled the secular and spiritual affairs of
men since the beginnings of Roman history, political authority
was the last to vanish; it had depended upon tradition, it could
not be secure without a past 'to throw its light upon the future*
(Tocqueville), and it was unable to survive the lost sanction of
religion. The enormous difficulties which especially the loss of
religious sanction held in store for the establishment of a
new authority, the perplexities which caused so many of the
men of the revolutions to fall back upon or at least to invoke
beliefs which they had discarded prior to the revolutions, we
shall have to discuss later.
If the men who, on both sides of the Atlantic, were prepared
for the revolution had anything in common prior to the events
which were to determine their lives, to shape their convictions,
and eventually to draw them apart, it was a passionate concern
for public freedom much in the way Montesquieu or Burke
spoke about it, and this concern was probably even then, in
the century of mercantilism and an undoubtedly very progres-
sive absolutism, something rather old-fashioned. Moreover, they
were by no means bent upon revolution, but, as John Adams
put it, 'called without expectation and compelled without pre-
vious inclination'; as Tocqueville testifies for France, 'the very
notion of a violent revolution had no place in f their] mind;
it was not discussed because it was not conceived.' 3 Yet, against
Adams' word stands his own testimony that 'the revolution was
effected before the war commenced',* not because of any specifi-
cally revolutionary or rebellious spirit but because the inhabitants
of the colonies were 'formed by law into corporations, or bodies
politic', and possessed 'the right to assemble ... in their town
halls, there to deliberate upon the public affairs'; it was 'in these
assemblies of towns or districts that the sentiments of the people
were formed in the first place'. 5 And against Tocqueville's re-
mark stands his own insistence on 'the taste' or 'the passion for
public freedom' which he found widespread in France prior to
the outbreak of the revolution, predominant in fact in the minds
The Pursuit of Happiness 1 19
of those who had no conception whatsoever o£ revolution and no
premonition of their own role in it.
Even at this point, the difference between the Europeans and
the Americans, whose minds were still formed and influenced
by an almost identical tradition, is conspicuous and important.
What was a passion and a 'taste' in France clearly was an ex-
perience in America, and the American usage which, especially
in the eighteenth century, spoke of 'public happiness', where the
French spoke of 'public freedom', suggests this difference quite
appropriately. The point is that the Americans knew that public
freedom consisted in having a share in public business, and that
the activities connected with this business by no means con-
stituted a burden but gave those who discharged them in public
a feeling of happiness they could acquire nowhere else. They
knew very well, and John Adams-was bold enough to formulate
this knowledge time and again, that the people went to the town
assemblies, as their representatives later were to go to the famous
Conventions, neither exclusively because of duty nor, and even
less, to serve their own interests but most of all because they
enjoyed the discussions, the deliberations, and the making of
decisions. What brought them together was 'the world and the
public interest of liberty' (Harrington), and what moved them
was 'the passion for distinction' which John Adams held to be
'more essential and remarkable' than any other human faculty :
'Wherever men, women, or children, are to be found, whether
they be old or young, rich or poor, high or low, wise or foolish,
ignorant or learned, every individual is seen to be strongly
actuated by a desire to be seen, heard, talked of, approved and
respected by the people about him, and within his knowledge.'
The virtue of this passion he called 'emulation', the 'desire to
excel another', and its vice he called 'ambition' because it 'aims
at power as a means of distinction'. 6 And, psychologically speak-
ing, these are in fact the chief virtues and vices of political man.
For the thirst and will to power as such, regardless of any
passion for distinction, though characteristic of the tyrannical
man, is no longer a typically political vice, but rather that quality
which tends to destroy all political life, its vices no less than
120 On Revolution
its virtues. It is precisely because the tyrant has no desire to excel
and lacks all passion for distinction that he finds it so pleasant to
rise above the company of all men; conversely, it is the desire
to excel which makes men love the world and enjoy the company
of their peers, and drives them into public business.
Compared to this American experience, the preparation of
the French homtnes de lettres who were to make the Revolution
was theoretical in the extreme; 7 no doubt *the play-actors 1 of the
French Assembly also enjoyed themselves, although they would
hardly have admitted it and certainly had no time to reflect
upon this side of an otherwise grim business. They had no ex-
periences to fall back upon, only ideas and principles untested by
reality to guide and inspire them, and these had all been con-
ceived, formulated, and discussed prior to the Revolution. Hence
they depended even more on memories from antiquity, and they
filled the ancient Roman words with suggestions that arose from
language and literature rather than from experience and con-
crete observation. Thus the very word res publica, la chose pub-
lique, suggested to them that there existed no such thing as
public business under the rule of a monarch. But when these
words, and the dreams behind them, began to manifest them-
selves in the early months of the Revolution, the manifestation
was not in the form of deliberations, discussions, and decisions; it
was, on the contrary, an intoxication whose chief element was
the crowd - the mass 'whose applause and patriotic delight added
as much charm as brilliance* to the Oath of the Tennis Court as
experienced by Robespierre. No doubt the historian is right to
add, 'Robespierre had experienced ... a revelation of Rous-
seauism manifest in the flesh. He had heard ... the voice of the
people, and thought it was the voice of God. From this moment
dates his mission. 8 And yet, however strongly the emotions of
Robespierre and his colleagues may have been swayed by experi-
ences for which there were hardly any ancient precedents, their
conscious thoughts and words would stubbornly return to
Roman language. If we wish to draw the line in purely linguistic
terms, we might insist on the relatively late date of the word
'democracy', which stresses the people's rule and role, as opposed
to the word 'republic', with its strong emphasis on objective in-
The Pursuit of Happiness 121
stitutions. And the word democracy' was not used in France
until 1794; even the execution of the king was still accompanied
by the shouts : Vive la rSpublique,
Thus Robespierre's theory of revolutionary dictatorship,
though it was prompted by the experiences of revolution, found
its legitimation in the well-known Roman republican institution,
and apart from it there was hardly anything new in theory that
was added during these years to the body of eighteenth-century
political thought. It is well known how much the Founding
Fathers, their deep sense of the novelty of their enterprise not-
withstanding, prided themselves on having only applied boldly
and without prejudice what had been discovered long before.
They considered themselves masters of political science because
they dared and knew how to apply the accumulated wisdom of
the past. That the Revolution consisted chiefly in the application
of certain rules and verities of political science as the eighteenth
century knew it is at best a half-truth even in America, and less
than this in France, where unexpected events so early interfered
with and ultimately defeated the constitution and the establish-
ment of lasting institutions. Still, the truth is that without the
Founding Fathers' enthusiastic and sometimes slightly comical
erudition in political theory - the copious excerpts from writers,
ancient and modern, which fill so many pages of John Adams*
works, sometimes make it seem that he collected constitutions
as other people collect stamps - no revolution would ever have
been effected.
In the eighteenth century the men prepared for power and
eager, among other things, to apply what they had learned by
study and thought were called hommes de lettres, and this is
still a better name for them than our term 'intellectuals', under
which we habitually subsume a class of professional scribes and
writers whose labours are needed by the ever-expanding bureau-
cracies of modern government and business administration as
well as by the almost equally fast-growing needs for entertain-
ment in mass society. The growth of this class in modern times
was inevitable and automatic; it would have come about under
all circumstances, and it might be argued - if one takes into
account the unsurpassed conditions for its development in the
122 On Revolution
political tyrannies of the East - that its chances were even better
under the rule of despotism and absolutism than under the con-
stitutional rule of free countries. The distinction between the
hommes de lettres and the intellectuals by no means rests on an
obvious difference in quality; more important in our context is
the fundamentally different attitudes these two groups have
shown, ever since the eighteenth century, toward society, that is,
toward that curious and somewhat hybrid realm which the
modern age interjected between the older and more genuine
realms of the public or political on one side and the private on
the other. Indeed, the intellectuals are and always have been part
and parcel of society, to which as a group they even owed their
existence and prominence; all pre-revolutionary governments in
eighteenth-century Europe needed and used them for 'the build-
ing up of a body of specialized knowledge and procedures in-
dispensable for the growing operation of their governments on
all levels, a process which stresses the esoteric character of
governmental activities.' 9 The men of letters, on the contrary,
resented nothing more than the secrecy of public affairs; they
had started their career by refusing this sort of governmental
service and by withdrawing from society, first from the society
of the royal court and the life of a courtier, and later from the
society of the salon. They educated themselves arid cultivated
their minds in a freely chosen seclusion, thus putting themselves
at a calculated distance from the social as well as the political,
from which they were excluded in any case, in order to look
upon both in perspective. It is only from about the middle of the
eighteenth century that we find them in open rebellion against
society and its prejudices, and the prerevolutionary defiance had
been preceded by the quieter but no less penetrating, considered,
and deliberate contempt for society which was the source even of
Montaigne's wisdom, which sharpened even the depth of Pascal's
thoughts, and which left its traces still upon many pages of
Montesquieu's work. This, of course, is not to deny the enor-
mous difference in mood and style between the contemptuous
disgust of the aristocrat and the resentful hatred of the plebeians
which was to follow it; but the object of both contempt and
hatred, we must remember, was more or less the same.
The Pursuit of Happiness 123
Moreover, no matter to which 'estate 1 the men of letters be-
longed, they were free from the burden of poverty. Dissatisfied
with whatever prominence state or society of the ancien regime
might have granted them, they felt that their leisure was a
burden rather than a blessing, an imposed exile from the realm
of true freedom rather than the freedom from politics which
philosophers since antiquity have claimed for themselves in order
to pursue activities they deemed to be higher than those which
engage men in public business. In other words, their leisure was
the Roman otium and not the Greek axoXf| ; it was an enforced
inactivity, a 'languishing in idle retirement', where philosophy
was supposed to deliver some 'cure for grief (a doloris medici-
nam),™ and they were still quite in the Roman style when they
began to employ this leisure in the interest of the res publica, la
chose publique, as the eighteenth century, translating literally
from the Latin, called the realm of public affairs. Hence they
turned to the study of Greek and Roman authors, not - and this
is decisive - for the sake of whatever eternal wisdom or im-
mortal beauty the books themselves might contain, but almost
exclusively in order to learn about the political institutions to
which they bore witness. It was their search for political freedom,
not their quest for truth, that led them back to antiquity, and
their reading served to give them the concrete elements with
which to think and dream of such freedom. In the words of
Tocqueville, 'Chaque passion publique se deguisa ainsi en
philosophic' Had they known in actual experience what public
freedom meant for the individual citizen, they might have
agreed with their American colleagues and spoken about 'public
happiness'; for one needs only to recall the rather common
American definition of public happiness - given, for instance,
by Joseph Warren in 1772 - as depending 'on virtuous and un-
shaken attachment to a free Constitution', to realize how closely
related the actual contents of the apparently different formulae
must have been. Public or political freedom and public or politi-
cal happiness were the inspiring principles which prepared the
minds of those who then did what they never had expected to
. do, and more often than not were compelled to acts for which
they had no previous inclination.
124 On Revolution
The men who in France prepared the minds and formulated
the principles of the coming revolution are known as the_
philosopher of the Enlightenment. But the name of philosophers
to which they laid claim was rather misleading; for their sig-
nificance in the history of philosophy is negligible, and their
contribution to the history of political thought does not equal
the originality of their great predecessors in the seventeenth and
early eighteenth centuries. However, their importance in the
context of revolution is great; it lies in the fact thaj:_they_used
the term freedom with a new, hitherto almost unknown
emphasis on public freedom, an indication that they und erstood
by freedom something very different from the free will or free
thought the philosophers had known and discussed since
Augustine. Their public freedom was not an inner realmjnto
which men might escape at will from the pressures of the world,
nor was it the liberum arbitrium which makes the^ill^choose
between alternatives. Freedom for them could exist onlyuin.
public; it was a tangible, worldly reality, something created by
men to be enjoyed by men rather than a gift or a capacity, it
was the man-made public space or market-place which antiquity
had known as the area where freedom appears and becomes
visible to all. ~
For the absence of political freedom under the rule of the
enlightened absolutism in the eighteenth century did not consist
so much in the denial of specific personal liberties, certainly not
for the members of the upper classes, as in the fact 'that the world
of public affairs was not only hardly known to them but was
invisible'. 11 What the hommes de lettres shared with the poor,
quite apart from, and also prior to, any compassion with their
suffering, was precisely obscurity, namely, that the public realm
was invisible to them and that they lacked the public space
where they themselves could become visible and be of signifi-
cance. What distinguished them from the poor was that they
had been offered, by virtue of birth and circumstances, the social
substitute for political significance which is consideration, and
their personal distinction lay precisely in the fact that they had
refused to settle in 'the land of consideration' (as Henry James
calls the domain of society), opting rather for the secluded
The Pursuit of Happiness 125
obscurity of privacy where they could at least entertain and
nourish their passion for significance and freedom. To be sure,
this passion for freedom for its own sake, for the sole 'pleasure
to be able to speak, to act, to breathe' (Tocqucville), can arise
only where men are already free in the sense that they do not
have a master. And the trouble is that this passion for public or
political freedom can so easily be mistaken for the perhaps much
more vehement, but politically essentially sterile, passionate
hatred of masters, the longing of the oppressed for liberation.
Such hatred, no doubt, is as old as recorded history and probably
even older; it has never yet resulted in revolution since it is
incapable of even grasping, let alone realizing, the central idea of
revolution, which is the foundation of freedom, that is, the
foundation of a body politic which guarantees the space where
freedom can appear.
Under modern conditions, the act of foundation is identical
with the framing of a constitution, and the calling of constitu-
tional assemblies has quite rightly become the hallmark of revolu-
tion ever since the Declaration of Independence initiated the
writings of constitutions for each of the American States, a
process which prepared and culminated in the Constitution of
the Union, the foundation of the United States. It is probable
that this American precedent inspired the famous Oath of the
Tennis Court in which the Third Estate swore that it would not
disband before a constitution was written and duly accepted by
the royal power. Yet what also has remained a hallmark of
revolutions is the tragic fate which awaited the first constitution
in France; neither accepted by the king nor commissioned and
ratified by the nation - unless one holds that the hissing or
applauding galleries which attended the deliberations of the
National Assembly were the valid expression of the constituent,
or even the consenting, power of the people - the Constitution of
1791 remained a piece of paper, of more interest to the learned
and the experts than to the people. Its authority was shattered
even more before it went into effect, and it was followed in quick
succession by one constitution after another until, in an avalanche
of constitutions lasting deep into our own century, the very
notion of constitution disintegrated beyond recognition. The
126 On Revolution
deputies of the French Assembly who had declared themselves
a permanent body and then, instead of taking their resolutions
and deliberations back to the people, cut themselves adrift from
their constituent powers, did not become founders or founding
fathers, but they certainly were the ancestors of generations of
experts and politicians to whom constitution-making was to
become a favourite pastime because they had neither power nor
a share in the shaping of events. It was in this process that the
act of constitution-making lost its significance, and that the very
notion of constitution came to be associated with a lack of reality
and realism, with an over-emphasis on legalism and formalities.
We today are still under the spell of this historical develop-
ment, and so we may find it difficult to understand that revolu-
tion on the one hand, and constitution and foundation on the
other, are like correlative conjunctions. To the men of the
eighteenth century, however, it was still a matter of course that
they needed a constitution to lay down the boundaries of the
new political realm and to define the rules within it, that they
had to found and build a new political space within which the
'passion for public freedom' or the 'pursuit of public happiness'
would receive free play for generations to come, so that their
own 'revolutionary' spirit could survive the actual end of the
revolution. However, even in America where the foundation of
a new body politic succeeded and where therefore, in a sense, the
Revolution achieved its actual end, this second task of revolu-
tion, to assure the survival of the spirit out of which the act of
foundation sprang, to realize the principle which inspired it -
a task which, as we shall see, Jefferson especially considered to be
of supreme importance for the very survival of the new body
politic - was frustrated almost from the beginning. And a sug-
gestion pointing to the forces that caused this failure can be
found in the very term 'pursuit of happiness' that Jefferson him-
self, in the Declaration of Independence, had put in the stead of
'property' in the old formula of 'life, liberty, and property',
which currently defined civil, as distinct from political, rights.
What makes Jefferson's substitution of terms so suggestive is
that he did not use the term 'public happiness', which we find so
frequently in the political literature of the time and which was
The Pursuit of Happiness 127
probably a significant American variation of the conventional
idiom in royal proclamations where 'the welfare and the hap-
piness of our people* quite explicitly meant the private welfare
of the king's subjects and their private happiness. 12 Thus Jeffer-
son himself - in a paper for the Virginia Convention of 1774
which in many respects anticipated the Declaration of Independ-
ence - had declared that 'our ancestors' when they left the
'British dominions in Europe' exercised c a right which nature
has given all men, ... of establishing new societies, under such
laws and regulations as to them shall seem most likely to pro-
mote public happiness.' 13 If Jefferson was right and it was in
quest of 'public happiness' that the 'free inhabitants of the British
dominions' had emigrated to America, then the colonies in the
New World must have been the breeding grounds of revolu-
tionaries from the beginning. And? by the same token, they must
have been prompted even then by some sort of dissatisfaction
with the rights and liberties of Englishmen, prompted by a
desire for some kind of freedom which the 'free inhabitants' of
the mother country did not enjoy. 1 * This freedom they called
later, when they had come to taste it, 'public happiness', and it
consisted in the citizen's right of access to the public realm, in
his share in public power - to be 'a participator in the govern-
ment of affairs' in Jefferson's telling phrase 15 -as distinct from the
generally recognized rights of subjects to be protected by the
government in the pursuit of private happiness even against
public power, that is, distinct from rights which only tyrannical
power would abolish. The very fact that the word 'happiness'
was chosen in laying claim to a share in public power indicates
strongly that there existed in the country, prior to the revolution,
such a thing as 'public happiness', and that men knew they
could not be altogether 'happy' if their happiness was located
and enjoyed only in private life.
However, the historical fact is that the Declaration of In-
dependence speaks of 'pursuit of happiness', not of public happi-
ness, and the chances arc that Jefferson himself was not very sure
in his own mind which kind of happiness he meant when he
made its pursuit one of the inalienable rights of man. His famous
'felicity of pen' blurred the distinction between 'private rights
128 On Revolution
and public happiness' 16 with the result that the importance of his
alteration was not even noticed in the debates of the Assembly.
To be sure, none of the delegates would have suspected the
astonishing career of this 'pursuit of happiness', which was to
contribute more than anything else to a specifically American
ideology, to the terrible misunderstanding that, in the words of
Howard Mumford Jones, holds that men are entitled to 'the
ghastly privilege of pursuing a phantom and embracing a
delusion'. 17 In the eighteenth-century setting, the term, as we
have seen, was familiar enough, and, without the qualifying
adjective, each of the successive generations was free to under-
stand by it what it pleased. But this danger of confusing public
happiness and private welfare was present even then, although
one may assume that the delegates to the Assembly still- held fast
to the general belief of 'colonial publicists, that "there is an in-
separable connection between public virtue and public happi-
ness", and that liberty [is] the essence of happiness'. 18 For
Jefferson - like the rest of them, with the possible exception only
of John Adams - was by no means aware of the flagrant contra-
diction between the new and revolutionary idea of public happi-
ness and the conventional notions of good government which
even then were felt to be 'hackneyed' (John Adams) or to repre-
sent no more than 'the common sense of the subject' (Jefferson);
according to these conventions, the 'participators in the govern-
ment of affairs' were not supposed to be happy but to labour
under a burden, happiness was not located in the public realm
which the eighteenth century identified with the realm of
government, but government was understood as a means to pro-
mote the happiness of society, the -only legitimate object of good
government', 19 so that any experience of happiness in the
'participators' themselves could only be ascribed to an 'inordi-
nate passion for power', and the wish for participation on the
side of the governed could only be justified by the need to check
and control these 'unjustifiable' tendencies of human nature. 20
Happiness, Jefferson too would insist, lies outside the public
realm, 'in the lap and love of my family, in the society of my
neighbours and my books, in the wholesome occupation of my
The Pursuit of Happiness 129
farms and my affairs', 21 in short, in the privacy of a home upon
whose life the public has no claim.
Reflections and exhortations of this sort are quite current in
the writings of the Founding Fathers, and yet I think they do
not carry much weight there - little weight in Jefferson's and less
in John Adams' works. 22 If we were to probe into the authentic
experiences behind the commonplace that public business is a
burden, at best 'a tour of duty . . . due from every individual' to
his fellow citizens, we had better turn to the fifth and fourth
centuries b.c. in Greece than to the eighteenth century a.d. of our
civilization. As far as Jefferson and the men of the American
Revolution are concerned - again with the possible exception of
John Adams - the truth of their experience rarely came out
when they spoke in generalities. Some of them, it is true, would
get indignant about 'the nonsense of Plato', but this did not
prevent their thought from being predetermined by Plato's 'foggy
mind' rather than by their own experiences whenever they tried
to express themselves in conceptual language. 23 Still, there are
more than a few instances when their profoundly revolutionary
acting and thinking broke the shell of an inheritance which had
degenerated into platitudes and when their words matched the
greatness and novelty of their deeds. Among these instances is
the Declaration of Independence, whose greatness owes nothing
to its natural-law philosophy - in which case it would indeed be
'lacking in depth and subtlety' 2 * - but lies in the 'respect to the
Opinion of mankind', in the 'appeal to the tribunal of the world
... for our justification', 25 that inspired the very writing of the
document, and it unfolds when the list of very specific grievances
against a very particular king gradually develops into a rejection
on principle of monarchy and kingship in general. 25 For this
rejection, in contrast to the other theories underlying the docu-
ment, was something altogether new, and the profound and
even violent antagonism of monarchists and republicans, as it
developed in the course of both the American and the French
Revolutions, was practically unknown prior to their actual out-
break.
Since the end of antiquity, it had been common in political
130 On Revolution
theory to distinguish between government according to law and
tyranny, whereby tyranny was understood to be the form of
government in which the ruler ruled out of his own will and in
pursuit of his own interests, thus offending the private welfare
and the lawful, civil rights of the governed. Under no circum-
stances could monarchy, one-man rule, as such be identified with
tyranny; yet it was precisely this identification to which the
revolutions quickly were to be driven. Tyranny, as the revolu-
tions came to understand it, was a form of government in which
the ruler, even though he ruled according to the laws of the
realm, had monopolized for himself the right of action, banished
the citizens from the public realm into the privacy of their house-
holds, and demanded of them that they mind their own, private
business. Tyranny, in other words, deprived of public happiness,
though not necessarily of private well-being, while a republic
granted to every citizen the right to become 'a participator in the
government of affairs', the right to be seen in action. The word
'republic', to be sure, does not yet occur; it was only after the
Revolution that all non-republican governments were felt to be
despotisms. But the principle out of which the republic even-
tually was founded was present enough in the 'mutual pledge*
of life, fortune, and sacred honour, all of which, in a monarchy,
the subjects would not 'mutually pledge to each other' but to the
crown, representing the realm as a whole. No doubt there is a
grandeur in the Declaration of Independence, but it consists not
in its philosophy and not even so much in its being 'an argument
in support of an action' as in its being the perfect way for an
action to appear in words. (As Jefferson himself saw it : 'Neither
aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied
from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be
an expression of the American mind, and to give that expres-
sion the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion.' 27 ) And
since we deal here with the written, and not with the spoken
word, we are confronted with one of the rare moments in history
when the power of action is great enough to erect its "own
monument.
Another such instance which bears directly upon the issue of
public happiness is of a much less grave, though perhaps not of
The Pursuit of Happiness 131
a less serious character. It may be found in the curious hope
Jefferson voiced at the end of his life when he and Adams had
begun to discuss, half jokingly and half in earnest, the pos-
sibilities of an afterlife. Obviously, such images of life in a here-
after, if we strip them of their religious connotations, present
nothing more nor less than various ideals of human happiness.
And Jefferson's true notion of happiness comes out very clearly
(without any of the distortions through a traditional, conven-
tional framework of concepts which, it turned out, was much
harder to break than the structure of the traditional form of
government) when he lets himself go in a mood of playful and
sovereign irony and concludes one of his letters to Adams as
follows: 'May we meet there again, in Congress, with our
antient Colleagues, and receive with them the seal of approba-
tion "Well done, good and faithful servants." m Here, behind
the irony, we have the candid admission that life in Congress,
the joys of discourse, of legislation, of transacting business, of
persuading and being persuaded, were to Jefferson no less con-
clusively a foretaste of an eternal bliss to come than the delights
of contemplation had been for medieval piety. For even 'the seal
of approbation' is not at all the common reward for virtue in a
future state; it is the applause, the demonstration of acclaim, 'the
esteem of the world' in which Jefferson in another context says
that there had been a time when it 'was of higher value in my
eye than everything in it'. 29
In order to understand how truly extraordinary it was, within
the context of our tradition, to see in public, political happiness
an image of eternal bliss, it may be well to recall that for
Thomas Aquinas, for example, the perfecta beatitudo consisted
entirely in a vision, the vision of God, and that for this vision the
presence of no friends was required (amici non requiruntur ad
perfectam beatitudincm)?* all of which, incidentally, is still in
perfect accord with Platonic notions of the life of an immortal
soul. Jefferson, on the contrary, could think of a possible im-
provement on the best and happiest moments of his life only by
enlarging the circle of his friends so that he could sit 'in Con-
gress' with the most illustrious of his 'Colleagues*. To find a
similar image of the quintessence of human happiness reflected
132 On Revolution
in the playful anticipation of an afterlife, we would have to go
back to Socrates, who, in a famous passage in the Apology,
frankly and smilingly confessed that all he could ask for was, so
to speak, more of the same - namely, no island of the blessed
and no life of an immortal soul utterly unlike the life of mortal
man, but the enlargement of the circle of Socrates' friends in
Hades by those illustrious men of the Greek past, Orpheus and
Musaeus, Hesiod and Homer, whom he had not been able to
meet on earth and with whom he would have liked to engage
in those unending dialogues of thought of which he had
become the master.
However that may be, of one thing at least we may be sure :
the Declaration of Independence, though it blurs the distinction
between private and public happiness, at least still intends us to
hear the term 'pursuit of happiness* in its twofold meaning:
private welfare as well as the right to public happiness, the pur-
suit of well-being as well as being a 'participator in public
affairs'. But the rapidity with which the second meaning was
forgotten and the term used and understood without its original
qualifying adjective may well be the standard by which to
measure, in America no less than in France, the loss of the
original meaning and the oblivion of the spirit that had been
manifest in the Revolution.
We know what happened in France in the form of great
tragedy. Those who needed and desired liberation from their
masters or from necessity, the great master of their masters,
rushed to the assistance of those who desired to found a space
for public freedom - with the inevitable result that priority had
to be given to liberation and that the men of the Revolution
paid less and less attention to what they had originally con-
sidered to be their most important business, the framing of a
constitution. Tocqueville again is quite right when he remarks
that 'of all ideas and sentiments which prepared the Revolution,
the notion and the taste of public liberty strictly speaking have
been the first ones to disappear'. 31 And yet, was not Robespierre's
profound unwillingness to put an end to the revolution also
due to his conviction that 'constitutional government is chiefly
concerned with civil liberty, revolutionary government with
The Pursuit of Happiness 133
public liberty'? 32 Must he not have feared that the end of revolu-
tionary power and the beginning of constitutional government
would spell the end of 'public liberty'? That the new public
space would wither away after it had suddenly burst into life
and intoxicated them all with the wine of action which, as a
matter of fact, is the same as the wine of freedom?
Whatever the answers to these questions may be, Robespierre's
clear-cut distinction between civil and public liberty bears an
obvious resemblance to the vague, conceptually ambiguous
American use of the term 'happiness'. Prior to both revolutions,
it had been in terms of civil liberties and public freedom, or of
the people's welfare and public happiness, that the hommes de
lettres on either side of the Atlantic had tried to answer the old
question: What is the end of government? That, under the
impact of revolution, the question now became : What is the
end of revolution and revolutionary government? was natural
enough, although it happened only in France. In order to under-
stand the answers given to this question, it is important not to
overlook the fact that the men of the revolutions, preoccupied
as they had been with the phenomenon of tyranny — which
deprives its subjects of both civil liberties and public freedom, of
private welfare as well as public happiness, and therefore tends
to obliterate the distinguishing line between them - were able to
discover the sharpness of the distinction between the private and
the public, between private interests and the common weal, only
in the course of the revolutions, during which the two principles
came into conflict with each other. This conflict was the same in
the American and the French Revolutions, though it assumed
very different expressions. For the American Revolution, it was
a question of whether the new government was to constitute a
realm of its own for the 'public happiness' of its citizens, or
whether it had been devised solely to serve and ensure their pur-
suit of private happiness more effectively than had the old
regime. For the French Revolution, it was a question of whether
the end of revolutionary government lay in the establishment of
a 'constitutional government' which would terminate the reign
of public freedom through a guarantee of civil liberties and
rights, or whether, for the sake of 'public freedom*, the Revolu-
134 ® n Revolution
tion should be declared in permanence. The guarantee of civil
liberties and of the pursuit of private happiness had long been
regarded as essential in all non-tyrannical governments where
the rulers governed within the limits of the law. If nothing more
was at stake, then the revolutionary changes of government, the
abolition of monarchy and the establishment of republics must
be regarded as accidents, provoked by no more than the wrong-
headedness of the old regimes. Had this been the case, reforms
and not revolution, the exchange of a bad ruler for a better one
rather than a change of government, should have been the
answer.
As a matter of fact, the rather modest beginnings of both
revolutions suggest that nothing more was originally intended
than reforms in the direction of constitutional monarchies, even
though the experiences of the American people in the realm of
'public happiness' must have been considerable prior to their
conflicts with England. The point, however, is that both the
French and the American Revolutions were very quickly driven
to an insistence on the establishment of republican governments,
and this insistence, together with the new violent antagonism
of monarchists and republicans, grew directly out of the revolu-
tions themselves. The men of the revolutions, at any rate, had
made their acquaintance with 'public happiness', and the impact
of this experience had been sufficiently profound for them to
prefer under almost any circumstances - should the alternatives
unhappily be put to them in such terms - public freedom to civil
liberties or public happiness to private welfare. Behind Robes-
pierre's theories, which foreshadow the Revolution declared in
permanence, one can discern the uneasy, alarmed, and alarming
question that was to disturb almost every revolutionary after him
who was worth his salt: if the end of revolution and the intro-
duction of constitutional government spelled the end of public
freedom, was it then desirable to end the revolution ?
Had Robespierre lived to watch the development -»f the new
government of the United States, where the Revolution had
never seriously curtailed civil rights and, perhaps for this reason,
succeeded precisely where the French Revolution failed, namely
in the task of foundation; where, moreover and in this context
The Pursuit of Happiness 135
most importantly, the founders had become rulers so that the
end of revolution did not spell the end of their 'public happiness',
his doubts might still conceivably have been confirmed. For the
emphasis shifted almost at once from the contents of the Con-
stitution, that is, the creation and partition of power, and the rise
of a new realm where, in the words of Madison, 'ambition would
be checked by ambition' 33 - the ambition, of course, to excel and
be of 'significance', not the ambition to make a career - to the
Bill of Rights, which contained the necessary constitutional
restraints upon government; it shifted, in other words, from
public freedom to civil liberty, or from a share in public affairs
for the sake of public happiness to a guarantee that the pur-
suit of private happiness would be protected and furthered
by public power. Jefferson's new formula - so curiously
equivocal in the beginning, recalling both the assurance of royal
proclamations with their emphasis on the people's private wel-
fare (which implied their exclusion from public affairs), and the
current prc-revolutionary phrase of 'public happiness' - was
almost immediately deprived of its double sense and understood
as the right of citizens to pursue their personal interests and thus
to act according to the rules of private self-interest. And these
rules, whether they spring from dark desires of the heart or from
the obscure necessities of the household, have never been notably
'enlightened'.
In order to understand what happened in America we need
perhaps only recall the outrage of Crevccceur, that great lover of
American pre-rcvolutionary equality and prosperity, when his
private happiness as a husbandman was interrupted by the out-
break of war and revolution - 'demons' he considered to have
been 'let loose against us' by 'those great personages who are
so far elevated above the common rank of men' that they cared
more for independence and the foundation of the republic than
for the interests of husbandmen and household heads. 34 This con-
flict bet ween priva te interes ts __and publje affairs played an
enormous role in both revolutions, and, generally speaking, one
can say that the men of the. revolutions were those who, out of
their genuine love for public freedom and public happiness
rather than out of any self-sacrificing idealism, consistently
136 On Revolution
thought andjcted jnterms of pu blic affairs. In America, where,
in the beginning, the existence of the country had been staked
upon a contest of principle, and where the people had risen in
rebellion over measures whose economic significance was trivial,
the Constitution was ratified even by those who - in debt to
British merchants to whose suits the Constitution would open
the federal courts - had much to lose in terms of private interest,
indicating that the founders had a majority of the people on
their side at least throughout the war and the Revolution. 33 Yet
even during this period, one can clearly see how, from start to
finish, Jefferson's drive for a place of public happiness and John
Adams' passion for 'emulation', his spectemur agendo - 'let us
be seen in action', let us have a space where we are seen and can
act - came into conflict with ruthless and fundamentally anti-
political desires to be rid of all public cares and duties; to estab-
lish a mechanism of government administration through which
men could control their rulers and still enjoy the advantages of
monarchical government, to be 'ruled without their own agency',
to have 'time not required for the supervision or choice of the
public agents, or the enactment of laws', so that 'their attention
may be exclusively given to their personal interests'. 38
The outcome of the American Revolution, as distinct from the
purposes which started it, has always been ambiguous, and the
question of whether the end of government was to be prosperity
or freedom has never been settled. Side by side with those who
came to this continent for the sake of a new world, or rather for
the sake of building a new world on a newly discovered con-
tinent, there had always been those who hoped for nothing more
than a new 'way of life'. It is not surprising that the latter should
have outnumbered the former; as for the eighteenth century, the
decisive factor might well have been that 'after the Glorious
Revolution the migration to America of important English ele-
ments ceased'. 37 In the language of the founders, the question
was whether 'the supreme object to be pursued' was the 'real wel-
fare of the great body of the people', 38 the greatest happiness of
the greatest number, or if it was rather 'the principal end of
government to regulate [the passion to excel and to be seen]
which in its turn becomes a principle means of government.' 39
The Pursuit of Happiness jyj
This alternative between freedom and prosperity, as we see it
today, was by no means a clear-cut issue in the minds of either
the American founders or the French revolutionaries, but from
this it does not follow that it was not present. There has always
been not only a difference but an antagonism between those who,
in the words of Tocqueville, 'seem to love liberty and only hate
their masters', and those who know: 'Qui cherche dans la
liberte autre chose qu'elle-meme est fait pour servir.' 40
The extent to which the ambiguous character of the revolu-
tions derived from an equivocality in the minds of the men who
made them is perhaps best illustrated by the oddly self-con-
tradicting formulations which Robespierre enunciated as the
'Principles of Revolutionary Government 1 . He started by defin-
ing the aim of constitutional government as the preservation of
the republic which revolutionary -government had founded for
the purpose of establishing public freedom. Yet, no sooner had he
defined the chief aim of constitutional government as the 'preser-
vation of public freedom* than he turned about, as it were, and
corrected himself : 'Under constitutional rule it is almost enough
to protect the individuals against the abuses of public power.' 41
With this second sentence, power is still public and in the hands
of government, but the individual has become powerless and
must be protected against it. Freedom, on the other hand, has
shifted places; it resides no longer in the public realm but in the
private life of the citizens and so must be defended against the
public and its power. Freedom and power have parted company,
and the fateful equating of power with violence, of the political
with government, and of government with a necessary evil, has
We could have drawn similar, though less succinct, illustra-
tions from American authors, and this, of course, is only another
way of saying that the social question interfered with the course
of the American Revolution no less sharply, though far less
dramatically, than it did with the course of the French Revolu-
tion. Yet the difference is still profound. Since the country was
never overwhelmed by poverty, it was 'the fatal passion for
sudden riches' rather than necessity that stood in the way of the
founders of the republic. And this particular pursuit of happiness
138 On Revolution
which, in the words of Judge Pendleton, has always tended 'to
extinguish every sentiment of political and moral duty', 42 could
be held in abeyance at least long enough to throw the founda-
tions and to erect the new building - though not long enough to
change the minds of those who were to inhabit it. The result,
in contradistinction to the European development, has been that
the revolutionary notions of public happiness and political free-
dom have never altogether vanished from the American scene;
they have become part and parcel of the very structure of the
political body of the republic. Whether this structure has a
granite groundwork capable of withstanding the futile antics of a
society intent upon affluence and consumption, or whether it
will yield under the pressure of wealth as the European com-
munities have yielded under the pressure of wretchedness and
misfortune, only the future can tell. There exist today as many
signs to justify hope as there are to instil fear.
In this context, the point of the matter is that America has
always been, for better or worse, an enterprise of European
mankind. Not only the American Revolution but everything
that happened before and after 'was an event within an Atlantic
civilization as a whole'. 43 Thus, just as the fact that poverty was
conquered in America had the deepest repercussions in Europe,
so did the fact that misery remained for so much longer the
condition of Europe's lower classes have a profound impact upon
the course of events in America after the Revolution. The
foundation of freedom had been preceded by liberation from
poverty, for America's early, pre-revolutionary prosperity -
achieved hundreds of years before the mass emigration of the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries washed yearly
hundreds of thousands, and even millions, of Europe's poorest
classes on to her shores - was, at least partly, the result of a
deliberate and concentrated effort toward liberation from poverty
such as had never been made in the countries of the Old World.
This effort in itself, this early determination to conquer the
seemingly sempiternal misery of mankind, is certainly one of the
greatest achievements of Western history and of the history of
mankind. The trouble was that the struggle to abolish poverty,
under the impact of a continual mass immigration from Europe,
The Pursuit of Happiness 139
fell more and more under the sway of the poor themselves, and
hence came under the guidance of the ideals born out of poverty,
as distinguished from those principles which had inspired the
foundation of freedom.
For abundance and endless consumfftion are the ideals of the
poor : they are the mirage in the desert of misery. In this sense,
affluence and wretchedness are only two sides of the same coin;
the bonds of necessity need not be of iron, they can be made of
silk. Freedom and luxury have always been thought to be in-
compatible, and the modern estimate that tends to blame the
insistence of the Founding Fathers on frugality and 'simplicity
of manners' (Jefferson) upon a Puritan contempt for the delights
of the world much rather testifies to an inability to understand
freedom than to a freedom from prejudice. For that 'fatal passion
for sudden riches' was never the vice of the sensuous but the
dream of the poor; and it has been so prevalent in America,
almost from the beginning of its colonization, because the coun-
try was, even in the eighteenth century, not only the 'land of
liberty, the seat of virtue, the asylum of the oppressed', but also
the promised land of those whose conditions hardly had pre-
pared them for comprehending either liberty or virtue. It is still
Europe's poverty that has taken its revenge in the ravages with
which American prosperity and American mass society increas-
ingly threaten the whole political realm. The hidden wish of
poor men is not 'To each according to his needs', but 'To each
according to his desires*. And_while it is > true thatjreedom can
only come to those whose needs have been fulfilled, it is equally
true that it will escape those who are bent upon living for their
desires. The American dream, as the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries under the impact of mass immigration came to under-
stand it, was neither the dream of the American Revolution -
the foundation of freedom - nor the dream of the French Revo-
lution - the liberation of man; it was, unhappily, the dream of
a 'promised land' where milk and honey flow. And the fact that
the development of modern technology was so soon able to
realize this dream beyond anyone's wildest expectation quite
naturally had the effect of confirming for the dreamers that they
really had come to live in the best of all possible worlds.
140 On Resolution
In conclusion, one can hardly deny that Crevecceur was right
when he predicted that 'the man will get the better of the citizen,
[that] his political maxims will vanish*, that those who in all
earnestness say, The happiness of my family is the only object
of my wishes', will be applauded by nearly everyone when, in
the name of democracy, they vent their rage against the 'great
personages who are so far elevated above the common rank of
man' that their aspirations transcend their private happiness, or
when, in the name of the 'common man' and some confused
notion of liberalism, they denounce public virtue, which cer-
tainly is not the virtue of the husbandman, as mere ambition,
and those to whom they owe their freedom as 'aristocrats' who
(as in the case of poor John Adams) they believe were possessed
by a 'colossal vanity'.* 4 The conversion of the citizen of tjxe
revolutions into the private inaTvidual - of nineteenth-century
society has often been described, usuaHyin ternis of thy French
Revolution, which spoke of citoyens and bourgeois. On aTmore
sophisticated level, we may consider this disappearance of the
'taste for political freedom' as the withdrawal of the individual
into an 'inward domain of consciousness' where it finds the only
'appropriate region of human liberty'; from this region, as
though from a crumbling fortress, the individual, having got the
better of the citizen, will then defend himself against a society
which in its turn gets 'the better of individuality'. 45 This process,
more than the revolutions, determined the physiognomy of the
nineteenth century as it partly does even that of the twentieth
century.
CHAPTER FOUR
Foundation I:
Constitutio hibertatis
That there existed men in the Old World to dream of public
freedom, that there were men in the New World who had
tasted public happiness - these were ultimately the facts which
caused the movement for restoration, for recovery of the old
rights and liberties, to develop into a revolution on either side of
the Atlantic. And no matter how far, in success and failure,
events and circumstances were to drive them apart, the Ameri-
cans would still have agreed with Robespierre on the ultimate
aim of revolution, the constitution of freedom, and on the actual
business of revolutionary government, the foundation of a
republic. Or perhaps it was the other way round and Robespierre
had been influenced by the course of the American Revolution
when he formulated his famous 'Principles of Revolutionary
Government'. For in America the armed uprising of the colo-
nies and the Declaration of Independence had been followed by
a spontaneous outbreak of constitution-making in all thirteen
colonies - as though, in John Adams' words, thirteen clocks
had struck as one' - so that there existed no gap, no
hiatus, hardly a breathing spell between the war of liberation,
the fight for independence which was the condition for freedom,
and the constitution of the new states. Although it is true that
'the first act of the great drama', the 'late American war', was
closed before the American Revolution had come to an end, 1
it is equally true that these two altogether different stages of the
revolutionary process began at almost the same moment and con-
tinued to run parallel to each other all through the years of war.
The importance of this development can hardly be over-
142 On Revolution
estimated. The miracle, if such it was, that saved the American
Revolution was not that the colonists should have been strong
and powerful enough to win a war against England but that this
victory did not end 'with a multitude of Commonwealths,
Crimes and Calamities . . .; till at last the exhausted Provinces
[would] sink into Slavery under the yoke of some fortunate
Conqueror', 2 as John Dickinson had rightly feared. Such is in-
deed the common fate of a rebellion which is not followed by
revolution, and hence the common fate of most so-called revolu-
tions. If, however, one keeps in mind that the end of rebellion is
liberation, while the end of revolution is the foundation of free-
dom, the political scientist at least will know how to avoid the
pitfall of the historian who tends to place his emphasis upon
the first and violent stage of rebellion and liberation, on the
uprising against tyranny, to the detriment of the quieter second
stage of revolution and constitution, because all the dramatic
aspects of his story seem to be contained in the first stage and,
perhaps, also because the turmoil of liberation has so frequently
defeated the revolution. This temptation, which befalls the
historian because he is a storyteller, is closely connected with the
much more harmful theory that the constitutions and the fever
of constitution-making, far from expressing truly the revolution-
ary spirit of the country, were in fact due to forces of reaction
and either defeated the revolution or prevented its full develop-
ment, so that - logically enough - the Constitution of the United
States, the true culmination of this revolutionary process, is
understood as the actual result of counter-revolution. The basic
misunderstanding lies in the failure to distinguish between
liberation and freedom; there is nothing more futile than rebel-
lion and liberation unless they are followed by the constitution
of the newly won freedom. For 'neither morals, nor riches, nor
discipline of armies, nor all these together will do without a
constitution' (John Adams).
Yet even if one resists this temptation to equate revolution with
the struggle for liberation, instead of identifying revolution with
the foundation of freedom, there remains the additional, and in
our context more serious, difficulty that there is very little in
form or content of the new revolutionary constitutions which
Foundation J: Constitutio Libertatis 143
was even new, let alone revolutionary. The notion of con-
stitutional government is of course by no means revolutionary in
content or origin; it means nothing more or less than govern-
ment limited by law, and the safeguard of civil liberties through
constitutional guarantees, as spelled out by the various bills of
rights which were incorporated into the new constitutions and
which are frequently regarded as their most important part,
never intended to spell out the new revolutionary powers of the
people but, on the contrary, were felt to be necessary in order to
limit the power of government even in the newly founded body
politic. A bill of rights, as Jefferson remarked, was 'what the
people are entitled to against every government on earth, general
or particular, and what no just government should refuse, or rest
on inference'. 3
In other words, constitutional government was even then, as
it still is today, limited government in the sense in which the
eighteenth century spoke of a limited monarchy', namely, a
monarchy limited in its power by virtue of laws. Civil liberties
as well as private welfare lie within the range of limited govern-
ment, and their safeguard does not depend upon the form of
government. Only tyranny, according to political theory a
bastard form of government, does away with constitutional,
namely, lawful government. However, the liberties which the
laws of constitutional government guarantee are all of a nega-
tive character, and this includes the right of representation for
the purposes of taxation which later became the right to vote;
they are indeed 'not powers of themselves, but merely an exemp-
tion from the abuses of power';* they claim not a share in govern-
ment but a safeguard against government. Whether we trace the
notion of this constitutionalism back to Magna Charta and hence
to feudal rights, privileges, and pacts concluded between the
royal power and the estates of the kingdom, or whether, on the
contrary, we assume that 'nowhere do we find modern con-
stitutionalism until an effective central government has been
brought into existence*, 5 is relatively unimportant in our context.
If no more had ever been at stake in the revolutions than this
kind of constitutionalism, it would be as though the revolutions
had remained true to their modest beginnings when they still
144 On Revolution
could be understood as attempts at restoration of 'ancient* liber-
ties : the truth of the matter, however, is that this was not the
case.
There is another and perhaps even more potent reason why we
find it difficult to recognize the truly revolutionary element in
constitution-making. If we take our bearings not by the revolu-
tions of the eighteenth century but by the series of upheavals
that followed upon them throughout the nineteenth and twen-
tieth centuries, it seems as though we are left with the alternative
between revolutions which become permanent, which do not
come to an end and do not produce their end, the foundation of
freedom, and those where in the aftermath of revolutionary up-
heaval some new 'constitutional* government eventually comes
into existence that guarantees a fair amount of civil liberties and
deserves, whether in the form of a monarchy or a republic, no
more than the name of limited government. The first of these
alternatives clearly applies to the revolutions in Russia and
China, where those in power not only admit the fact but boast
of having maintained indefinitely a revolutionary government;
the second alternative applies to the revolutionary upheavals
which swept nearly all European countries after the First World
War, as well as to many colonial countries that won their inde-
pendence from European rule after the Second World War. In
these cases, constitutions were by no means the result of revolu- ,
tion; they were imposed, on the contrary, after a revolution had
failed, and they were, at least in the eyes of the people living
under them, the sign of its defeat, not of its victory. They were
usually the work of experts, though not in the sense in which
Gladstone had called the American Constitution 'the most
wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and
purpose of man', but rather in the sense in which Arthur
Young even in 1792 felt that the French had adopted the *new
word', which *they use as it a constitution was a pudding to be
made by a recipe*. 6 Their purpose was to stem the tide of revolu-
tion, and if they too served to limit power, it was the power of
the government as well as the revolutionary power of the people
whose manifestation had preceded their establishment. 7
One, and perhaps not the least, of the troubles besetting a
Foundation 1: Constitutio Libertatis 145
discussion of these matters is merely verbal. The word 'constitu-
tion 1 obviously is equivocal in that it means the act of con-
stituting as well as the law or rules of government that are
'constituted*, be these embodied in written documents or, as in
the case of the British constitution, implied in institutions,
customs, and precedents. It is clearly impossible to call by the
same name and to expect the same results from those 'con-
stitutions* which a non-revolutionary government adopts because
the people and their revolution had been unable to constitute
their own government, and those other 'constitutions' which
either, in Gladstone's phrase, 'had proceeded from progressive
history' of a nation or were the result of the deliberate attempt
by a whole people at founding a new body politic. The distinc-
tion as well as the confusion are perfectly apparent in the famous
definition of the word by Thomas^Paine, a definition in which
he only summed up and reasoned out what the fever of American
constitution-making must have taught him: *A constitution is
not the act of a government, but of a people constituting a
government'. 8 Hence the need in France as in America for con-
stituent assemblies and special conventions whose sole task it
was to draft a constitution; hence also the need to bring the
draft home and back to the people and have the Articles of Con-
federacy debated, clause by clause, in the town-hall meetings and,
later, the articles of the Constitution in the state congresses. For
the point of the matter was not at all that the provincial con-
gresses of the thirteen colonies could not be trusted to establish
state governments whose powers were properly and sufficiently
limited, but that it had become a principle with the constituents
'that the people should endow the government with a constitu-
tion and not vice versa*. 9
A brief glance at the various destinies of constitutional govern-
ment outside the Anglo-American countries and spheres of in-
fluence should be enough to enable us to grasp the enormous
difference in power and authority between a constitution imposed
by a government upon a people and the constitution by which
a people constitutes its own government. The constitutions of
experts under which Europe came to live after the First World
War were all based, to a large extent, upon the model of the
146 On Revolution
American Constitution, and taken by themselves they should
have worked well enough. Yet the mistrust they have always
inspired in the people living under them is a matter of historical
record as is the fact that fifteen years after the downfall of
monarchial government on the European continent more than
half of Europe lived under some sort of dictatorship, while the
remaining constitutional governments, with the conspicuous
exception of the Scandinavian countries and of Switzerland,
shared the sad lack of power, authority, and stability which even
then was already the outstanding characteristic of the Third
Republic in France. For lack of power and the concomitant want
of authority have been the curse of constitutional government in
nearly all European countries since the abolition of absolute
monarchies, and the fourteen constitutions of France between
1789 and 1875 have caused, even before the rainfall of postwar
constitutions in the twentieth century, the very word to become
a mockery. Finally, we may remember, the periods of constitu-
tional government were nicknamed times of the 'system' (in
Germany after the First World War and in France after the
Second), a word by which the people indicated a state of affairs
where legality itself was submerged in a system of half-corrupt
connivances from which every right-minded person should
be permitted to excuse himself since it hardly seemed worth
while even to rise in revolt against it. In short, and in the words
of John Adams, 'a constitution is a standard, a pillar, and a bond
when it is understood, approved and beloved. But without this
intelligence and attachment, it might as well be a kite or balloon,
flying in the air'. 10
.The difference between a constitution that is the act of govern-
ment and the constitution by which people constitute a govern-
ment is obvious enough. To it must be added another difference
which, though closely connected with it, is much more difficult
to perceive. If there was anything which the constitution-makers
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had in common with
their American ancestors in the eighteenth century, it was a mis-
trust in power as such, and this mistrust was perhaps even more
pronounced in the New World than it ever had been in the old
countries. That man by his very nature is 'unfit to be trusted
Foundation 1: Constitutio Libcrtatis 147
with unlimited power', that those who wield power arc likely to
turn into 'ravenous beasts of prey', that government is necessary
in order to restrain man and his drive for power and, therefore,
is (as Madison put it) a reflection upon human nature' - these
were commonplaces in the eighteenth century no less than in the
nineteenth, and they were deeply ingrained in the minds of the
Founding Fathers. All this stands behind the bills of rights, and
it formed the general agreement on the absolute necessity of con-
stitutional government in the sense of limited government; and
yet, for the American development it was not decisive. The
founders' fear of too much power in government was checked
by their great awareness of the enormous dangers of the rights
and liberties of the citizen that would arise from within society.
Hence, according to Madison, *it is of great importance in a
republic, not only to guard the society against the oppression of
its rulers; but to guard one part of the society against the in-
justice of the other part,* to save 'the rights of individuals, or of
the minority . . . from interested combinations of the majority*. 11
This, if nothing else, required the constitution of public, govern-
mental power whose very essence could never be derived from
something which is a mere negative, i.e., constitutional limited
government, although European constitution-makers and con-
stitutionalists saw in it the quintessence of the blessings of the
American Constitution. What they admired, and from the view-
point of Continental history rightly, was in fact the blessings of
'mild government' as it had developed organically out of British
history, and since these blessings were not only incorporated into
all constitutions of the New World but most emphatically spelled
out as the inalienable rights of all men, they failed to under-
stand, on one hand, the enormous, overriding importance of the
foundation of a republic and, on the other, the fact that the
actual content of the Constitution was by no means the safe-
guard of civil liberties but the establishment of an entirely new
system of power.
In this respect, the record of the American Revolution speaks
an entirely clear, unambiguous language. It was not constitu-
tionalism in the sense of 'limited', lawful government that pre-
occupied the minds of the founders. On this they were agreed
148 On Revolution
beyond the need for discussion or even clarification, and even in
the days when feeling against England's king and Parliament
ran highest in the country, they remained somehow conscious of
the fact that they still dealt with a 'limited monarchy' and not
with an absolute prince. When they declared their independence
from this- government, and after they" had foresworn their
allegiance to the crown, the main question for them certainly
was not how to limit power but how to establish it, not how to
limit government but how to found a new one. The fever of
constitution-making which gripped the country immediately af-
ter the Declaration of Independence prevented the development
of a power vacuum, and the establishment of new power could
not be based upon what had always been essentially a negative
on power, that is, the bills of rights.
This whole matter is so easily and frequently confused because
of the important part the 'Declaration of the Rights of Man and
the Citizen' came to play in the course of the French Revolution,
where these rights indeed were assumed not to indicate the
limitations of all lawful government, but on the contrary to be
its very foundation. Quite apart from the fact that the declara-
tion 'All men are born equal', fraught with truly revolutionary
implications in a country which still was feudal in social and
political organization, had no such implication in the New
World, there is the even more important difference in emphasis
with regard to the only absolutely new aspect in the enumera-
tion of civil rights, and that is that these rights were now
declared solemnly to be rights of all men, no matter who they
were or where they lived. This difference in emphasis came
about when the Americans, though quite sure that what they
claimed from England were 'the rights of Englishmen', could
no longer think of themselves in terms of 'a nation in whose
veins the blood of freedom circulates' (Burke); even the trickle
of non-English and non-British stock in their midst was enough
to remind them : € Whether you be English, Irish, Germans, or
Swedes, . . . you are entitled to all the liberties of Englishmen
and the freedom of this constitution'. 12 What they were saying
and .proclaiming was in fact that those rights which up to now
had been enjoyed only by Englishmen should be enjoyed in
Foundation I; Constitutio Libertatis 149
the future by all men 13 - in other words, all men should live
under constitutional, 'limited' government. The proclamation of
human rights through the French Revolution, on the contrary,
meant quite literally that every man by virtue of being born had
become the owner of certain rights. The consequences of this
shifted emphasis are enormous, in practice no less than in theory.
The American version actually proclaims no more than the
necessity of civilized government for all mankind; the French
version, however, proclaims the existence of rights independent
of and outside the body politic, and then goes on to equate these
so-called rights, namely the rights of man qua man, with the
rights of citizens. In our context, we do not need to insist on the
perplexities inherent in the very concept of human rights nor on
the sad inefficacy of all declarations, proclamations, or enumera-
tions of human rights that were* not immediately incorporated
into positive law, the law of the land, and applied to those who
happened to live there. The trouble with these rights has always
been that they could not but be less than the rights of nationals,
and that they were invoked only as a last resort by those who
had lost their normal rights as citizens, 14 We need only to ward
off from our considerations the fateful misunderstanding, sug-
gested by the course of the French Revolution, that the pro-
clamation of human rights or the guarantee of civil rights could
possibly become the aim or content of revolution.
The aim of the state constitutions which preceded the Con-
stitution of the Union, whether drafted by provincial congresses
or by constitutional assemblies (as in the case of Massachusetts),
was to create new centres of power after the Declaration of In-
dependence had abolished the authority and power of crown
and Parliament. On this task, the creation of new power,
the founders and men of the Revolution brought to bear the
whole arsenal of what they themselves called their 'political
science', for political science, in their own words, consisted in
trying to discover 'the forms and combinations of power in
republics 1 . 15 Highly aware of their own ignorance on the sub-
ject, they turned to history, collecting with a care amounting
to pedantry all examples, ancient and modern, real and fictitious,
of republican constitutions; what they tried to learn in order to
150 On Revolution
dispel their ignorance was by no means the safeguards of civil
liberties - a subject on which they certainly knew much more
than any previous republic - but the constitution of power. This
was also the reason for the enormous fascination exerted by
Montesquieu, whose role in the American Revolution almost
equals Rousseau's influence on the course of the French Revolu-
tion; for the main subject of Montesquieu's great work, studied
and quoted as an authority on government at least a decade
before the outbreak of the Revolution, was indeed 'the con-
stitution of political freedom', 16 but the word 'constitution 1 in
this context has lost all connotations of being a negative, a
limitation and negation of power; the word means, on the con-
trary, that the 'grand temple of federal liberty' must be based
on the foundation and correct distribution of power. It was
precisely because Montesquieu - unique in this respect among
the sources from which the founders drew their political wisdom
- had maintained that power and freedom belonged together;
that, conceptually speaking, political freedom did not reside in
the I-will but in the I-can, and that therefore the political realm
must be construed and constituted in a way in which power and
freedom would be combined, that we find his name invoked in
practically all debates on constitution. 17 Montesquieu confirmed
what the founders, from the experience of the colonies, knew to
be right, namely, that liberty was 'a natural Power of doing or
not doing whatever we have a Mind', and when we read in the
earliest documents of colonial times that 'deputyes thus chosen
shall have power and liberty to appoynt* we can still hear how
natural it was for these people to use the two words almost as
synonyms. 18
It is well known that no question played a greater role in these
debates than did the problem of the separation or the balance of -
powers, and it is perfectly true that the notion of such a separa-
tion was by no means Montesquieu's exclusive discovery. As a
matter of fact, the idea itself - far from being the outgrowth of a
mechanical, Newtonian world view, as has recently been sug-
gested - is very old; it occurs, at least implicitly, in the traditional
discussion of mixed forms of government and thus can be traced
back to Aristotle, or at least to Polybius, who was perhaps the
Foundation I: Constitutio Libertatis 151
first to be aware of some of the advantages inherent in mutual
checks and balances. Montesquieu seems to have been unaware
of this historical background; he had taken his bearings by what
he believed to be the unique structure of the English constitu-
tion, and whether or not he interpreted this constitution correctly
is of no relevance today and was of no great importance even in
the eighteenth century. For Montesquieu's discovery actually
concerned the nature of power, and this discovery stands in so
flagrant a contradiction to all conventional notions on this
matter that it has almost been forgotten, despite the fact that the
foundation of the republic in America was largely inspired by it.
The discovery, contained in one sentence, spells out the forgotten
principle underlying the whole structure of separated powers:
that only 'power arrests power', that is, we must add, without
destroying it, without putting impotence4n the place of power. 19
For power can of course be destroyed by violence; this is what
happens in tyrannies, where the violence of one destroys the
power of the many, and which therefore, according to Montes-
quieu, are destroyed from within : jhey perish because they
engender impotence instead of "power. But power, contrary to
what we are inclined to think, cannot be checked, at least not
reliably, by laws, for the so-called power of the ruler which is
checked in constitutional, limited, lawful government is in fact
not power but violence, it is the mutiplied strength of the one
who has monopolized the power of the many. Laws, on the
other hand, are always in danger of being abolished by the
power of the many, and in a conflict between law and power it
is seldom the law which will emerge as victor. Yet even if we
assume that law is capable of checking power - and on this
assumption all truly democratic forms of government must rest
if they are not to degenerate into the worst and most arbitrary
tyranny - the limitation which laws set upon power can only
result in a decrease of its potency. Power can be stopped and
still be kep t inta ct only by power^so that the principle of the
separation of power not only provides a guarantee against the
monopolization of power by one part of the government, but
actuallyprovidcs a kind of mechanism, built into the very heart
of government, through which new power is constantly gener-
152 On Revolution
ated, without, however, being able to overgrow and expand
to the detriment of other centres or sources of power. Monte?
quieu's famous insight that even virtue stands in need of
limitation and that even an excess of reason is undesirable occurs
in his discussion of the nature of power; 20 to him, virtue and
reason were powers rather than mere faculties, so that their
preservation and increase had to be subject to the same con-
ditions which rule over the preservation and increase of power*
Certainly it was not because he wanted less virtue and less reason
that Montesquieu demanded their limitation.
This side of the matter is usually overlooked because we think
of the division of power only in terms of its separation in the
three branches of government. The chief problem of the
founders, however, was how to establish union out of thirteen
'sovereign', duly constituted republics; their task was the founda-
tion of a 'confederate republic* which - in the language of the
time, borrowed from Montesquieu - would reconcile the advan-
tages of monarchy in foreign affairs with those of republicanism
in domestic policy. 21 And in this task of the Constitution there
was no longer any question of constitutionalism in the sense of
civil rights - even though a Bill of Rights was then incorporated
into the Constitution as amendments, as a necessary supplement
to it - but of erecting a system of powers that would check and
balance in such a way that the power neither of the union nor
of its parts, the duly constituted states, would decrease or destroy
one another.
How well this part of Montesquieu's teaching was under-
stood in the days of the foundation of the republic 1 On the level
of theory, its greatest defender was John Adams, whose entire
political thought turned about the balance of powers. And when
he wrote: Tower must be opposed to power, force to force,
strength to strength, interest to interest, as well as reason to
reason, eloquence to eloquence, and passion to passion', he
obviously believed he had found in this very opposition an in-
strument to generate more power, more strength, more reason,
and not to abolish them. 22 On the level of practice and the
erection of institutions, we may best turn to Madison's argument
on the proportion and balancing of power between the federal
Foundation 1: Constitutio Libertatis 153
and the state governments. Had he believed in the current
notions of the indivisibility of power - that divided power is less
power 23 - he would have concluded that the new power of the
union must be founded on powers surrendered by the states,
so that the stronger the union was to be, the weaker its con-
stituent parts were to become. His point, however, was that the
very establishment of the Union had founded a new source of
power which in no way drew its strength from the powers of the
states, as it had not been established at their expense. Thus he
insisted : 'Not the states ought to surrender their powers to the
national government, rather the powers of the central govern-
ment should be greatly enlarged ... It should be set as a check
upon the exercise by the state governments of the considerable
powers which must still remain with them.' 24 Hence, 'if [the
governments of the particular states] were abolished, the general
government would be compelled by the principle of self-
preservation to reinstate them in their proper jurisdiction'. 25 In
this respect, the great and, in the long run, perhaps the greatest
American innovation in politics as such was the consistent
abolition of sovereignty within the body politic of the republic,
the insight that in the realm of human affairs sovereignty and
tyranny are the same. The defect of the Confederacy was that
there had been no 'partition of power between the General and
the Local Governments'; and that it had acted as the central
agency of an alliance rather than as a government; experience
had shown that in this alliance of powers there was a dangerous
tendency for the allied powers not to act as checks upon one
another but to cancel one another out, that is, to breed im-
potence. 26 What the founders were afraid of in practice was not
power but impotence, and their fears were intensified by the
view of Montesquieu, quoted throughout these discussions, that
republican government was effective only in relatively small ter-
ritories. Hence, the discussion turned about the very viability of
the republican form of government, and both Hamilton and
Madison called attention to another view of Montesquieu,
according to which a confederacy of republics could solve the
problems of larger countries under the condition that the con-
stituted bodies - small republics - were capable of constituting
154 O n Revolution
a new body politic, the confederate republic, instead of resigning
themselves to a mere alliance. 27
Clearly, the true objective of the American Constitution was
not to limit power but to create more power, actually to establish
and duly constitute an entirely new power centre, destined to
compensate the confederate republic, whose authority was to be
exerted over a large, expanding territory, for the power lost
through the separation of the colonies from the English crown.
This complicated and delicate system, deliberately designed to
keep the power potential of the republic intact and prevent any
of the multiple power sources from drying up in the event of
further expansion, 'of being increased by the addition of other
members*, was entirely the child of revolution. 28 The American
Constitution finally consolidated the power of the Revolution,
and since the aim of revolution was freedom, it indeed came to
be what Bracton had called Constitutio Libertatu, the founda-
tion of freedom.
To believe that the short-lived European postwar constitu-
tions or even their predecessors in the nineteenth century, whose
inspiring principle had been distrust of power in general and
fear of the revolutionary power of the people in particular, could
constitute the same form of government as the American Con-
stitution, which had sprung from confidence in having dis-
covered a power principle strong enough to found a perpetual
union, is to be fooled by words.
However obnoxious these misunderstandings may be, they are
not arbitrary and hence cannot be ignored. They would not have
arisen if it had not been for the historical fact that the revolutions
had started as restorations, and that it was difficult indeed, most
difficult for the actors themselves, to say when and why the
attempt at restoration was transformed into the irresistible event
of revolution. Since their original intention had not been the
foundation of freedom but the recovery of the rights and liberties
of limited government, it was only natural that the men of
Foundation I: Constitutio Libertatis 155
revolution themselves, when finally confronted by the ultimate
rask of revolutionary government, the foundation of a republic,
should be tempted to speak of .the new freedom, born in the
course of revolution, in terms of ancient liberties.
Something very similar is true with respect to the other key
terms of revolution, the interrelated terms of power and
authority. We mentioned before that no revolution ever suc-
ceeded, that few rebellions ever started, so long as the authority
of the body politic was truly intact. Thus, from the very
beginningi the recovery of ancient liberties was accompanied by
the reinstitution of lost authority and lost power. And again,
just as the old concept of liberty, because of the attempted
restoration, came to exert a strong influence on the interpretation
of the new experience of freedom, so the old understanding of
power and authority, even if thcip former representatives were
most violently denounced, almost automatically led the new ex-
perience of power to be channelled into concepts which had just
been vacated. It is this phenomenon of automatic influences
which indeed entitles the historians to state : 'The nation stepped
into the shoes of the Prince' (F, W. Maitland) but 'not before the
Prince himself had stepped into the pontifical shoes of Pope and
Bishop* - and then to conclude that this was the reason why 'the
modern Absolute State, even without a Prince, was able to make
claims like a Church*. 29
Historically speaking, the most obvious and the most decisive
distinction between the American and the French Revolutions
was that the historical inheritance of the American Revolution
was 'limited monarchy* and that of the French Revolution an
absolutism which apparently reached far back into the first
centuries of our era and the last centuries of the Roman Empire.
Nothing, indeed, seems more natural than that a revolution
should be predetermined by the type of government it over-
throws; nothing, therefore, appears more plausible than to ex-
plain the new absolute, the absolute revolution, by the absolute
monarchy which preceded it, and to conclude that the more
absolute the ruler, the more absolute the revolution will be which
replaces him. The records of both the French Revolution in the
eighteenth century and the Russian Revolution which modelled
156 On Revolution
itself upon it in our own century could easily be read as one
series. of demonstrations of this plausibility. What else did even
Sieves do but simply put the sovereignty of the nation into the
place which had been vacated by a sovereign king? What could
have been more natural to him than to put the nation above the
law, as the French king's sovereignty had long since ceased to
mean independence from feudal pacts and obligations and, at
least since the days of Bodin, had meant the true absoluteness of
regal power, a potestas legibus soluta, power absolved from the
laws? And since the person of the king had not only been the
source of all earthly power, but his will the origin of all earthly
law, the nation's will, obviously, from now on had to be the
law itself. 30 On this point the men of the French Revolution
were no less in complete agreement than the men of the
American Revolution were in agreement on the necessity to
limit . government, and just as Montesquieu's theory of the
separation of powers had become axiomatic for American politi-
cal thought because it took its cue from the English constitution,
so Rousseau's notion of a General Will, inspiring and directing
the nation as though it were no longer composed of a multitude
but actually formed one person, became axiomatic for all factions
and parties of the French Revolution, because it was indeed the
theoretical substitute for the sovereign will of an absolute
monarch. The point of the matter was that the absolute monarch
- unlike the constitutionally limited king - not only represented
the potentially everlasting life of the nation, so that 'the king is
dead, long live the king* actually meant that the king 'is a Cor-
poration in himself that liveth ever'; 81 he also incarnated on earth
a divine origin in which law and power coincided. His will,
because it supposedly represented God's will on earth, was the
source of both law and power, and it was this identical origin
that made law powerful and power legitimate. Hence, when the
men of the French Revolution put the people into the seat of the
king it was almost a matter of course for them to see in the
people not only, in accord with ancient Roman theory and in full
agreement with the principles of the American Revolution, the
source and the locus of all power, but the origin of all laws as
well
Foundation I: Constitutio Libertatis 157
The singular good fortune of the American Revolution is un-
deniable. It occurred in a country which knew nothing of the
predicament of mass poverty and among a people who had a
widespread experience with self-government; to be sure, not the
least of these blessings was that the Revolution grew out of a
conflict with a 'limited monarchy'. In the government of king
and Parliament from which the colonies broke away, there was
no potestas legibus soluta, no absolute power absolved from laws.
Hence, the framers of American constitutions, although they
knew they had to establish a new source of law and to devise a
new system of power, were never even tempted to derive law and
power from the same origin. The seat of power to them was the
people, but the source of law was to become the Constitution, a
written document, an endurable objective thing, which, to be
sure, one could approach from many different angles and upon
which one could impose many different interpretations, which
one could change and amend in accordance with circumstances,
but which nevertheless was never a subjective state of mind, like
the will. It has remained a tangible worldly entity of greater
durability than elections or public-opinion polls. Even when, at
a comparatively late date and, presumably, under the influence
of Continental constitutional theory, the supremacy of the Con-
stitution was argued 'on the ground solely of its rootage in
popular will', it was felt that, once the decision was taken, it
remained binding for the body politic to which it gave birth; 32
and even if there were people who reasoned that in a free govern-
ment the people must retain the power 'at any time, for any
cause, or for no cause, but their own sovereign pleasure, to alter
or annihilate both the mode and the essence of any former
government, and adopt a new one in its stead', 3 -'* they remained
rather lonely figures in the Assembly. In this, as in other cases,
what appeared in France as a genuine political or even philo-
sophic problem came to the fore during the American Revolu-
tion in such an unequivocally vulgar form that it was discredited
even before anybody had bothered to make a theory out of it.
For, of course, those who expected from the Declaration of
Independence 'a form of government [in which], by being
independent of the rich men, every man would then be able to
158 On Revolution
do as he pleased', were never lacking; 3 * yet they remained with-
out any influence on theory or practice of the Revolution. And
still, however great the good fortune of the American Revolu-
tion, it was not spared the most troublesome of all problems in
revolutionary government, the problem of an absolute.
That the problem of an absolute is bound to appear in a revolu-
tion, that it is inherent in the revolutionary event itself, we
might never have known without the American Revolution. If
we had to take our cue solely from the great European revolu-
tions : from the English civil war in the seventeenth century, the
French Revolution in the eighteenth, and the October Revolu-
tion in the twentieth, we might be so overwhelmed with
historical evidence pointing unanimously to the interconnection
of absolute monarchy followed by despotic dictatorships as to
conclude that the problem of an absolute in the political realm
was due exclusively to the unfortunate historical inheritance, to
the absurdity of absolute monarchy, which had placed an abso-
lute, the person of the prince, into the body politic, an absolute
for which the revolutions then erroneously and vainly tried to
find a substitute. It is tempting indeed to blame absolutism, the
antecedent of all but the American Revolution, for the fact that
its fall destroyed the whole fabric of European government to-
gether with the European community of nations, and that the
flames of revolutionary conflagration, kindled by the abuses of
the anciens regimes, eventually were to set the whole world on
fire. Whereby today it is no longer of great relevance whether
the new absolute to be put into the place of the absolute sovereign
was Sicyes's nation from the beginnings of the French Revolu-
tion or whether it became with Robespierre, at the end of four
years of revolutionary history, the revolution itself. For what
eventually set the world on fire was precisely a combination of
these two, of national revolutions or revolutionary nationalism,
of nationalism speaking the language of revolution or of revolu-
tions arousing the masses with nationalist slogans. And in
neither case was the course of the American Revolution ever
followed or repeated: constitution-making was never again
understood as the foremost and the noblest of all revolutionary
deeds, and constitutional government, if it came into existence
Foundation 1: Constitutio Libertatis 159
at all, had a tendency to be swept away by the revolutionary
movement which had brought it into power. Not constitutions,
the end product and also the end of revolutions, but revolu-
tionary dictatorships, designed to drive on and intensify the
revolutionary movement, have thus far been the more familiar
outcome of modern revolution - unless the revolution was de-
feated and succeeded by some kind of restoration.
The fallacy of such historical reflections, however legitimate, is
that they take for granted what upon closer inspection turns out
to be by no means a matter of course. European absolutism in
theory and practice, the existence of an absolute sovereign whose
will is the source of both power and law, was a relatively new
phenomenon; it had been the first and most conspicuous con-
sequence of what we call secularization, namely, the emancipa-
tion of secular power from the authority of the Church. Absolute
monarchy, commonly and rightly credited with having prepared
the rise of the nation-state, has been responsible, by the same
token, for the rise of the secular realm with a dignity and a
splendour of its own. The short-lived, tumultuous story of the
Italian city-states, whose affinity with the later story of revolu-
tions consists in a common harkening back to antiquity, to the
ancient v glory of the political realm, might have forewarned and
could have foretold what the chances and what the perplexities
would be that lay in store for the modern age in the realm of
politics, except, of course, that there exist no such foretellings
and forewarnings in history. Moreover, it was precisely the use of
absolutism which for centuries clouded these perplexities because
it seemed to have found, within the political realm itself, a fully
satisfactory substitute for the lost religious sanction of secular
authority in the person of the king or rather in the institution of
kingship. But this solution, which the revolutions soon enough
were to unmask as a pseudo-solution, served only to hide, for
some centuries, the most elementary predicament of all modern
political bodies, their profound instability, the result of some
elementary lack of authority.
The specific sanction which religion and religious authority
had bestowed upon the secular realm could not simply be re-
placed by an absolute sovereignty, which, lacking a transcendent
160 On Revolution
and transmundane source, could only degenerate into tyranny
and despotism. The truth of the matter was that when the Prince
'had stepped into the pontifical shoes of Pope and Bishop', he
did not, for this reason, assume the function and receive the
sanctity of Bishop or Pope; in the language of political theory, he
was not a successor but a usurper, despite all the new theories
about sovereignty and the divine rights of princes. Seculariza-
tion, the emancipation of the secular realm from the tutelage of
the Church, inevitably posed the problem of how to found and
constitute a new authority without which the secular realm, far
from acquiring a new dignity of its own, would have lost even
the derivative importance it had held under the auspices of the
Church. Theoretically speaking, it is as though absolutism were
attempting to solve this problem of authority without having
recourse to the revolutionary means of a new foundation; it
solved the problem, in other words, within the given frame of
reference in which the legitimacy of rule in general, and the
authority of secular law and power in particular, had always
been justified by relating them to an absolute source which itself
was not of this world. The revolutions, even when they were not
burdened with the inheritance of absolutism as in the case of the
American Revolution, still occurred within a tradition which
was partly founded on an event in which the 'word had become
flesh', that is, on an absolute that had appeared in historical
time as a mundane reality. It was because of the mundane nature
of this absolute that authority as such had become unthinkable
without some sort of religious sanction, and since it was the task
of the revolutions to establish a new authority, unaided by
custom and precedent and the halo of immemorial time, they
could not but throw into relief with unparalleled sharpness the
old problem, not of law and power per se, but of the source of
law which would bestow legality upon positive, posited laws,
and of the origin of power which would bestow legitimacy
upon the powers that be.
The enormous significance for the political realm of the lost
sanction of religion is commonly neglected in the discussion of
modern secularization, because the rise of the secular realm,
which was the inevitable result of the separation of church and
Foundation 1: Constitutio Libertatis 161
state, of the emancipation of politics from religion, seems so ob-
viously to have taken place at the expense of religion; through
secularization, the Church lost much of her earthly property and,
more important, the protection of secular power. Yet, as a matter
of fact, this separation cut both ways, and just as one speaks of
an emancipation of the secular from the religious, one may, and
perhaps with even more right, speak of an emancipation of
religion from the demands and burdens of the secular, which
had weighed heavily upon Christianity ever since the disintegra-
tion of the Roman Empire had forced the Catholic Church to
assume political responsibilities. For 'true religion', as William
Livingstone once pointed out, 'wants not the princes of this
world to support it; but has in fact either languished or been
adulterated wherever they meddled with it'. 35 The numerous
difficulties and perplexities, theoretical and practical, that have
beset the public, political realm ever since the rise of the secular,
the very fact that secularization was accompanied by the rise of
absolutism and the downfall of absolutism followed by revolu-
tions whose chief perplexity was where to find an absolute from
which to derive authority for law and power, could well be
taken to demonstrate that politics and the state needed the
sanction of religion even more urgently than religion and the
churches had ever needed the support of princes.
The need for an absolute manifested itself in many different
ways, assumed different disguises, and found different solutions.
Its function within the political sphere, however, was always the
same : it was needed to break two vicious circles, the one appar-
ently inherent in human law-making, and the other inherent in
the petitio principii which attends every new beginning, that is,
politically speaking, in the very task of foundation. The first of
these, the need of all positive, man-made laws for an external
source to bestow legality upon them and to transcend as a
'higher law* the legislative act itself, is of course very familiar
and was already a potent factor in the shaping of absolute
monarchy. What Sieyes maintained with respect to the nation,
that 'it would be ridiculous to assume that the nation is bound
by the formalities or by the constitution to which it has sub-
jected its mandatories', 36 is equally true with respect to the
162 On Revolution
absolute prince, who indeed, like Sieyes's nation had 'to be the
origin of all legality', the 'fountain of justice', and thus could
not be subject to any positive laws. This was the reason why even
Blackstone had maintained that an 'absolute despotic power
must in all governments reside somewhere', 37 whereby it is
obvious that this absolute power becomes despotic once it has
lost its connection with a higher power than itself. That Black-
stone calls this power despotic is a clear indication of the extent
to which the absolute monarch had cut himself loose, not from
the political order over which he ruled, but from the divine or
natural-law order to which he had remained subject prior to the
modern age. Yet, if it is true that the revolutions did not 'invent'
the perplexities of a secular political realm, it is a fact that with
their arrival, that is, with the necessity of making new laws
and of founding a new body politic, former 'solutions* - such as
the hope that custom would function as a 'higher law' because
of a 'transcendental quality* ascribed to 'it's vast antiquity', 38 or
the belief that the exalted position of the monarch as such would
surround the whole governmental sphere with an aura of
sanctity, as in the often quoted appraisal of the British monarchy
by Bagehot: 'The English monarchy strengthens our govern-
ment with the strength of religion' - stood now revealed as facile
expedients and subterfuges. This exposure of the dubious nature
of government in the modern age occurred in bitter earnest only
when and where revolutions eventually broke out. But in the
realm of opinion and ideology it came to dominate political dis-
cussion everywhere, to divide the discussants into radicals who
recognized the fact of revolution without understanding its
problems, and conservatives who clung to tradition and the past
as to fetishes with which to ward off the future, without under-
standing that the very emergence of revolution on the political
scene as event or as threat had demonstrated in actual fact that
this tradition had lost its anchorage, its beginning and principle,
and was cut adrift.
Sieves, who, in the field of theory, had no peer among the
men of the French Revolution, broke the vicious circle, and the
petitio principii of which he spoke so eloquently, first by draw-
Foundation I: Constitutio Libertatis 163
ing his famous distinction between a pouvoir constituent and a
pouvoir constitue and, second, by putting the pouvoir constituant,
that is, the nation, into a perpetual 'state of nature'. ('On doit
concevoir les Nations sur la terre, comme des individus, hors du
lien social . . . dans l'etat de nature'.) Thus, he seemingly solved
both problems, the problem of the legitimacy of the new power,
the pouvoir constituS, whose authority could not be guaranteed
by the Constituent Assembly, the pouvoir constituant, because
the power of the Assembly itself was not constitutional and could
never be constitutional since it was prior to the constitution itself;
and the problem of the legality of the new laws which needed a
'source and supreme master', the 'higher law' from which to
derive their validity. Both power and law were anchored in the
nation, or rather in the will of the nation, which itself remained
outside and above all governments and all laws. 39 The constitu-
tional history of France, where even during the revolution con-
stitution followed upon constitution while those in power were
unable to enforce any of the revolutionary laws and decrees,
could easily be read as one monotonous record illustrating again
and again what should have been obvious from the beginning,
namely that the so-called will of a multitude (if this is to be more
than a legal fiction) is ever-changing by definition, and that a
structure built on it as its foundation is built on quicksand. What
saved the nation-state from immediate collapse and ruin was the
extraordinary ease with which the national will could be mani-
pulated and imposed upon whenever someone was willing to
take the burden or the glory of dictatorship upon himself.
Napoleon Bonaparte was only the first in a long series of national
statesmen who, to the applause of a whole nation, could declare :
'I am the pouvoir constituant.* However, while the dictate of
one will achieved for short periods the nation-state's fictive ideal
of unanimity, it was not will but interest, the solid structure of
a class society, that bestowed upon the nation-state for the longer
periods of its history its measure of stability. And this interest -
the intirit du corps, in the language of Sieves, by which not
the citizen but the individual 'allies itself only with some others'
- was never an expression of the will but, on the contrary, the
^
164 On Revolution
manifestation of the world or rather of those parts of the world
which certain groups, corps, or classes had in common because
they were situated between them.*
Theoretically, it is obvious that Sieyes's solution for the per-
plexities of foundation, the establishment of a new law and the
foundation of a new body politic, had not resulted and could not
result in the establishment of a republic in the sense of 'an
empire of laws and not of men' (Harrington), but had replaced
monarchy, or one-man rule, with democracy, or rule by the
majority. We find it difficult to perceive how much was at stake
in this early shift from the republic to the democratic form
of government because we commonly equate and confound
majority rule with majority decision. The latter, however, is a
technical device, likely to be adopted almost automatically in all
types of deliberative councils and assemblies, whether these are
the whole electorate or a town-hall meeting or small councils of
chosen advisers to the respective rulers. In other words, the prin-
ciple of majority is inherent in the very process of decision-mak-
ing and thus is present in all forms of government, including
despotism, with the possible exception only of tyranny. Only
where the majority, after the decision has been taken, proceeds to
liquidate politically, and in extreme cases physically, the oppos-
ing minority does the technical device of majority decision
degenerate into majority rule. 41 These decisions, to be sure, can
be interpreted as expressions of will, and no one will doubt that
under modern conditions of political equality they present and
represent the ever-changing political life of a nation. The point
of the matter, however, is that in the republican form of govern-
ment such decisions are made, and this life is conducted, within
the framework and according to the regulations of a constitution
which, in turn, is no more the expression of a national will or
subject to the will of a majority than a building is the expression
of the will of its architect or subject to the will of its inhabitants.
The great significance attributed, on both sides of the Atlantic,
to the constitutions as written documents testifies to their
elementary objective, worldly character perhaps more than any-
thing else. In America, at any rate, they were framed with the
express and conscious intention to prevent, as far as humanly
Foundation 1: Constitutio Libertatis 165
possible, the procedures of majority decisions from generating
into the 'elective despotism* of majority rule. 43
The great and fateful misfortune of the French Revolution
was that none of the constituent assemblies could command
enough authority to lay down the law of the land; the reproach
rightly levelled against them was always the same : they lacked
the power to constitute by definition; they themselves were un-
constitutional. Theoretically, the fateful blunder of the men of
the French Revolution consisted in their almost automatic, un-
critical belief that power and law spring from the selfsame
source. Conversely, the great good fortune of the American
Revolution was that the people of the colonies, prior to their
conflict with England, were organized in self-governing bodies,
that the revolution - to speak the language of the eighteenth
century - did not throw them into a state of nature,* 3 that there
never was any serious questioning of the pouvoir constituant of
those who framed the state constitutions and, eventually, the
Constitution of the United States. What Madison proposed with
respect to the American Constitution, namely, to derive its
'general authority . . . entirely from the subordinate authorities', 4 *
repeated only on a national scale what had been done by the
colonies themselves when they constituted their state govern-
ments. The delegates to the provincial congresses or popular
conventions which drafted the constitutions for state govern-
ments had derived their authority from a number of subordinate,
duly authorized bodies - districts, counties, townships; to pre-
serve these bodies unimpaired in their power was to preserve the
source of their own authority intact. Had the Federal Conven-
tion, instead of creating and constituting the new federal power,
chosen to curtail and abolish state powers, the founders would
have met immediately the perplexities of their French colleagues;
they would have lost their pouvoir constituant - and this, prob-
ably, was one of the reasons why even the most convinced sup-
porters of a strong central government did not want to abolish
166 On Revolution
the powers of state governments altogether.' 5 Not only was the
federal system the sole alternative to the nation-state principle; it
was also the only way not to be trapped in the vicious circle of
pouvoir constituent and pouuoir constitute
The astounding fact that the Declaration of Independence
was preceded, accompanied, and followed by constitution-
making in all thirteen colonies revealed all of a sudden to what
an extent an entirely new concept of power and authority, an
entirely novel idea of what was of prime importance in the
political realm had already -developed in the New World, even
though the inhabitants of this world spoke and thought in the
terms of the Old World and referred to the same sources for in-
spiration and confirmation of their theories. What was lacking
in the Old World were the townships of the colonies, and, seen
with the eyes of a European observer, 'the American Revolution
broke out, and the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people came
out of the townships and took possession of the state 1 . 46 Those
who received the power to constitute, to frame constitutions,
were duly elected delegates of constituted bodies; they received
their authority from below, and when they held fast to the
Roman principle that the seat of power lay in the people, they
did not think in terms of a fiction and an absolute, the nation
above all authority and absolved from all laws, but in terms of a
working reality, the organized multitude whose power was
exerted in accordance with laws and limited by them. The
American revolutionary insistence on the distinction between a
republic and a democracy or majority rule hinges on the radical
separation of law and power, with clearly recognized different
origins, different legitimations, and different spheres of applica-
tion.
What the American Revolution actually did was to bring the
new American experience and the new American concept of
power out into the open. Like prosperity and equality of con-
dition, this new power concept was older than the Revolution,
but unlike the social and economic happiness of the New World
- which would have resulted in abundance and affluence under
almost any form of government - it would hardly have survived
without the foundation of a new body politic, designed explicitly
Foundation 1: Constitutio Libertatis 167
to preserve it; without revolution, in other words, the new
power principle would have remained hidden, it might have
fallen into oblivion or be remembered as a curiosity, of interest
to anthropologists and local historians, but of no interest to
statecraft and political thought.
Power - as the men of the American Revolution understood it
as a matter of course because it was embodied in all institutions
of self-government throughout the country - was not only prior
to the Revolution, it was in a sense prior to the colonization of
the continent. The Mayflower Compact was drawn up on the
ship and signed upon landing. For our argument, it is perhaps
of no great relevance, though it would be interesting to know
whether the Pilgrims had been prompted to 'covenant' because
of the bad weather which prevented their landing farther south
within the jurisdiction of the "Virginia Company that had
granted them their patent, or whether they felt the need *to
combine themselves together' because the London recruits were
an 'undesirable lot* challenging the jurisdiction of the Virginia
Company and threatening to 'use their owne libertieV 7 In either
case, they obviously feared the so-called state of nature, the un-
trod wilderness, unlimited by any boundary, as well as the
unlimited initiative of men bound by no law. This fear is not
surprising; it is the justified fear of civilized men who, for what-
ever reasons, have decided to leave civilization behind them and
strike out on their own. The really astounding fact in the whole
story is that their obvious fear of one another was accompanied
by the no less obvious confidence they had in their own power,
granted and confirmed by no one and as yet unsupported by any
means of violence, to combine themselves together into a 'civil
Body Politick' which, held together solely by the strength of
mutual promise 'in the Presence of God and one another*, sup-
posedly was powerful enough to 'enact, constitute, and frame*
all necessary laws and instruments of government. This deed
quickly became a precedent, and when, less than twenty years
later, colonists from Massachusetts emigrated to Connecticut,
they framed their own 'Fundamental Orders' and 'plantation
covenant' in a still uncharted wilderness, so that when the royal
charter finally arrived to unite the new settlements into the
168 On Revolution
colony of Connecticut it sanctioned and confirmed an already
existing system of government. And precisely because the royal
charter of 1662 had only sanctioned the Fundamental Orders of
1639, the self-same charter could be adopted in 1776, virtually
unchanged, as 'the Civil Constitution of this State under the sole
authority of the people thereof, independent of any King and
Prince whatever'.
Since the colonial covenants had originally been made with-
out any reference to king or prince, it was as though the
Revolution liberated the power of covenant and constitution-
making as it had shown itself in the earliest days of colonization.
The unique and all-decisive distinction between the settlements
of North America and all other colonial enterprises was that
only the British emigrants had insisted, from the very beginning,
that they constitute themselves into 'civil bodies politic'. These
bodies, moreover, were not conceived as governments, strictly
speaking; they did not imply rule and the division of the people
into rulers and ruled. The best proof of this is the simple fact
that the people thus constituted could remain, for more than a
hundred and fifty years, the royal subjects of the government of
England. Th ese new bodies politic really were 'political societies '.
and their great importance for the future lay in the for mation
of a political realm that enjoyed power and was entitlecTto
claim rights without possessing or claiming sovereignty . 48 The
greatest revolutionary innovation, Madison's discovery of the
federal principle for the foundation of large republics, was partly
based upon an experience, upon the intimate knowledge of
political bodies whose internal structure predetermined them, as
it were, and conditioned its members for a constant enlargement
whose principle was neither expansion nor conquest but the
further combination of powers. For not only the basic federal
principle of uniting separate and independently constituted
bodies, but also the name 'confederation' in the sense of 'com-
bination' or 'cosociation' was actually discovered in the earliest
times of colonial history, and even the new name of the union to
be called the United States of America was suggested by the
short-lived New England Confederation to be 'called by the
name of United Colonies of New England'. 49 And it was this
Foundation I: Constitutio Libertatis 169
experience, rather than any theory, which emboldened Madison
to elaborate and affirm a casual remark of Montesquieu, namely
that the republican form of government, if based upon the
federal principle, was appropriate for large and growing terri-
tories. 50
John Dickinson, who once almost casually remarked, 'Ex-
perience must be our only guide. Reason may mislead us', 51
may have been dimly aware of this unique but theoretically
inarticulate background of the American experiment. It has been
said that 'America's debt to the idea of the social contract is so
huge as to defy measurement', 52 but the point of the matter is
that the early colonists, not the men of the Revolution, 'put the
idea into practice', and they certainly had no notion of any
theory. On the contrary, if Locke in a famous passage states,
'That which begins and actually constitutes any political society
is nothing but the consent of any number of freemen capable of
majority, to unite and incorporate into such society,' and then
calls this act the 'beginning to any lawful government in the
world', it rather looks as though he was more influenced by the
facts and events in America, and perhaps in a more decisive
manner, than the founders were influenced by his Treatises of
Civil Government.® The proof of the matter - if proof in such
matters can exist at all - lies in the curious and, as it were, in-
nocent way in which Locke construed this 'original compact', in
line with the current social-contract theory, as a surrender of
rights and powers to either the government or the community,
that is, not at all as a 'mutual' contract but as an agreement in
which an individual person resigns his power to some higher
authority and consents to be ruled in exchange for a reasonable
protection of his life and property. 54
Before we proceed, we must recall that in theory the seven-
teenth century clearly distinguished between two kinds of 'social
contract'. One was concluded between individual persons and
supposedly gave birth to society; the other was concluded be-
tween a people and its ruler and supposedly resulted in legiti-
mate government. However, the decisive differences between
these two kinds (which have hardly more in common than a
commonly shared and misleading name) were early neglected
170 On Revolution
because the theorists themselves were primarily interested in
finding a universal theory covering all forms of public relation-
ships, social as well as political, and all kinds of obligations;
hence, the two possible alternatives of 'social contract', which,
as we shall sec, actually are mutually exclusive, were seen, with
more or less conceptual clarity, as aspects of a single twofold
contract. In theory, moreover, both contracts were fictions, the
fictitious explanations of existing relationships between the mem-
bers of a community called society, or between this society and its
government; and while the history of the theoretical fictions can
be traced back deep into the past, there had been no instance,
prior to the colonial enterprise of the British people, when even
a remote possibility of testing their validity in actual fact had
presented itself.
Schematically, the chief differences between these two kinds
of social contract may be enumerated as follows: The mutual
contract by which people bind themselves together in order to
form a community is based on reciprocity and presupposes
equality; its actual content is a promise, and its result is indeed
a 'society' or 'cosociation' in the old Roman sense of societas y
which means alliance. Such an alliance gathers together the iso-
lated strength of the allied partners and binds them into a new
power structure by virtue of 'free and sincere promises'. 55 In the
so-called social contract between a given society and its ruler, on
the other hand, we deal with a fictitious, aboriginal act on the
side of each member, by virtue of which he gives up his isolated
strength and power to constitute a government; far from gaining
a new power, and possibly more than he had before, he resigns
his power such as it is, and far from binding himself through
promises, he merely expresses his 'consent' to be ruled by the
government, whose power consists of the sum total of forces
which all individual persons have channelled into it and
which are monopolized by the government for the alleged benefit
of all subjects. As far as the individual person is concerned, it is
obvious that he gains as much power by the system of mutual
promises as he loses by his consent to a monopoly of power in
the ruler. Conversely, those who 'covenant and combine them-
selves together' lose, by virtue of reciprocation, their isolation,
Foundation I: Constitutio Libertatis 171
while in the other instance it is precisely their isolation which is
safeguarded and protected.
Whereas the act of consent, accomplished by each individual
person in his isolation, stands indeed only 'in the Presence of
God', the act of mutual promise is by definition enacted 'in the
presence of one another'; it is in principle independent of
religious sanction. Moreover, a body politic which is the result
of covenant and 'combination* becomes the very source of power
for each individual person who outside the constituted political
realm remains impotent; the government which, on the con-
trary, is the result of consent acquires a monopoly of power so
that the governed are politically impotent so long as they do not
decide to recover their original power in order to change the
government and entrust another ruler with their power.
In other words, the mutual contract where power is con-
stituted by means of promise contains in nuce both the republi-
can principle, according to which power resides in the people,
and where a 'mutual subjection' makes of rulership an absurdity
- 'if the people be governors, who shall be governed?' 56 - and the
federal principle, the principle of 'a Commonwealth for increase*
(as Harrington called his Utopian Oceana), according to which
constituted political bodies can combine and enter into lasting
alliances without losing their identity. It is equally obvious that
the social contract which demands the resignation of power to
the government and the consent to its rule contains in nuce both
the principle of absolute rulership, of an absolute monopoly of
power 'to overawe them all (Hobbes) (which, incidentally, is
liable to be construed in the image of divine power, since only
God is omnipotent), and the national principle according to
which there must be one representative of the nation as a whole,
and where the government is understood to incorporate the will
of all nationals.
'In the beginning', Locke once remarked, 'all the world was
America.' For all practical purposes, America should have pre-
sented to the social-contract theories that beginning of society
and government which they had assumed to be the fictitious con-
dition without which the existing political realities could be
neither explained nor justified. And the very fact that the sudden
172 On Revolution
rise and great variety of social-contract theories during the early
centuries of the modern age were preceded and accompanied by
these earliest compacts, combinations, cosociations, and con-
federations in colonial America would indeed be very suggestive,
if it were not for the undeniable other fact that these theories in
the Old World proceeded without ever mentioning the actual
realities in the New World. Nor are we entitled to assert that the
colonists, departing from the Old World, took with them the
wisdom of new theories, eager, as it were, for a new land in
which to test them out and to apply them to a novel form of
community. This eagerness for experimentation, and the con-
comitant conviction of absolute novelty, of a not/us ordo saec-
lorum, was conspicuously absent from the minds of the colonists,
as it was conspicuously present in the minds of those men who
one hundred and fifty years later were to make the Revolution.
If there was any theoretical influence that contributed to the com-
pacts and agreements in early American history, it was, of course,
the Puritans* reliance on the Old Testament, and especially their
rediscovery of the concept of the covenant of Israel, which indeed
became for them an 'instrument to explain almost every relation
of man to man and man to God'. But while it may be true that
'the Puritan theory of the origin of the church in the consent of
the believers led directly to the popular theory of the origin of
government in the consent of the governed', 57 this could not have
led to the other much less current theory of the origin of a 'civil
body politic' in the mutual promise and binding of its con-
stituents. For the Biblical covenant as the Puritans understood it
was a compact between God and Israel by virtue of which God
gave the law and Israel consented to keep it, and while this
covenant implied government by consent, it implied by no
means a political body in which rulers and ruled would be equal,
that is, where actually the whole principle of rulership no longer
applied. 58
Once we turn from these theories and speculations about in-
fluences to the documents themselves and their simple, un-
cluttered, and often awkward language, we see immediately
that it is an event rather than a theory or a tradition we are con-
fronted with, an event of the greatest magnitude and the greatest
Foundation I: Constitutio Libertatis xfo
import for the future, enacted on the spur of time and circum-
stances, and yet thought out and considered with the greatest
care and circumspection. What prompted the colonists 'solemnly
and mutually in the Presence of God and one another, [to]
covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil Body
Politick ... ; and by virtue hereof [to] enact, constitute, and
frame, such just and equal Laws, Ordinances, Acts, Constitu-
tions, and Offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most
meet and convenient for the general Good of the Colony; unto
which we promise all due Submission and Obedience' (as the
Mayflower Compact has it), were the 'difficulties and discourage-
ments which in all probabilities must be forecast upon the
execution of this business'. Clearly the colonists, even before
embarking, had rightly and thoroughly considered 'that this
whole adventure growes upon the* joint confidence we have in
each others fidelity and resolution herein, so as no man of us
would have adventured it without assurance of the rest'. Noth-
ing but the simple and obvious insight into the elementary
structure of joint enterprise as such, the need 'for the better en-
couragement of ourselves and others that shall joyne with us in
this action', caused these men to become obsessed with the
notion of compact and prompted them again and again 'to
promise and bind' themselves to one another. 59 No theory,
theological or political or philosophical, but their own decision
to leave the Old World behind and to venture forth into an
enterprise entirely of their own led into a sequence of acts and
occurrences in which they would have perished, had they not
turned their minds to the matter long and intensely enough to
discover, almost by inadvertence, the elementary grammar of
political action and its more complicated syntax, whose rules
determine the rise and fall of human power. Neither grammar
nor syntax was something altogether new in the history of
Western civilization; but to find experiences of equal import in
the political realm and to read a language of equal authenticity
and originality - namely, so incredibly free of conventional
idioms and set formulas - in the huge arsenal of historical docu-
ments, one might have to go back into a very distant past indeed,
a past, at any rate, of which the settlers were totally ignorant. 60
174 ® n Revolution
What they discovered, to be sure, was no theory of social con-
tract in either of its two forms, but rather the few elementary
truths on which this theory rests.
For our purpose in general, and our attempt to determine
with some measure of certainty the essential character of the
revolutionary spirit in particular, it may be worth while to pause
here long enough to translate, however tentatively, the gist of
these pre-revolutionary and even pre-colonial experiences into
the less direct but more articulate language of political thought.
We then may say that the specifically American experience had
taught the men of the Revolution that action, though it may be
started in isolation and decided upon by single individuals for
very different motives, can be accomplished only by some joint
effort in which the motivation of single individuals - for in-
stance, whether or not they are an 'undesirable lot 1 - no longer
counts, so that homogeneity of past and origin, the decisive prin-
ciple of the nation-state, is not required. The joint effort
equalizes very effectively the differences in origin as well as in
quality. Here, moreover, we may find the root of the surprising
so-called realism of the Founding Fathers with respect to human
nature. They could afford to ignore the French revolutionary
proposition that man is good outside society, in some fictitious
original state, which, after all, was the proposition of the Age of
Enlightenment. They could afford to be realistic and even pes-
simistic in this matter because they knew that whatever men
might be in their singularity, they could bind themselves into a
community which, even though it was composed of 'sinners',
need not necessarily reflect this 'sinful' side of human nature.
Hence, the same social state which to their French colleagues
had become the root of all human evil was to them the only
reasonable life for a salvation fro m evil and wickedness at which
men might arrive even in this world and even by themselves,
without any divine assistance. Here, incidentally, we may also
see the authentic source of the much misunderstood American
version of the then current belief in the perfectibility of man.
Before American common philosophy fell prey to Rousseauan
notions in these matters - and this did not happen prior to the
nineteenth century - American faith was not at all based on a
Foundation I: Constitutio Libertatis 175
semi-religious trust in human nature, but on the contrary, on the
possibility of checking human nature in its singularity by virtue
of common bonds and mutual promises. The hope for man in
his singularity lay in the fact that not man but men inhabit the
earth and form a world between them. It is human worldliness
that will save men from the pitfalls of human nature. And the
strongest argument, therefore, John Adams could muster against
a body politic dominated by a single assembly was that it was
'liable to all the vices, follies and frailties of an individual'. 61
Closely connected with this is an insight into the nature of
human power. In distinction to strength, which is the gift and
the possession of every man in his isolation against all other
men, power comes into being only if and when men join them-
selves together for the purpose of action, and it will disappear
when, for whatever reason, they disperse and desert one another.
Hence, binding and promising, combining and covenanting are
the means by which power is kept in existence; where and when
men succeed in keeping intact the power which sprang up
between them during the course of any particular act or deed,
they are already in the process of foundation, of constituting a
stable worldly structure to house, as it were, their combined
power of action. There is an element of the world-buildin g
capacit y of man in th^ hum an faculty of making and keeping
promises. J ust as promises and agreements deal with the future
and provide stability in the ocean of future uncertainty where
the unpredictable may break in from all sides, so the constituting,
founding, and world-building capacities of man concern always
not so much ourselves and our own time on earth as our 'suc-
cessor', and 'posterities'. The grammar of action : that action is
the only human faculty that demands a plurality of men; and the
syntax of power : that power is the only human attribute which
applies solely to the worldly in-between space by which men are
mutually related, combine in the act of foundation by virtue of
the making and the keeping of promises, which, in the realm of
politics, may well be the highest human faculty.
In other words, what had happened in colonial America prior
to the Revolution (and what had happened in no other part of
the world, neither in the old countries nor in the new colonies)
176 On Revolution
was, theoretically speaking, that action had led to the formation
of power and that power was kept in existence by the then newly
discovered means of promise and covenant. The force of this
power, engendered by action and kept by promises, came to the
fore when, to the great surprise of all the great powers, the
colonies, namely, the townships and provinces, the counties and
cities, their numerous differences amongst themselves notwith-
standing, won the war against England. But this victory was a
surprise only for the Old World; the colonists themselves, with a
hundred and fifty years of covenant-making behind them, rising
out of a country which was articulated from top to bottom -
from provinces or states down to cities and districts, townships,
villages, and counties - into duly constituted bodies, each a com-
monwealth of its own, with representatives 'freely chosen by the »
consent of loving friends and neighbours', 62 each, moreover,
designed 'for increase' as it rested on the mutual promises of
those who were 'cohabiting' and who, when they 'conioyned
[them] selves to be as one Publike State or Commonwealth', had
planned not only for their 'successors' but even for 'such as shall
be adioyned to [them] att any tyme hereafter' 63 - the men who
out of the uninterrupted strength of this tradition 'bid a final
adieu to Britain' knew their chances from the beginning; they
knew of the enormous power potential that arises when men
'mutually pledge to each other [their] lives, [their] Fortunes
and their sacred Honour'. 64
This was the experience that guided the men of the Revolu-
tion; it had taught not only them but the people who had dele-
gated and *so betrusted' them, how to establish, and found public
bodies, and as such it was without parallel in any other part
of the world. The same, however, is by no means true of their
reason, or rather reasoning, of which Dickinson rightly feared
that it might mislead them. Their reason, indeed, both in style
and content was formed by the Age of Enlightenment as it had
spread to both sides of the Atlantic; they argued in the same
terms as their French or English colleagues, and even their dis-
agreements were by and large still' discussed within the frame-
work of commonly shared references and concepts. Thus, Jeffer-
son could speak of the consent by the people from which govern-
Foundation 1: Constitutio Libertatis 177
ments 'derive their just powers' in the same Declaration which he
closes on the principle of mutual pledges, and neither he nor
anybody else became aware of the simple and elementary differ-
ence between 'consent 1 and mutual promise, or between the two
types of social-contract theory. This lack of conceptual clarity
and precision with respect to existing realities and experiences
has been the curse of Western history ever since, in the after-
math of the Periclean Age, the men of action and the men of
thought parted company and thinking began to emancipate
itself altogether from reality, and especially from political
factuality and experience. The great hope of the modern age and
the modern age's revolution has been, from the beginning, that
this rift might be healed; one of the reasons why this hope thus
far has not been fulfilled, why, in the words of Tocqueville, not
even the New World could bring- forth a new political science,
lies in the enormous strength and resiliency of our tradition of
thought, which has withstood all the reversals and transforma-
tion of values through which the thinkers of the nineteenth
century tried to undermine and to destroy it.
However that may be, the fact of the matter, as it relates to
the American Revolution, was that experience had taught the
colonists that royal and company charters confirmed and legal-
ized rather than established and founded their 'commonwealth',
that they were 'subject to the laws which they adopted at their
first settlement, and to such others as have been since made by
their respective Legislatures', and that such liberties were 'con-
firmed by the political constitutions they have respectively as-
sumed, and also by several charters of compact from the
Crown.* 65 It is true, 'the colonial theorists wrote much about the
British constitution, the rights of Englishmen, and even of the
laws of nature, but they accepted the British assumption that
colonial governments derived from British charters and com-
missions.' 66 Yet the essential point even in these theories was the
curious interpretation, or rather misinterpretation, of the British
constitution as a fundamental law which could limit the legis-
lative powers of Parliament. This, clearly, meant understand-
ing the British constitution in the light of American compacts
and agreements, which indeed were such 'fundamental Law',
178 On Revolution
such 'fixed* authority, the 'bounds 1 of which even the supreme
legislature might not 'overleap . . . without destroying its own
foundation*. It was precisely because the Americans so firmly
believed in their own compacts and agreements that they would
appeal to a British constitution and their 'constitutional Right*,
'exclusion of any Consideration of Charter Rights*; whereby it
is even relatively unimportant that they, following the fashion
of the time, asserted this to be an 'unalterable Right, in nature*,
since, to them at least, this right had become law only because
they thought it to be 'ungrafted into the British Constitution,
as a fundamental Law*. 67
And again, experience had taught the colonists enough about
the nature of human power to conclude from the by no means
intolerable abuses of power by a particular king that kingship
as such is a form of government fit for slaves, and that 'an
American republic ... is the only government which we wish
to see established; for we can never be willingly subject to any
other King than he who, being possessed of infinite wisdom,
goodness and rectitude, is alone fit to possess unlimited power* ; a
but the colonial theorists were still debating at length the ad-
vantages and disadvantages of the various forms of government
- as though there were any choice in this matter. Finally, it was
experience — 'the unified wisdom of North America ... col-
lected in a general congress' 69 - rather than theory or learning,
that taught the men of the Revolution the real meaning of the
Roman potcstas in populo, that power resides in the people. They
knew that the principle of potestas in populo is capable of
inspiring a form of government only if one adds, as the Romans
did, auctoritas in senatu, authority resides in the senate, so that
government itself consists of both power and authority, or, as
the Romans had it, senatus populusquc Roman us. What the
royal charters and the loyal attachment of the colonies to. king
and Parliament in England had done for the people in America
was to provide their power with the additional weight of
authority; so that the chief problem of the American Revolu-
tion, once this source of authority had been severed from the
colonial body politic in the New World, turned out to be the 1
establishment and foundation not of power but of authority.
CHAPTER FIVE
Foundation II:
Novus Ordo Saeclorurn
Magnus ab Integra saeclorurn nascitur ordo. -Virgil
Power and authority arc no more the same than are power
and violence. We have hinted alfeady at the latter distinction,
which, however, we now must recall once more. The relevance
of these differences and distinctions becomes especially striking
when we consider the enormously and disastrously different
actual outcomes of the one tenet the men of the two eighteenth-
century revolutions held in common : the conviction that source
and origin of legitimate political power resides in the people. For
the agreement was in appearance only. The people in France, le
peuple in the sense of the Revolution, were neither organized
nor constituted; whatever 'constituted bodies* existed iin the Old
World, diets and parliaments, orders and estates, rested on privi-
lege, birth, and occupation. They represented particular private
interests but left the public concern to the monarch, who, in
an enlightened despotism, was supposed to act as *a single
enlightened person against many private interests', 1 whereby
it was understood that in a 'limited monarchy* these bodies had
the right to voice grievances and to withhold consent. None of
the European parliaments was a legislative body; they had at best
the right to say 'yes' or 'no'; the initiative, however, or the
right to act did not rest with them. No doubt the initial slogan
of the American Revolution, 'No taxation without representa-
tion', still belonged in this sphere of 'limited monarchy* whose
fundamental principle was consent of the subjects. We have
difficulties today in perceiving the great potency of this prin-
180 On Revolution
ciple because the intimate connection of property and freedom
is for us no longer a matter of course. To the eighteenth cen-
tury, as to the seventeenth before it and the nineteenth after it,
the function of laws was not primarily to guarantee liberties but
to protect property; it was property, and not the law as such,
that guaranteed freedom. Not before the twentieth century were
people exposed directly and without any personal protection to
the pressures of either state or society; and only when people
emerged who were free without owning property to protect their
liberties were laws necessary to protect persons and personal
freedom directly, instead of merely protecting their properties.
In the eighteenth century, however, and especially in the Eng-
lish-speaking countries, property and freedom still coincided;
who said property, said freedom, and to recover or defend one's
property rights was the same as to fight for freedom. It was pre-
cisely in their attempt to recover such 'ancient liberties' that the
American Revolution and the French Revolution had their most
conspicuous similarities.
The reason why the conflict between king and parliament in
France resulted in such an altogether different outcome from
the conflict between the American constituted bodies and the
government in England lies exclusively in the totally different
nature of these constituted bodies. The rupture between king
and parliament indeed threw the whole French nation into a
'state of nature'; it dissolved automatically the political structure
of the country as well as the bonds among its inhabitants,
which had rested not on mutual promises but on the various
privileges accorded to each order and estate of society. Strictly
speaking, there were no constituted bodies in any part of the
Old World. The constituted body itself was already an innova-
tion born out of the necessities and the ingeniousness of those
Europeans who had decided to leave the Old World not only
in order to colonize a new continent but also for the purpose
of establishing a new world order. The conflict of the colonies
with- king and Parliament in England dissolved nothing more
than the charters granted the colonists and those privileges they
enjoyed by virtue of being Englishmen; it deprived the country
of its governors, but not of its legislative assemblies, and the
Foundation II: Novus Ordo Saeclorum 181
people, while renouncing their allegiance to a king, felt by no
means released from their own numerous compacts, agreements,
mutual promises, and 'cosociations'. 2
Hence, when the men of the French Revolution said that all
power resides in the people, they understood by power a 'nat-
ural' force whose source and origin lay outside the political
realm, a force which in its very violence had been released by
the revolution and like a hurricane had swept away all institu-
tions of the ancien rSgime. This force was experienced as super-
human in its strength, and it was seen as the result of the
accumulated violence of a multitude outside all bonds and all
political organization. The experiences of the French Revolution
with a people thrown into a 'state of nature' left no doubt that
the multiplied strength of a multitude could burst forth, under
the pressure of misfortune, with a violence which no institution-
alized and controlled power could withstand. But these experi-
ences also taught that, contrary to all theories, no such multi-
plication would ever give birth to power, that strength and
violence in their pre-political state were abortive. The men of
the French Revolution, not knowing how to distinguish be-
tween violence and power, and convinced that all power must
come from the people, opened the political realm to this pre-
political, natural force of the multitude and they were swept
away by it, as the king and the old powers had been swept away
before. The men of the American Revolution, on the contrary, I bo /Jju^-
understood by power the very opposite of a pre-political natural |
violence. To them, power came into being when and where'
people would get together and bind themselves through
promises, covenants, and mutual pledges; only such power*
which rested on reciprocity and mutuality, was real power and
legitimate, whereas the so-called power of kings or princes or
aristocrats, because it did not spring from mutuality but, at best,
rested only on consent, was spurious and usurped. They them-
selves still knew very well what made them succeed where all
other nations were to fail; it was, in the words of John Adams,
the power of 'confidence in one another, and in the common
people, which enabled the United States to go through a revolu-
tion.' 3 This confidence moreover, arose not from a common
1 82 On Revolution
ideology but from mutual promises and as such became the
basis for 'associations' - the gathering-together of people for a
specified political purpose. It is a melancholy thing to say (but
I am afraid it contains a good measure of truth) that this notion
of 'confidence in one another' as a principle of organized action
has been present in other parts of the world only in conspiracy
and in societies of conspirators.
However, while power, rooted in a people that had bound
itself by mutual promises and lived in bodies constituted by
compact, was enough 'to go through a revolution' (without un-
leashing the boundless violence of the multitudes), it was by no
means enough to establish a 'perpetual union', that is, to found
a new authority. Neither compact nor promise upon which
compacts rest are sufficient to assure perpetuity, that is, to
bestow upon the affairs of men that measure of stability without
which they would be unable to build a world for their posterity,
destined and designed to outlast their own mortal lives. For the
men of the Revolution, who prided themselves on founding re-
publics, that is, governments 'of law and not of men', the prob-
lem of authority arose in the guise of the so-called 'higher law*
which would give sanction to positive, posited laws. No doubt,
the laws owed their factual existence to the power of the people
and their representatives in the legislatures; but these men could
not at the same time represent the higher source from which
these laws had to be derived in order to be authoritative and
valid for all, the majorities and the minorities, the present and
the future generations. Hence, the very task of laying down a
new law of the land, which was to incorporate for future gener-
ations the 'higher law' that bestows validity on all man-made
laws, brought to the fore, in America no less than in France, the
need for an absolute, and the only reason why this need did not
lead the men of the American Revolution into the same absurdi-
ties into which it led those of the French Revolution, and par-
ticularly Robespierre himself, was that the former distinguished
clearly and unequivocally between the origin of power, which
springs from below, the 'grass roots' of the people, and the
source of law, who seat is 'above', in some higher and trans-
cendent region.
Foundation II: Novus Ordo Saeclorum 183
Theoretically, the deification of the people in the French
Revolution was the inevitable consequence of the attempt to
derive both law and power from the selfsame source. The
claim of absolute kingship to rest on 'divine rights' had con-
strued secular rulership in the image of a god who is both
omnipotent and legislator of the universe, that is, in the image
of the God whose Will is Law. The 'general will' of Rousseau
or Robespierre is still this divine Will which needs only to will
in order to produce a law. Historically, there is no more momen-
tous difference of principle between the American and the
French Revolutions than that the latter unanimously held that
'law is the expression of the General Will' (as Article VI of the
Declaration des Droits de X Homme et du Citoyen of 1789 has
it), a formulation for which one may look in vain in either the
Declaration of Independence or the Constitution of the United
States. Practically, as we saw before, it turned out that it was
not even the people and its 'general will' but the very process
of the Revolution itself which became the source of all 'laws', a
source which relentlessly produced new 'laws', namely, decrees
and ordinances, which were obsolete the very moment they
were issued, swept away by the Higher Law of the Revolution
which had just given birth to them. 'Une loi revolutionnaire,*
said Condorcet, summing up almost four years of revolutionary
experience, 'est une loi qui a pour objet de maintenir cette
revolution, et d'en accelerer ou regler la marche.' ('A revolution-
ary law is a law whose object is to maintain the revolution and
to accelerate or regulate its course.')* It is true, Condorcet also
voiced the hope that the revolutionary law, by accelerating the
course of revolution, would usher in the day when the revolu-
tion would be 'completed', that it would even 'precipitate its
terminal end*; but this hope was in vain. In theory as in prac-
tice, only a counter-movement, a contrer evolution, could stop a
revolutionary process which had become a law unto itself.
'The great problem in politics, which I compare to the
problem of squaring the circle in geometry ... [is] : How to
find a form of government which puts the law above man.' 5
Theoretically, Rousseau's problem closely resembles Sieyes's
vicious circle: those who get together to constitute a new
184 On Revolution
government are themselves unconstitutional, that is, they have
no authority to do what they have set out to achieve. The vicious
circle in legislating is present not in ordinary lawmaking, but in
laying down the fundamental law, the law of the land or the
constitution which, from then on, is supposed to incarnate the
'higher law 1 from which all laws ultimately derive their author-
ity. And with this problem, which appeared as the urgent need
for some absolute, the men of the American Revolution found
themselves no less confronted than their colleagues in France.
The trouble was - to quote Rouseau once more - that to put the
law above man and thus to establish the validity of man-made
laws, // faudrait des dieux, 'one actually would need gods'.
The need for gods in the body politic of a republic appeared
in the course of the French Revolution in Robespierre's desperate
attempt at founding an entirely new cult, the cult of a Supreme
Being. At the time Robespierre made his proposal, it seemed
as though the cult's chief function was to arrest the Revolution,
which had run amok. As such, the great festival - this wretched
and foredoomed substitute for the constitution which the Revo-
lution had been unable to produce - failed utterly; the new god,
it turned out, was not even powerful enough to inspire the
proclamation of a general amnesty and to show a minimum of
clemency, let alone mercy. The ridiculousness of the enterprise
was such that it must have been manifest to those who attended
the initiating ceremonies as it was to later generations; even then
it must have looked as though 'the god of the philosophers'
upon whom Luther and Pascal had vented their contempt had
finally decided to disclose himself in the guise of a circus clown.
If confirmation were needed that the revolutions of the modern
age, their occasional deistic language notwithstanding, presup-
pose not the breakdown of religious beliefs as such, but certainly
their utter loss of relevance in the political realm, Robespierre's
cult of the Supreme Being would be enough. Yet even Robes-
pierre, whose lack of sense of humour was notorious, might
have shirked this ridicule, had not his need been so desperate.
For what he needed was by no means just a 'Supreme Being' -
a term which was not his - he needed rather what he himself
called an 'Immortal Legislator* and what, in a different context,
Foundation II: Novus Ordo Saeclorum 185
he also named a 'continuous appeal to Justice'. 6 In terms of the
French Revolution, he needed an ever-present transcendent
source of authority that could not be identified with the general
will of either the nation or the Revolution itself, so that an
absolute Sovereignty - Blackstone's 'despotic power* - might
bestow sovereignty upon the nation, that an absolute Immor-
tality might guarantee, if not immortality, then at least some
permanence and stability to the republic, and, finally, that some
absolute Authority might function as the fountainhead of jus-
tice from which the laws of the new body politic could derive
their legitimacy.
It was the American Revolution which demonstrated that of
these three needs the need for an Immortal Legislator was the
most urgent and the one which was least predetermined by the
particular historical conditions of the French nation. For we may
lose all desire to laugh at the circus clown when we find the
same notions, stripped of all ridicule, in John Adams, who also
demanded worship of a Supreme Being which he, too, called
'the great Legislator of the Universe,' 7 or when we recall the
solemnity with which Jefferson, in the Declaration of Independ-
ence, appealed to 'the laws of nature and nature's God'. More-
over, the need for a divine principle, for some transcendent
sanction in the political realm, as well as the curious fact that
this need would be felt most strongly in case of a revolution,
that is, when a new body politic had to be established, had been
clearly anticipated by nearly all theoretical forerunners of the
revolutions - with the sole exception, perhaps, of Montesquieu.
Thus even Locke, who so firmly believed that 'a principle of
action [has been planted in man] by God himself (so that men
would have only to follow the voice of a God-given conscience
within themselves, without any special recourse to the transcen-
dent planter), was convinced that only an 'appeal to God in
Heaven' could help those who came out of the 'state of nature'
and were about to lay down the fundamental law of a civil
society. 8 Hence, in theory as in practice, we can hardly avoid
the paradoxical fact that it was precisely the revolutions, their
crisis and their emergency, which drove the very 'enlightened'
men of the eighteenth century to plead for some religious sane-
1 86 On Revolution
tion at the very moment when they were about to emancipate the
secular realm fully from the influences of the churches and to
separate politics and religion once and for all.
In order to gain a more precise understanding of the nature
of the problem involved in this need for an absolute, it may be
well to remind ourselves that neither Roman nor Greek anti-
quity was ever perplexed by it. It is all the more noteworthy
that John Adams - who even before the outbreak of the Revolu-
tion had insisted on 'rights antecedent to all earthly govern-
ment . . . derived from the great Legislator of the universe' and
who then became instrumental in 'retaining and insisting on
[the law of nature] as a recourse to which we might be driven
by Parliament much sooner than we were aware' 9 — should have
believed that 'it was the general opinion of ancient nations
that the Divinity alone was adequate to the important office of
giving laws to men.' 10 For the point of the matter is that Adams
was in error, and that neither the Greek vouoc, nor the Roman
lex was of divine origin, that neither the Greek nor the Roman
concept of legislation needed divine inspiration. 11 The very
notion of divine legislation implies that the legislator must be
outside of and above his own laws, but in antiquity it was not
the sign of a god but the characteristic of the tyrant to impose
on the people laws by which he himself would not be bound. 12
It is true, though, that in Greece it was held that the lawgiver
came from outside the community, that he could be a stranger
and be called from abroad; but this meant no more than that
laying down the law was pre-political, prior to the existence of
the polis, the city-state, just as building the walls around the
city was prior to the coming into existence of the city itself. The
Greek legislator was outside the body politic, but he was not
above it and he was not divine. The very word v6uo$, which,
apart from its etymological significance, receives its full mean-
ing as the opposite of (puaic, or things that are natural, stresses
the 'artificial', conventional, man-made nature of the laws.
Moreover, although the word vouog came to assume different
meanings throughout the centuries of Greek civilization, it never
lost its original 'spatial significance' altogether, namely, 'the
notion of a range or province, within which defined power may
Foundation II: Novus Ordo Saeclorum 187
be legitimately exercised*. 13 Obviously, no idea of a 'higher law*
could possibly make sense with respect to this v6(iog, and even
Plato's laws are not derived from a 'higher law' which would
not only determine their usefulness but constitute their very
legality and validity. 14 The only trace we find of this notion of
the Legislator's role and status with respect to the body politic
in the history of revolutions and a modern foundation seems to
be Robespierre's famous proposal that the 'members of the Con-
stituent Assembly engage themselves formally to leave to others
the care for building the temple of Liberty whose foundations
they have thrown; that they disqualify themselves gloriously for
the next election.' And the actual source of Robespierre's sug-
gestion has been so little known in modern times 'that his-
torians have suggested all kinds of ulterior motives for [his]
action'. 15
Roman law, although almost totally different from the Greek
vouoc,, still needed no transcendent source of authority, and if
the act of legislation needed help from the gods - the nodding
affirmation with which, according to Roman religion, the gods
approve of decisions made by human beings - it needed it no
more than other important political acts. Unlike the Greek
v6uoc,, the Roman lex was not coeval with the foundation of
the city, and Roman legislation was not a pre-political activity.
The original meaning of the word lex is 'intimate connection'
or relationship, namely something which connects two things or
two partners whom external circumstances have brought to-
gether. Therefore, the existence of a people in the sense of an
ethnic, tribal, organic unity is quite independent of all laws. The
natives of Italy, we are told by Virgil, were 'Saturn's people
whom no laws fettered to justice, upright of their own free will
and following the custom of the gods of old'. 16 Only after Aeneas
and his warriors had arrived from Troy, and a war had broken
out between the invaders and the natives, were 'laws' felt to be
necessary. These 'laws' were more than the means to re-
establish peace; they were treaties and agreements with which a
new alliance, a new unity, was constituted, the unity of two
altogether different entities which the war had thrown together
and which now entered into a partnership. As to the Romans,
188 On Revolution
the end of war was not simply defeat of the enemy or the
establishment of peace; a war was concluded to their satisfaction
only when the former enemies became 'friends' and allies (socit)
of Rome. The ambition of Rome was not to subject the whole
world to Roman power and imperium, but to throw the Roman
system of alliances over all countries of the earth. And this was
not a mere fantasy of the poet. The people of Rome itself, the
populus Romanus, owed its existence to such a war-born partner-
ship, namely, to the alliance between patricians and plebeians,
whose internal civil strife was concluded through the famous
laws of the Twelve Tables. And even this oldest and proudest
document of their history the Romans did not think to be in-
spired by the gods; they preferred to believe that Rome had
sent a commission to Greece in order to study there different
systems of legislation. 17 Hence the Roman Republic, resting it-
self upon the perpetual alliance between patricians and plebeians,
used the instrument of leges chiefly for treaties and for ruling
the provinces and communities which belonged to the Roman
system of alliances, that is, to the ever-extending group of
Roman socii who formed the societas Romana.
I have mentioned that among the pre-revolutionary theorists
only Montesquieu never thought it necessary to introduce an
absolute, a divine or despotic power, into the political realm.
This is closely connected with the fact that, as far as I know,
only Montesquieu ever used the word 'law' in its old, stricdy
Roman sense, defining it in the very first chapter of the Esprit
des Lois, as the rapport, the relation subsisting between different
entities. To be sure, he too assumes a 'Creator and Preserver*
of the universe, and he too speaks of a 'state of nature 1 and of
'natural laws*, but the rapports subsisting between the Creator
and the creation, or between men in the state of nature, are no
more than 'rules' or regies which determine the government of
the world and without which a world would not exist at all. 11
Neither religious nor natural laws, therefore, constitute for
Montesquieu a 'higher law,' strictly speaking; they are no more
than the relations which exist and preserve different realms of
being. And since, for Montesquieu as for the Romans, a law
is merely what relates two things and therefore is relative by
Foundation II: Novus Ordo Saeclorum 189
definition, he needed no absolute source of authority and could
describe the 'spirit of the laws' without ever posing the trouble-
some question of their absolute validity.
These historical reminiscences and reflections are to suggest
that the whole problem of an absolute which would bestow
validity upon positive, man-made laws was partly an inheritance
from absolutism, which in turn had fallen heir to those long
centuries when no secular realm existed in the Occident that
was not ultimately rooted in the sanction given to it by the
Church, and when therefore secular laws were understood as the
mundane expression of a divinely ordained law. This, however,
is only part of the story. It was of even greater importance and
impact that the very word 'law' had assumed an altogether dif-
ferent meaning throughout these centuries. What mattered was
that - the enormous influence of Roman jurisprudence and legis-
lation upon the development of medieval as well as modern legal
systems and interpretations notwithstanding - the laws them-
selves were understood to be commandments, that they were
construed in accordance with the voice of God, who tells men :
Thou shalt not. Such commandments obviously could not be
binding without a higher, religious sanction. Onlyjo the extent
that we understand by law a commandment to which men owe
obedience regardless ot their consent and mutual agreements,
does the law require a transcendent source ot authority tor its
validity, that is, an origin which must be beyond human power.
This, of course, is not to say that the old Jits publicum, the
law of the land which later was called a 'constitution', or the
ius privatum^ which then became our civil law, possesses the
characteristics of divine commandments. But the model in
whose image Western mankind had construed the quintessence
of all laws, even of those whose Roman origin was beyond
doubt, and even in juridical interpretation that used all the
terms of Roman jurisdiction - this model was itself not Roman
at all; it was Hebrew in origin and represented by the divine
Commandments of the Decalogue. And the model itself did not
change when in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
natural law stepped into the place of divinity - into the place,
that is, which once had been held by the Hebrew God who was
190 On Revolution
a lawmaker because he was the Maker of the Universe, a
place which then had been occupied by Christ, the visible repre-
sentative and bodily incarnation of God on earth, from whom
then the vicars of Christ, the Roman popes and bishops as well
as the kings who followed them, had derived their authority,
until finally the rebellious Protestants turned to Hebrew laws
and covenants and to the figure of Christ himself. For the
trouble with natural law was precisely that it had no author,
that it could only be understood as a law of nature in the sense
of a non-personal, superhuman force which would compel men
anyhow, no matter what they did or intended to do or omitted
to do. In order to be a source of authority and bestow validity
upon man-made laws, one had to add to 'the law of nature', as
Jefferson did, 'and nature's God', whereby it is of no great
relevance if, in the mood of the time, this god addressed his
creatures through the voice of conscience or enlightened them
through the light of reason rather than through the revelation
of the Bible. The point of the matter has always been that
natural law itself needed divine sanction to become binding for
men. 19
Religious sanction for man-made laws presently turned out
to require much more than a mere theoretical construction of
a 'higher law', more even than belief in an Immortal Legis-
lator and worship of a Supreme Being; it required a firm belief
in 'a future state of rewards and punishments* as the 'only true
foundation of morality'. 20 What matters is that this was not
only true for the French Revolution, where people or nation
was to step into the shoes of the absolute prince and where
Robespierre had merely 'turned the old system inside out'. 21
(There, indeed, the notion of an 'immortal soul' which was to
serve as a rappel continuel a la justice 22 was indispensable; it
was the only possible, tangible bridle which could prevent the
new sovereign, this absolute ruler who is absolved from his own
laws, from committing criminal acts. Like the absolute prince,
the nation, in terms of public law, could do no wrong because it
was the new vicar of God on earth; but since, like the prince, in
actual fact it could and was liable to do very wrong indeed, it
too had to be exposed to the penalty which would 'be exacted
_#_
Foundation II: Novus Or do Saeclorum 191
by none but God the avenger* - in Bracton's telling phrase.)
It was even truer for the American Revolution, where an explicit
mention of a 'future state of rewards and punishments' occurs in
all state constitutions, although we find no trace of it in either
the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution of the
United States. But from this we should not conclude that the
drafters of state constitutions were less 'enlightened' than Jeffer-
son or Madison. Whatever the influence of Puritanism may have
been upon the development of an American character, the
founders of the republic and the men of the Revolution be-
longed to the Age of Enlightenment; they were all deists, and
their insistence on a belief in 'future states' was oddly out of
tune with their religious convictions. Certainly no religious
fervour but strictly political misgivings about the enormous risks
inherent in the secular realm of* human affairs caused them
to turn to the only element of traditional religion whose
political usefulness as an instrument of rule was beyond any
doubt.
We, who had ample opportunity to watch political crime on
an unprecedented scale, committed by people who had liber-
ated themselves from all beliefs in 'future states' and had lost the
age-old fear of an 'avenging God', are in no position, it seems,
to quarrel with the political wisdom of the founders. But it
was political wisdom and not religious conviction that made
John Adams write the following strangely prophetic words : 'Is
there a possibility that the government of nations may fall in the
hands of men who teach the most disconsolate of all creeds,
that men are but fire flies, and this all is without a father? Is
this the way to make man as man an object of respect? Or is it
to make murder itself as indifferent as shooting plover, and the
extermination of the Rohilla nation as innocent as the swallow-
ing of mites on a morsel of cheese?' 23 For the same reasons,
namely, our own experiences, we also are tempted to revise
the current opinion that Robespierre opposed atheism because
it happened to be a common creed among aristocrats; there is
no reason for not believing him when he said that he found it
impossible to understand how any legislator could ever be an
atheist since he necessarily had to rely on a 'religious sentiment
192 On Revolution
which impresses upon the soul the idea of a sanction given to
the moral precepts by a power greater than man'. 24
Finally, and for the future of the American republic per-
haps most importantly, the Preamble of the Declaration of
Independence contains, in addition to the appeal to 'nature's
God', one more sentence which relates to a transcendent source
of authority for the laws of the new body politic; and this sen-
tence is not out of tune with the founders' dcistic beliefs or the
mood of enlightenment of the eighteenth century. Jefferson's
famous words, 'We hold these truths to be self-evident', com-
bine in a historically unique manner the basis of agreement be-
tween those who have embarked upon revolution, an agreement
necessarily relative because related to those who enter it, with
an absolute, namely with a truth that needs no agreement since,
because of its self-evidence, it compels without argumentative
demonstration or political persuasion. By virtue of being self-
evident, these truths are pre-rational - they inform reason but
are not its product - and since their self-evidence puts them be-
yond disclosure and argument, they are in a sense no less
compelling than 'despotic power' and no less absolute than the
revealed truths of religion or the axiomatic verities of mathe-
matics. In Jefferson's own words these are 'the opinions and be-
liefs of men [which] depend not on their own will, but follow
involuntarily the evidence proposed to their minds'. 25
There is perhaps nothing surprising in that the Age of
Enlightenment should have become aware of the compelling
nature of axiomatic or self-evident truth, whose paradigmatic
example, since Plato, has been the kind of statements with which
we are confronted in mathematics. Le Mercier de la Riviere was
perfectly right when he wrote: 'Euclide est un veritable des-
pote et les verites geometriques qu'il nous a transmises sont
des lois veritablement despotiques. Leur despotisme legal et le
despotisme personnel de ce Legislateur n'en font qu'un, celui de
la force irresistible de l'evidence'; 25 and Grotius, more than a
hundred years earlier, had already insisted that 'even God can-
not cause that two times two should not make four'. (Whatever
the theological and philosophic implications of Grotius's for-
mula might be, its political intention was clearly to bind and
Foundation II: Novus Ordo Saeclorum m
limit the sovereign will of an absolute prince who claimed to
incarnate divine omnipotence on earth, by declaring that even
God's power was not without limitations. This must have
appeared of great theoretical and practical relevance to the
political thinkers of the seventeenth century for the simple rea-
son that divine power, being by definition the power of One,
could appear on earth only as superhuman strength, that is,
strength multiplied and made irresistible by the means of
violence. In our context, it is important to note that only mathe-
matical laws were thought to be sufficiently irresistible to check
the power of despots.) The fallacy of this position was not only
to equate this compelling evidence with right reason - the
dictamen rationis or a veritable dictate of reason - but to be-
lieve that these mathematical 'laws* were of the same nature as
the laws of a community, or that the former could somehow
inspire the latter. Jefferson must have been dimly aware of
this, for otherwise he would not have indulged in the some-
what incongruous phrase, 'We hold these truths to be self-
evident', but would have said: These truths are self-evident,
namely, they possess a power to compel which is as irresistible
as despotic power, they are not held by us but we are held by
them; they stand in no need of agreement. He knew very well
that the statement 'All men are created equal' could not pos-
sibly possess the same power to compel as the statement that
two times two make four, for the former is indeed a statement
of reason and even a reasoned statement which stands in need
of agreement, unless one assumes that human reason is divinely
informed to recognize certain truths as self-evident; the latter,
on the contrary, is rooted in the physical structure of the human
brain, and therefore is 'irresistible'.
If we were to understand the body politic of the American
republic solely in terms of its two greatest documents, the
Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United
States, then the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence
would provide the sole source of authority from which the
Constitution, not as an act of constituting government but as
the law of the land, derives its own legitimacy; for the Constitu-
tion itself, in its preamble as well as in its amendments which
194 On Revolution
form the Bill of Rights, is singularly silent on this question of
ultimate authority. The authority of self-evident truth may be
less powerful than the authority of an 'avenging God 1 , but it
certainly still bears clear signs of divine origin; such truths are,
as Jefferson wrote in the original draft of the Declaration of
Independence, 'sacred and undeniable'. It was not just reason
which Jefferson promoted to the rank of the 'higher law' which
would bestow validity on both the new law of the land and the
old laws of morality; it was a divinely informed reason, the
'light of reason', as the age liked to call it, and its truths also
enlightened the conscience of men so that they would be recep-
tive to an inner voice which still was the voice of God, and
would reply, I will, whenever the voice of conscience told them,
Thou shalt, and, more important, Thou shalt not.
No doubt, there are many ways to read the historical configura-
tion in which the troublesome problem of an absolute made its
appearance. With respect to the Old World, we mentioned the
continuity of a tradition which seems to lead us straight back
to the last centuries of the Roman Empire and the first centuries
of Christianity, when, after the 'Word became flesh', the
incarnation of a divine absolute on earth was first represented
by the vicars of Christ himself, by bishop and pope, who were
succeeded by kings who claimed rulcrship by virtue of divine
rights until, eventually, absolute monarchy was followed by the
no less absolute sovereignty of the nation. From the weight and
burden of this tradition the settlers of the New World had
escaped, not when they crossed the Atlantic but when, under
the pressure of circumstances - in fear of the new continent' s
uncharted wildernes s and frightened by the chartlcss darkness
of the human heart - they had constituted t hem selves int o 'civil
bodies politic', mutually bound themselves into an enterprise
for which no other bond existed , and thus made a new begin -
ning in the very midst of the history of Western mankin d. In
historical perspective, we know today what this escape signi-
Foundation II: Novus Or do Saeclorum 195
fied for better and worse, we know how it led America away
from the European nation-state development, interrupting the
original unity of an Atlantic civilization for more than a hun-
dred years, throwing America back into the 'unstoried wilder-
ness* of the new continent and depriving it of Europe's cultural
grandeur. By the same token, however, and in our con-
text most importantly, America was spared the cheapest and the
most dangerous disguise the absolute ever assumed in the politi-
cal realm, the disguise of the nation. Perhaps the price for this
release, the price of 'isolation', of severance from the people's
own roots and origins in the Old World, would not have been
too high if the political release had also brought about a libera-
tion from the conceptual, intellectual framework of the Western
tradition, a liberation which, of course, should not be mistaken
for an oblivion of the past. This obviously was not the case; the
novelty of the New World's political development was nowhere
matched by an adequate development of new thought. Hence,
there was no avoiding the problem of the absolute - even
though none of the country's institutions and constituted bodies
could be traced back to the factual development of absolutism
- because it proved to be inherent in the traditional concept of
law. If the essence of secular law was a command, then a
divinity, not nature but nature's God, not reason but a
divinely informed reason, was needed to bestow validity on
it.
However, as far as the New World was concerned this was
only theoretically so. It is true enough that the men of the
American Revolution remained bound to the conceptual and
intellectual framework of the European tradition and that they
were no more capable of articulating theoretically the colonial
experience of the tremendous strength inherent in mutual
promises than they were ready to admit in principle, and not
only occasionally, the intimate relationship between 'happiness*
and action - that 'it is action, not rest, that constitutes our
pleasure' (John Adams). Had this bondage to tradition deter-
mined the actual destinies of the American republic to the
same extent as it compelled the minds of the theorists, the
authority of this new body politic in actual fact might have
196 On Revolution
crumbled under the onslaught of modernity - where the loss
of religious sanction for the political realm is an accomplished
fact - as it crumbled in all other revolutions. The fact of
the matter is that this was not the case, and what saved the
American Revolution from this fate was neither 'nature's God'
nor self-evident truth, but the act of foundation itself.
It has often been noticed that the actions of the men of the
revolutions were inspired and guided to an extraordinary degree
by the examples of Roman antiquity, and this is not only true for
the French Revolution, whose agents had indeed an extra-
ordinary flair for the theatrical; the Americans, perhaps, thought
less of themselves in terms of ancient greatness - though Thomas
Paine was wont to think 'what Athens was in miniature,
America will be in magnitude' - they certainly were conscious of
emulating ancient virtue. When Saint-Just exclaimed, 'The
world has been empty since the Romans and is filled only with
their memory, which is now our only prophecy of freedom', he
was echoing John Adams, to whom 'the Roman constitution
formed the noblest people and the greatest power that has ever
existed', just as Paine's remark was preceded by James Wilson's
prediction that 'the glory of America will rival - it will outshine
the glory of Greece'. 27 I have mentioned how strange this en-
thusiasm for the ancients actually was, how out of tune with the
modern age, how unexpected that the men of the revolutions
should turn to a distant past which had been so vehemently
denounced by the scientists and the philosophers of the seven-
teenth century. And yet, when we recall with what enthusiasm
for 'ancient prudence' Cromwell's short dictatorship had been
greeted even in the seventeenth century by Harrington and
Milton, and with what unerring precision Montesquieu, in the
first part of the eighteenth century, turned his attention to the
Romans again, we may well come to the conclusion that, with-
out the classical example shining through the centuries, none of
the men of the revolutions on cither side of the Atlantic would
have possessed the courage for what then turned out to be un-
precedented action. Historically speaking, it was as though the
Renaissance's revival of antiquity that had come to an abrupt
end with the rise of the modern age should suddenly be granted
Foundation II: Novus Ordo Saeclorum 197
another lease on life, as though the republican fervour of the
short-lived Italian city-states - foredoomed, as Machiavelli knew
so well, by the advent of the nation-state - had only lain dor-
mant to give the nations of Europe the time to grow up, as it
were, under the tutelage of absolute princes and enlightened
despots.
However that may be, the reason why the men of the revolu-
tions turned to antiquity for inspiration and guidance was most
emphatically not a romantic yearning for past and tradition.
Romantic conservatism - and which conservatism worth its salt
has not been romantic? - was a consequence of the revolutions,
more specifically of the failure of revolution in Europe; and this
conservatism turned to the Middles Ages, not to antiquity; it
glorified those centuries when the secular realm of worldly
politics received its light from the splendour of the Church, that
is, when the public realm lived from borrowed light. The men
of the revolutions prided themselves on their 'enlightenment', on
their intellectual freedom from tradition, and since they had not
yet discovered the spiritual perplexities of this situation, they
were still untainted by the sentimentalities about the past and
traditions in general which were to become so characteristic for
the intellectual climate of the early nineteenth century. When
they turned to the ancients, it was because they discovered in
them a dimension which had not been handed down by tradition
- neither by the traditions of customs and institutions nor by the
great tradition of Western thought and concept. Hence, it was
not tradition that bound them back to the beginnings of Western
history but, on the contrary, their own experiences, for which
they needed models and precedents. And the great model and
precedent, all occasional rhetoric about the glory of Athens and
Greece notwithstanding, was for them, as it had been for
Machiavelli, the Roman republic and the grandeur of its history.
In order to understand more clearly for what specific lessons
and precedents the men of the revolutions turned to the great
Roman example it may be well to recall another, frequently
noticed fact which, however, plays a distinct role only in the
American Republic. Many historians, especially in the twentieth
century, have found it rather disconcerting that the Constitution,
198 On Revolution
which, in the words of John Quincy Adams, 'had been extorted
from the grinding necessity of a reluctant nation*, should have
become overnight the object of 'an undiscriminating and almost
blind worship' - as Woodrow Wilson once put it. 28 One could
indeed vary Bagehot's word about the government of England
and assert that the Constitution strengthens the American
government 'with the strength of religion'. Except that the
strength with which the American people bound themselves to
their constitution was not the Christian faith in a revealed God,
nor was it Hebrew obedience to the Creator who also was the
Legislator of the universe. If their attitude towards Revolution
and Constitution can be called religious at all, then the word
'religion' must be understood in its original Roman sense, and
their piety would then consist in religare, in binding themselves
back to a beginning, as Roman pietas consisted in being bound
back to the beginning of Roman history, the foundation of the
eternal city. Historically speaking, the men of the American
Revolution, like their colleagues on the other side of the Atlantic,
had been wrong when they thought they were merely revolving
back to an 'early period' in order to retrieve ancient rights and
liberties. But, politically speaking, they had been right in
deriving the stability and authority of any given body politic
from its beginning, and their difficulty had been that they could
not conceive of a beginning except as something which must
have occurred in a distant past. Woodrow Wilson, even without
knowing it, called the American worship of the Constitution
blind and undiscriminating because its origins were not shrouded
in the halo of time; perhaps the political genius of the American
people, or the great good fortune that smiled upon the American
republic, consisted precisely in this blindness, or, to put it
another way, consisted in the extraordinary capacity to look
upon yesterday with the eyes of centuries to come.
The great measure of success the American founders could
book for themselves, the simple fact that their revolution
succeeded where all others were to fail, namely, in founding a
new body politic stable enough to survive the onslaught of
centuries to come, one is tempted to think, was decided the very
moment when the Constitution began to be 'worshipped', even
Foundation II: Novus Ordo Saeclorum 199
though it had hardly begun to operate. And since it was in this
respect that the American Revolution was most conspicuously
different from all other revolutions which were to follow, one is
tempted to conclude that it was the authority which the act of
foundation carried within itself, rather than the belief in an im-
mortal Legislator, or the promises of reward and the threats of
punishment in a 'future state', or even the doubtful self-evidence
of the truths enumerated in the preamble to the Declaration of
Independence, that assured stability for the new republic. This
authority, to be sure, is entirely different from the absolute which
the men of the revolutions so desperately sought to introduce as
the source of validity of their laws and the fountain of legitimacy
for the new government. Here again, it was ultimately the great
Roman model that asserted itself almost automatically and
almost blindly in the minds of those who, in all deliberate con-
sciousness, had turned to Roman history and Roman political
institutions in order to prepare themselves for their own task.
For Roman authority was not vested in laws, and the validity
of the laws did not derive from an authority above them. It was
incorporated in a political institution, the Roman Senate -
potestas in populo, but auctoritas in senatu - and the fact that
the upper chamber was named in accordance with this Roman
institution is all the more suggestive, as the American Senate
has little in common with the Roman, or even the Venetian,
model; it shows clearly how dear the word had become to the
minds of men who had attuned themselves to the spirit of
'ancient prudence'. Among 'the numerous innovations displayed
on the American theater' (Madison), the most momentous per-
haps and certainly the most conspicuous consisted in a shift of
the location of authority from the (Roman) Senate to the
judiciary branch of government; but what remained close to the
Roman spirit was that a concrete institution was needed and
established which, in clear distinction from the powers of the
legislative and executive branches of government, was especially
designed for the purpose of authority. It was precisely in their
incorrect use of the word 'senate', or rather in their un-
willingness to endow with authority a branch of the legislature,
that the Founding Fathers showed how well they understood
20Q On Revolution
the Roman distinction between power and authority. For the
reason Hamilton insisted that 'the majesty of national authority
must be manifested through the medium of the courts of
justice' 2 ' was that, in terms of power, the judiciary branch, pos-
sessing 'neither Force nor Will but merely judgement . . . , [was]
beyond comparison the weakest of the three departments of
power*. 30 In other words, its very authority made it unfit for
power, just as, conversely, the very power of the legislature made
the Senate unfit to exert authority. Even judicial control, accord-
ing to Madison, 'the unique contribution of America to the
science of government 1 , is not without its ancient counterpart
in the Roman office of censorship, and it was still a 'Council of
Censors which ... in Pennsylvania in 1783 and 1784 was . . •
to inquire "whether the constitution had been violated, and
whether the legislative and executive departments had en-
croached on each other" *. 31 The point, however, is that when this
'important and novel experiment in polities' was incorporated
into the Constitution of the United States it lost, together with
its name, its ancient characteristics - the power of the ccnsores >
on one hand, their rotation in office, on the other. Institution-
ally, it is lack of power, combined with permanence of office,
which signals that the true seat of authority in the American
Republic is the Supreme Court. And this authority is exerted in
a kind of continuous constitution-making, for the Supreme
Court is indeed, in Woodrow Wilson's phrase, *a kind of Con-
stitutional Assembly in continuous session'. 8 *
However, while the American institutional differentiation
between power and authority bears distinctly Roman traits, its
own concept of authority is dearly entirely different. In Rome,
"the function of authority was political, and it consisted in giving
advice, while in the American republic the function of authority
is legal, and it consists in interpretation. The Supreme Court
derives its own authority from the Constitution as a written
document, while the Roman Senate, the patrcs or fathers of the
Roman republic, held their authority because they represented* or
rather reincarnated, the ancestors whose only claim to authority
in the body politic was precisely that they had founded it, that
they were the 'founding fathers'. Through the Roman Senators,
Foundation 11; Novus Ordo Saeclorum 201
the founders of the city of Rome were present, and with them the
spirit of foundation was present, the beginning, the principium
and principle, of those res gestae which from then on formed the
history of the people of Rome. For auctoritas, whose etymolog-
ical root is augere, to augment and increase, depended upon the
vitality of the spirit of foundation, by virtue of which it was
possible to augment, to increase and enlarge, the foundations as
they had been laid down by the ancestors. The uninterrupted
continuity of this augmentation and its inherent authority could
come about only through tradition, that is, through the handing
down, through an unbroken line of successors, of the principle
established in the beginning. To stay in this unbroken line of
successors meant in Rome to be in authority, and to remain
tied back to the beginning of the ancestors in pious remembrance
and conservation meant to have Roman pietas, to be 'religious'
or 'bound back' to one's own beginnings. Hence, it was neither
legislating, though it was important enough in Rome, nor ruling
as such that was thought to possess the highest human virtue,
but the founding of new stales or the conservation and augmenta-
tion of those that were already founded : *Neque enim est ulla
res in qua proprius ad deorum numen virtus accedat humana,
quam civitates aut condere novas aut conservare iam conditas.' 55
The very coincidence of authority, tradition, and religion, all
three simultaneously springing from the act of foundation, was
the backbone of Roman history from beginning to end. Because
authority meant augmentation of foundations, Cato could say
that the constitutio ret publicae was 'the work of no single man
and of no single time'. By virtue of auctoritas-, permanence and
change were tied together, whereby, for better and worse,
throughout Roman history, change could only mean increase
and enlargement of the old. To the Romans, at least, the con-
quest of Italy and the building of an empire were legitimate to
the extent that the conquered territories enlarged the foundation
of the city and remained tied to it.
This last point, namely, that foundation, augmentation, and
conservation are intimately interrelated, might well have been
the most important single notion which the men of the Revolu-
tion adopted, not by conscious reflection, but by virtue of being
202 On Revolution
nourished by the classics and of having gone to school in Roman
antiquity. Out of this school had come Harrington's notion of a
'Commonwealth for increase*, for that was precisely what the
Roman Republic had always been, just as centuries earlier
Machiavelli had already nearly textually repeated Cicero's great
statement, quoted earlier, even though he did not bother to
mention his name : 'No man is so much raised on high by any of
his acts as are those who have reformed republics and kingdoms
with new laws and institutions. . . . After those who have been
gods, such men get the first praises.' 34 As far as the eighteenth
century was concerned, it must have seemed to the men of the
Revolution as though their chief immediate problem - which
made the theoretical and legal perplexity of the absolute so un-
comfortably troublesome in practical politics - the problem of
how to make the Union 'perpetual', 35 of how to bestow per-
manence upon a foundation, of how to obtain the sanction of
legitimacy for a body politic which could not claim the sanction
of antiquity (and what, if not antiquity, had thus far always
begotten 'the opinion of right'? as Hume once remarked), it
must have seemed to them as though all this had found a simple
and, as it were, automatic solution in ancient Rome. The very
concept of Roman authority suggests that the act of foundation
inevitably develops its own stability and permanence, and
authority in this context is nothing more or less than a kind of
necessary 'augmentation' by virtue of which all innovations and
changes remain tied back to the foundation which, at the same
time, they augment and increase. Thus the amendments to the
Constitution augment and increase the original foundations of
the American republic; needless to say, the very authority of the
American Constitution resides in its inherent capacity to be
amended and augmented. This notion of a coincidence of
foundation and preservation by virtue of augmentation - that the
'revolutionary' act of beginning something entirely new, and
conservative care, which will shield this new beginning through
the centuries, are interconnected - was deeply rooted in the
Roman spirit and could be read from almost every page of
Roman history. The coincidence itself is perhaps best illustrated
in the Latin word for founding, which is condere and which was
Foundation II: Novus Ordo Saeclorum 203
derived from an early Latin field god, called Conditor, whose
main function was to preside over growth and harvest; he ob-
viously was a founder and preserver at the same time.
That this interpretation of the success of the American Revolu-
tion in terms of the Roman spirit is not arbitrary appears to be
vouched for by the curious fact that it is by no means only we who
call the men of the Revolution by the name of 'founding fathers',
but that they thought of themselves in the same way. This fact
has recently given rise to the rather unpleasant idea that these
men thought they possessed more virtue and wisdom than could
be reasonably expected from their successors. 30 But even a cursory
acquaintance with the thought and style of the time is sufficient
to see how alien such anticipated arrogance would have been to
their minds. The fact of the matter is much simpler: they
thought of themselves as founders because they had consciously
set out to imitate the Roman example and to emulate the Roman
spirit. When Madison speaks of the 'successors' on whom it will
be 'incumbent ... to improve and perpetuate' the great design
formed by the ancestors, he anticipated 'that veneration which
time bestows on every thing, and without which the wisest and
freest government would not possess the requisite stability'. 37
No doubt the American founders had donned the clothes of the
Roman maiores, those ancestors who by definition were 'the
greater ones', even before they were recognized as such by the
people. But the spirit in which this claim was made was not
arrogance; it sprang from the simple recognition that either they
were founders and, consequently, would become ancestors, or
they had failed. What counted was neither wisdom nor virtue,
but solely the act itself, which was indisputable. What they had
done, they knew well enough, and they knew enough of history
to be grateful to have 'been sent into life at a time when the
greatest lawgivers of antiquity would have wished to live'. 38
We noted earlier that the word 'constitution' carries a twofold
meaning. We can still understand by it, in Thomas Paine's terms,
the constituting act, 'antecedent to government', by which a
people constitutes itself into a body politic, whereas we usually
mean by it the result of this act, the Constitution as a written
document. If we now turn our attention once more to the 'un-
204 ® n R ev °l ut i° n
discriminating and blind worship' with which the people of the
United States have looked upon their 'constitution* ever since,
we may be able to see how ambiguous this worship has always
been in that its object was at least as much the act of constituting
as it was the written document itself. In view of the strange fact
that constitution-worship in America has survived more than a
hundred years of minute scrutiny and violent critical debunking
of the document as well as of all the 'truths' which to the
founders carried self-evidence, one is tempted to conclude that
the remembrance of the event itself - a people deliberately
founding a new body politic - has continued to shroud the actual
outcome of this act, the document itself, in an atmosphere of
reverent awe which has shielded both event and document
against the onslaught of time and changed circumstances. And
one may be tempted even to predict that the authority of the
republic will be safe and intact as long as the act itself, the
beginning as such, is remembered whenever constitutional ques-
tions in the narrower sense of the word come into play.
The very fact that the men of the American Revolution
thought of themselves as 'founders' indicates the extent to which
they must have known that it would be the act of foundation ,
itself, rather than an Immortal Legislator or self-evident truth or
any other transcendent, transmundane source, which eventually
would became the fountain of authority in the new body politic.
From this it follows that it is futile to search for an absolute to
break the vicious circle in which all beginning is inevitably
caught, because this 'absolute' lies in the very act of beginning
itself. In a way, this has always been known, though it was never
fully articulated in conceptual thought for the simple reason that
the beginning itself, prior to the era of revolution, has always
been shrouded in mystery and remained an object of speculation.
The foundation which now, for the first time, had occurred in
broad daylight to be witnessed by all who were present had been,
for thousands of years, the object of foundation legends in
which imagination tried to reach out into a past and to an event
which memory could not reach. Whatever we may find out
about the factual truth of such legends, their historical signifi-
cance lies in how the human mind attempted to solve the prob-
Foundation II: Novus Or do Saeclorum 205
lem of the beginning, of an unconnected, new event breaking
into the continuous sequence of historical time.
As far as the men of the Revolution were concerned, there
were only two foundation legends with which they were fully
acquainted, the biblical story of the exodus of Israeli tribes from
Egypt and Virgil's story of the wanderings of Aeneas after he
had escaped burning Troy. Both are legends of liberation, the
one of liberation from slavery and the other of escape from
annihilation, and both stories are centred about a future promise
of freedom, the eventual conquest of a promised land or the
foundation of a new city - dum conderet urbem, as Virgil even
in the beginning of his great poem indicates its actual content.
With respect to revolution, these tales seem to contain an im-
portant lesson; in strange coincidence, they both insist on a hiatus
between the end of the old order* and the beginning of the new,
whereby it is of no great importance in this context whether the
hiatus is being filled by the desolate aimless wanderings of Israeli
tribes in the wilderness or by the adventures and dangers which
befell Aeneas before he reached the Italian shore. If these
legends could teach anything at all, their lesson indicated that
freedom is no more the automatic result of liberation than the
new beginning is the automatic consequence of the end. The
revolution - so at least it must have appeared to these men -
was precisely the legendary hiatus between end and beginning,
between a no-longer and a not-yct. And these times of transition
from bondage to freedom must have appealed to their imagina-
tion very strongly, because the legends unanimously tell us of
great leaders who appear on the stage of history precisely in
these gaps of historical time. 39 Moreover, this hiatus obviously
creeps into all time speculations which deviate from the currently
accepted notion of time as a continuous flow; it was, therefore,
an almost natural object of human imagination and speculation,
in so far as these touched the problem of beginning at all; but
what had been known to speculative thought and in legendary
tales, it seemed, appeared for the first time as an actual reality.
If one dated the revolution, it was as though one had done the
impossible, namely, one had dated the hiatus in time in terms
of chronology, that is, of historical time. 40
206 On Revolution
It is in the very nature of a beginning to carry with itself a
measure of complete arbitrariness. Not only is it not bound into
a reliable chain of cause and effect, a chain in which each effect
immediately turns into the cause for future developments, the
beginning has, as it were, nothing whatsoever to hold on to; it is
as though it came out of nowhere in either time or space. For a
moment, the moment of beginning, it is as though the beginner
had abolished the sequence of temporality itself, or as though the
actors were thrown out of the temporal order and its continuity.
The problem of beginning, of course, appears first in thought
and speculation about the origin of the universe, and we know
the Hebrew solution for its perplexities - the assumption of a
Creator God who is outside his own creation in the same way as
the fabricator is outside the fabricated object. In other words,
the problem of beginning is solved through the introduction of
a beginner whose own beginnings are no longer subject to
question because he is 'from eternity to eternity'. This eternity
is the absolute of temporality, and to the extent that the begin-
ning of the universe reaches back into this region of the absolute,
it is no longer arbitrary but rooted in something which, though
it may be beyond the reasoning capacities of man, possesses a
reason, a rationale of its own. The curious fact that the men of
the revolutions were prompted into their desperate search for an
absolute the very moment they had been forced to act might
well be, at least partly, influenced by the age-old thought-customs
of Western men, according to which each completely new
beginning needs an absolute from which it springs and by which
it is 'explained'.
No matter how much the involuntary thought-reactions of the
men of the revolutions may still have been dominated by the
Hebrew-Christian tradition, there is no doubt that their con-
scious effort to grapple with the perplexities of beginning as they
appear in the very act of foundation turned not to the 'In the
beginning God created the heavens and the earth' but to *ancient
prudence', to the political wisdom of antiquity and, more specifi-
cally, to Roman antiquity. It is no accident of tradition that the
revival of ancient thought and the great effort to retrieve the
elements of ancient political life neglected (or misunderstood)
Foundation II: Novus Ordo Saeclorum 207
the Greeks and took its bearings almost exclusively from Roman
examples. Roman history had been centred about the idea of
foundation, and none of the great Roman political concepts such
as authority, tradition, religion, law, et cetera can be understood
without an insight into the great deed which stands at the
beginning of Roman history and chronology, the fact of urbs
condita, of the foundation of the eternal city. The current
Roman solution of the problem, inherent in this beginning, is
perhaps best indicated in Cicero's famous appeal to Scipio to
become dictator rei publicae constituendae, to establish the
dictatorship for the fateful moment of constituting - or rather
reconstituting - the public realm, the republic in its original
meaning. 41 This Roman solution was the actual source of in-
spiration of Robespierre's 'despotism of liberty', and had Robes-
pierre wanted to justify his dictatorship for the sake of the
constitution of freedom, he might well have appealed to
Machiavelli : 'To found a new republic, or to reform entirely the
old institutions of an existing one, must be the work of one man
only*; 42 he might also have rested his case with James Harring-
ton, who, referring 'to the ancients and their learned disciple
Machiavelli (the only politician of later ages)', 43 had also asserted
*that the legislator* (who for Harrington coincided . with the
founder) 'should be one man, and . . . that the government
should be made altogether or at once. . . . For which cause a
wise legislator . . . may justly endeavour to get the sovereign
power into his own hands. Nor shall any man that is master of
reason blame such extraordinary means as in that case shall be
necessary, the end proving no other than the constitution of a
well-ordered commonwealth.' 4 *
However close the men of the revolutions may have come to
the Roman spirit, however carefully they may have followed
Harrington's advice to 'ransack the archives of ancient pru-
dence' 45 - and no one spent more time in this business than
John Adams - with respect to their main business, the constitu-
tion of some entirely new, unconnected body politic, these
archives must have remained strangely silent. Inherent in the
Roman concept of foundation we find, strangely enough, the
notion that not only all decisive political changes in the course
ao8 On Revolution
of Roman history were reconstitutions, namely, reforms of the
old institutions and the retrievance of the original act of founda-
tion, but that even this first act had been already a re-establish-
ment, as it were, a regeneration and restoration. In the language
of Virgil the foundation of Rome was the re-establishment of
Troy, Rome actually was a second Troy. Even Machiavelli,
partly because he was an Italian and partly because he was still
close to Roman history, could believe that the new founda-
tion of a purely secular realm of politics which he had in
mind actually was nothing but the radical reform of 'the old
institution*, and even Milton, many years later, could still dream
not of founding a new Rome, but of building 'Rome anew*. But
this is not true for Harrington, and the best proof of this lies
in the fact that he begins to introduce into this discussion
altogether different images and metaphors, which are utterly
alien to the Roman spirit. For while he is defending the 'extra-
ordinary means' necessary for the establishment of Cromwell's
Commonwealth, he suddenly argues : 'And, whereas a book or a
building has not been known to attain to perfection if it have
not had a sole author or architect, a commonwealth, as to the
fabric of it, is of the like nature.' 46 In other words, he introduces
here the means of violence which indeed are ordinary a nd neces-
sa ry for all purp oses o f fabrication precisely because somethi ng is
cr eated, not outof nothing, but out of given material which must
be violated in order to yield itself to the formative processes out
of which a thing, a fabricated object, will arise. The Roman
dictator, however, was by no means a fabricator, and the citizens
over whom he had extraordinary powers for the duration of an
emergency were anything rather than human material out of
which to 'build' something. To be sure, Harrington was not yet
in a position to know the enormous dangers inherent in the
Oceanic enterprise, nor did he have any premonition of the use
which Robespierre was to make of the extraordinary means of
violence, when he believed himself to be in the position of an
'architect' who built out of human material a new house, the
new republic, for human beings. What happened was that to-
gether with the new beginning the aboriginal, legendary crime
of Western mankind reappeared in the scene of European
Foundation II: Novus Ordo Saeclorum 209
politics, as though once again fratricide was to be the origin of
fraternity and bestiality the fountainhead of humanity, only that
now, in conspicuous opposition to man's age-old dreams as well
as to his later concepts, violence by no means gave birth to some-
thing new and stable but, on the contrary, drowned in a 'revolu-
tionary torrent' the beginning as well as the beginners.
It was perhaps because of the inner affinity between the
arbitrariness inherent in all beginnings, and human potentiali-
ties for crime that the Romans decided to derive their descend-
ance not from Romulus, who had slain Remus, but from
Aeneas 47 - Romanae stirpis origo ('fount of the Roman race') -
who had come Ilium in Italiam portans victosque Penates,
'carrying Ilium and her conquered household gods into Italy'. 48
To be sure, this enterprise also was accompanied by violence, the
violence of war between Aeneas and the native Italians, but this
war, in Virgil's interpretation, was necessary in order to undo
the war against Troy; since the resurgence of Troy on Italian
soil - illic fas regna resurgere Troiae - was destined to save 'the
remnant left by the Grecians and Achilles' wrath' and thus to
resurrect the gens Hectorea^ which, according to Homer, had
disappeared from the surface of the earth, the Trojan war must
be repeated once more, and this meant to reverse the order of
events as it was laid down in Homer's poems. The reversal of
Homer is deliberate and complete in Virgil's great poem : there
is again an Achilles possessed by indomitable rage; Turnus intro-
duces himself with the words 'Here too shalt thou tell that a
Priam found his Achilles'; 50 there is 'a second Paris, another bale-
fire for Troy's towers reborn'. 51 Aeneas himself is obviously
another Hector, and there stands in the centre of it all, 'the
source of all that woe, again a woman, Lavinia in the place of
Helena. And now after he has assembled all the old personages,
Virgil proceeds to invert the Homeric story: this time it is
Turnus-Achilles who flees before Aeneas-Hector, Lavinia is a
bride and not an adulteress, and the end of the war is not victory
and departure for one side, extermination and slavery and utter
destruction for the others, but 'both nations, unconquered, join
treaty forever under equal laws' 52 and settle down together, as
Aeneas has announced even before the battle begins.
2I0 On Revolution
We are not interested in this context in Virgil's demonstration
of Rome's famous dementia - parcere subiectis et debellare
superbos - nor in the Roman concept of warfare which underlies
it, that unique and great notion of a war whose peace is pre-
determined not by victory or defeat but by an alliance of the
warring parties, who now become partners, socii or allies, by
virtue of the new relationship established in the fight itself and
confirmed through the instrument of lex, the Roman law. Since
Rome was founded on this treaty-law between two different and
naturally hostile people, it could become Rome's mission even-
tually 'to lay all the world beneath laws' - totum sub leges
mitteret orbem. The genius of Roman politics - not only accord-
ing to Virgil but, generally, according to Roman self-inter-
pretation - lay in the very principles which attend the legendary
foundation of the city.
In our context, however, it is more important to observe that in
this self-interpretation even the foundation of Rome was not
understood as an absolutely new beginning. Rome - that was the
resurgence of Troy and the re-establishment of some city-state
that had existed before and of which the thread of continuity
and tradition never had broken. And we need only recall Virgil's
other great political poem, the fourth Eclogue, in order to be-
come aware of how important it was for this self-interpretation to
see constitution and foundation in terms of restoration and
re-establishment. For if in the reign of Augustus 'the great cycle
of periods is born anew' (as all standard translations into
modern languages translate the great guiding line of the poem:
Magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur or do), it is precisely
because the 'order of periods' is not the American novus or do
saeclorum in the sense of an 'absolutely new beginning' 53 - as
though he were speaking here, in the region of politics, of what
he speaks of in the Georgica, in an altogether different context,
namely, of 'the first dawning of the rising world'. 5 * The order of
the fourth Eclogue is great by virtue of going back to and being
inspired by a beginning which antedates it: 'Now returns the
Maid, returns the reign of Saturn', as the next line explicitly
states. From which it follows, of course, that the child to whose
birth the poem is addressed is by no means a Gedg oonrip, a
Foundation II: Novus Ordo Saeclorum 211
divine saviour descending from some transcendent, transmun-
dane region. This child, most explicitly, is a human child born
into the continuity of history, and the boy must learn heroum
laudes et facta parentis, 'the glories of heroes and the father's
deeds*, in order to be able to do what all Roman boys were
supposed to grow up to - 'to rule the world that the ancestors'
virtues have set at peace'. No doubt the poem is a nativity hymn,
a song of praise to the birth of a child and the announcement of
a new generation, a nova progenies; but far from being the
prediction of the arrival of a divine child and saviour, it is,, on
the contrary, the affirmation of the divinity of birth as such, that
the world's potential salvation lies in the very fact that the
human species regenerates itself constantly and forever.
I have dwelt on Virgil's poem at some length because it seems
to me as though the poet of the first century b.c. developed in his
way what the Christian philosopher Augustine in the fifth cen-
tury a.d. was to articulate in conceptual and Christianized lan-
guage : Initium ergo ut esset, creatus est homo - 'That there be a
beginning, man was created,' 03 and what finally must have
become apparent in the very course of the revolutions of the
modern age. What matters in our context is less the profoundly
Roman notion that all foundations are re-establishments and
reconstructions than the somehow connected but different idea
that men are equipped for the logically paradoxical task of
making a new beginning because they themselves are new
beginnings and hence beginners, that the very capacity for be-
ginning is rooted in natality, in the fact that human beings
appear in the world by virtue of birth. It was not the spreading
of alien cults - the Isis cult or the Christian sects - in the declin-
ing empire which prompted the Romans to accept the cult of the
'child' more readily than they accepted almost anything else
from the strange cultures of a conquered world; 56 it was rather
the other way round: because Roman politics and civilization
had this unequalled, intimate connection with the integrity of a
beginning in the foundation of their city, the Asiatic religions
which centred around the birth of a child-saviour attracted them
so strongly; not their strangeness as such but the affinity of birth
and foundation, that is, the emergence of a familiar thought in
212 On Revolution
a strange and more intimate disguise, must have been fascinating
for men of Roman culture and formation.
However that may be, or might have been, when the
Americans decided to vary Virgil's line from magnus ordo
saeclorum to novus ordo saeclorurriy they had admitted that it
was no longer a matter of founding 'Rome anew' but of found-
ing a 'new Rome', that the thread of continuity which bound
Occidental politics back to the foundation of the eternal city
and which tied this foundation once more back to the pre-
historical memories of Greece and Troy was broken and could
not be renewed. And this admission was inescapable. The
American Revolution, unique in this respect until the breakdown
of the European colonial system and the emergence of new
nations in our own century, was 'to a large extent not only the
foundation of a new body politic but the beginning of a specific
national history. No matter how decisively colonial experience
and pre-colohial history might have influenced the course
of the Revolution and the formation of public institutions
in this country, its story as an independent entity begins
only with the Revolution and the foundation of the republic.
Hence, it seems, the men of the American Revolution, whose
awareness of the absolute novelty in their enterprise amounted
to an obsession, were inescapably caught in something for
which neither the historical nor the legendary truth of their
own tradition could offer any help or precedent. And yet,
when reading Virgil's fourth Eclogue, they might have been
faintly aware that there exists a solution for the perplexities of
beginning which needs no absolute to break the vicious circle in
which all first things seem to be caught. What saves the act of
beginning from its own arbitrariness is that it carries its own
principle within itself, or, to be more precise, that beginning and
principle, principium and principle, are not only related to each
other, but are coeval. The absolute from which the beginning is
to derive its own validity and which must save it, as it were,
from its inherent arbitrariness is the principle which, together
with it, makes its appearance in the world. The way the beginner
starts whatever he intends to do lays down the law of action
for those who have joined him in order to partake in the enter-
Foundation II: Novus Ordo Saedorum 213
prise and to bring about its accomplishment. As such, the prin-
ciple inspires the deeds that are to follow and remains apparent
as long as the action lasts. And it is not only our own language
which still derives 'principle' from the Latin principium and
therefore suggests this solution for the otherwise unsolvable
problem of an absolute in the realm of human affairs which is
relative by definition; the Greek language, in striking agreement,
tells the same story. For the Greek word for beginning is dpxii,
and &pxf| means both beginning and principle. No later poet or
philosopher has expressed the innermost meaning of this coin-
cidence more beautifully and more succinctly than Plato when,
at the end of his life, he remarked almost casually, dpxf| yap Kal
0edc, bf &v9pd)7roic, (8p6uevr| ccfcCsi jt&vra 57 - which, in an effort
to catch the original meaning, we may be permitted to para-
phrase : 'For the beginning, because it contains its own principle,
is also a god who, as long as he dwells among men, as long as he
inspires their deeds, saves everything.' It was the same experience
which centuries later made Polybius say, 'The beginning is not
merely half of the whole but reaches out towards the end.' 58 And
it was still the same insight into the identity of principium and
principle which eventually persuaded the American community
to look 'to its origins for an explanation of its distinctive
qualities and thus for an indication of what its future should
hold', 59 as it had earlier led Harrington - certainly without any
knowledge of Augustine and probably without any conscious
notion of Plato's sentence - to the conviction : 'As no man shall
show me a Commonwealth born straight that ever became
crooked, so no man shall show me a Commonwealth born
crooked that ever became straight.' 60
Great and significant as these insights are, their political
relevance comes to light only when it has been recognized that
they stand in flagrant opposition to the age-old and still current
notions of the dictating violence, necessary for all foundations
and hence supposedly unavoidable in all revolutions. In this
respect, the course of the American Revolution tells an unfor-
gettable story and is apt to teach a unique lesson; for this
revolution did not break out but was made by men in common
deliberation and on the strength of mutual pledges. The prin-
214 ® n Evolution
ciple which came to light during those fateful years when the
foundations were laid - not by the strength of one architect but
by the combined power of the many - was the interconnected
principle of mutual promise and common deliberation; and the
event itself decided indeed, as Hamilton had insisted, that men
'are really capable ... of establishing good government from
reflection and choice', that they are not 'forever destined to
depend for their political constitutions on accident and force'. 61
CHAPTER SIX
The Revolutionary Tradition
and Its Lost Treasure
Notre heritage nest precede d'aucun testament -Rene Char
If there was a single event that shattered the bonds between
the New World and the countries of the old Continent, it was
the French Revolution, which, in the view of its contemporaries,
might never have come to pass without the glorious example on
the other side of the Atlantic. It was not the fact of revolution
but its disastrous course and the collapse of the French republic
which eventually led to the severance of the strong spiritual
and political ties between America and Europe that had pre-
vailed all through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Thus, Condorcet's Influence de la Revolution d'Atnerique sur
VEurope, published three years before the storming of the
Bastille, was to mark, temporarily at least, the end and not the
beginning of an Atlantic civilization. One is tempted to hope
that the rift which occurred at the end of the eighteenth century
is about to heal in the middle of the twentieth century, when it
has become rather obvious that Western civilization has its last
chance of survival in an Atlantic community; and among the
signs to justify this hope is perhaps also the fact that since the
Second World War historians have been more inclined to con-
sider the Western world as a whole than they have been since
the early nineteenth century.
Whatever the future may hold in store for us, the estrange-
ment of the two continents after the eighteenth-century revolu-
tions has remained a fact of great consequence. It was chiefly
216 On Revolution
during this time that the New World lost its political significance
in the eyes of the leading strata in Europe, that America ceased
to be the land of the free and became almost exclusively the
promised land of the poor. To be sure, the attitude of Europe's
upper classes toward the alleged materialism and vulgarity of the
New World was an almost automatic outgrowth of the social
and cultural snobbism of the rising middle classes, and as such
of no great importance. What mattered was that the European
revolutionary tradition in the nineteenth century did not show
more than a passing interest in the American Revolution or in
the development of the American republic. In conspicuous con-
trast to the eighteenth century, when the political thought of the
philosophes, long before the outbreak of the American Revolu-
tion, was attuned to events and institutions in the New World,
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.
In recent times, when revolution has become one of the most
common occurrences in the political life of nearly all countries
and continents, the failure to incorporate the American Revolu-
tion into the revolutionary tradition has boomeranged upon the
foreign policy of the United States, which begins to pay an
exorbitant price for world-wide ignorance and for native
oblivion. The point is unpleasantly driven home when even
revolutions in the American continent speak and act as though
they knew by heart the texts of revolutions in France, in Russia,
and in China, but had never heard of such a thing as an
American Revolution. Less spectacular perhaps, but certainly no
less real, are the consequences of the American counterpart to
the world's ignorance, her own failure to remember that a
revolution gave birth to the United States and that the republic
was brought into existence by no 'historical necessity' and no
organic development, but by a deliberate act : the foundation of
freedom. Failure to remember is largely responsible for the in-
tense fear of revolution in America, for it is precisely this
The Revolutionary Tradition and Its Lost Treasure 217
fear that attests to the world at large how right they are to think
of revolution only in terms of the French Revolution. Fear of
revolution has been the hidden leitmotif of postwar American
foreign policy in it's desperate attempts at stabilization of the
status quo, with the result that American power and prestige
were used and misused to support obsolete and corrupt political
regimes that long since had become objects of hatred and con-
tempt among their own citizens.
Failure to remember and, with it, failure to understand have
been conspicuous whenever, in rare moments, the hostile dia-
logue with Soviet Russia touched upon matters of principle.
When we were told that by freedom we understood free enter-
prise, we did very little to dispel this monstrous falsehood, and
all too often we have acted as though we too believed that it was
wealth and abundance which were at stake in the postwar con-
flict between the 'revolutionary' countries in the East and the
West. Wealth and economic well-being, we have asserted, are
the fruits of freedom, while we should have been the first to
know that this kind of 'happiness' was the blessing of America
prior to the Revolution, and that its cause was natural abund-
ance under 'mild government', and neither political free-
dom nor the unchained, unbridled 'private initiative' of capital-
ism, which in the absence of natural wealth has led everywhere
to unhappiness and mass poverty. Free enterprise, in other
words, has been an unmixed blessing only in America, and
it is a minor blessing compared with the truly political freedoms,
such as freedom of speech and thought, of assembly and associa-
tion, even under the best conditions. Economic growth may one
day turn out to be a curse rather than a good, and under no
conditions can it either lead into freedom or constitute a proof
for its existence. A competition between America and Russia,
therefore, with regard to production and standards of living,
trips to the moon and scientific discoveries, may be very interest-
ing in many respects; its outcome may even be understood as a
demonstration of the stamina and gifts of the two nations in-
volved, as well as of the value of their different social manners
and customs. There is only one question this outcome, whatever
2i 8 On Revolution
it may be, will never be able to decide, and that is which form of
government is better, a tyranny or a free republic. Hence, in
terms of the American Revolution, the response to the Com-
munist bid to equal and surpass the Western countries in pro-
duction of consumer goods and economic growth should have
been to rejoice over the new good prospects opening up to the
people of the Soviet Union and its satellites, to be relieved that
at least the conquest of poverty on a world-wide scale could
constitute an issue of common concern, and then to remind our
opponents that serious conflicts would not rise out of the dis-
parity between two economic systems but only out of the con-
flict between freedom and tyranny, between the institutions of
liberty, born out of the triumphant victory of a revolution, and
the various forms of domination (from Lenin's one-party dic-
tatorship to Stalin's totalitarianism to Khrushchev's attempts
at an enlightened despotism) which came in the aftermath of a
revolutionary defeat.
Finally, it is perfectly true, and a sad fact indeed, that most
so-called revolutions, far from achieving the constitutio liber-
tatis, have not even been able to produce constitutional guaran-
tees of civil rights and liberties, the blessings of 'limited
government', and there is no question that in our dealings with
other nations and their governments we shall have to keep in
mind that the distance between tyranny and constitutional,
limited government is as great as, perhaps greater than, the dis-
tance between limited government and freedom. But these
considerations, however great their practical relevance, should
be no reason for us to mistake civil rights for political freedom,
or to equate these preliminaries of civilized government with the
very substance of a free republic. For political freedom, gener-
ally speaking, means the right 'to be a participator in govern-
ment', or it means nothing.
While the consequences of ignorance, oblivion, and failure to
remember are conspicuous and of a simple, elementary nature,
the same is not true for the historical processes which brought
all this about. Only recently, it has been argued again, and in a
rather forceful, and sometimes even plausible manner, that it
The Revolutionary Tradition and Its Lost Treasure 219
belongs, in general, among the distinct features of an 'American
frame of mind' to be unconcerned with 'philosophy' and that
the Revolution, in particular, was the result not of 'bookish'
learning or the Age of Enlightenment, but of the 'practical' ex-
periences of the colonial period, which all by themselves gave
birth to the republic. The thesis, ably and amply propounded
by Daniel Boorstin, has its merits because it stresses adequately
the great role the colonial experience came to play in the prepara-
tion of the Revolution and in the establishment of the republic,
and yet it will hardly stand up under closer scrutiny. 1 A certain
distrust of philosophic generalities in the Founding Fathers was,
without doubt, part and parcel of their English heritage, but
even a cursory acquaintance with their writings shows clearly
that they were, if anything, more learned in the ways of 'ancient
and modern prudence' than their colleagues in the Old World,
and more likely to consult books for guidance in action. More-
over, the books they consulted were exactly the same which at
the time influenced the dominant trends of European thought,
and while it is true that the actual experience of being a 'par-
ticipator in government' was relatively well known in America
prior to the Revolution, when the European men of letters still
had to search its meaning by way of building Utopias or of
'ransacking ancient history', it is no less true that the contents
of what, in one instance, was an actuality and, in the other, a
mere dream were singularly alike. There is no getting away
from the politically all-important fact that at approximately
the same historical moment the time-honoured form of monar-
chical government was overthrown and republics were estab-
lished on both sides of the Atlantic.
However, if it is indisputable that book-learning and think-
ing in concepts, indeed of a very high calibre, erected the frame-
work of the American republic, it is no less true that this interest
in political thought and theory dried up almost immediately
after the task had been achieved. 2 As I indicated earlier, I think
this loss of an allegedly purely theoretical interest in political
issues has not been the 'genius' of American history but, on the
contrary, the chief reason the American Revolution has re-
mained sterile in terms of world politics. By the same token, I
220 On Revolution
am inclined to think that it was precisely the great amount of
theoretical concern and conceptual thought lavished upon the
French Revolution by Europe's thinkers and philosophers
which contributed decisively to its world-wide success, despite
its disastrous end. The American failure to remember can be
traced back to this fateful failure of post-revolutionary thought. 9
For if it is true that all thought begins with remembrance, it
is also true that no remembrance remains secure unless it is
condensed and distilled into a framework of conceptual notions
within which it can further exercise itself. Experiences and even
the stories which grow out of what men do and endure, of
happenings and events, sink back into the futility inherent in
the living word and the living deed unless they are talked about
over and over again. What saves the affairs of mortal men from
their inherent futility is nothing but this incessant talk about
them, which in its turn remains futile unless certain concepts,
certain guideposts for future remembrance, and even for sheer
reference, arise out of it. 4 At any rate, the result of the 'Ameri-
can* aversion from conceptual thought has been that the inter-
pretation of American history, ever since Tocqueville, suc-
cumbed to theories whose roots of experience lay elsewhere,
until in our own century this country has shown a deplorable
inclination to succumb to and to magnify almost every fad and
humbug which the disintegration not of the West but of the
European political and social fabric after the First World War
has brought into intellectual prominence. The strange mag-
nification and, sometimes, distortion of a host of pseudo-scien-
tific nonsense — particularly in the social and psychological
sciences - may be due to the fact that these theories, once they
had crossed the Atlantic, lost their basis of reality and with it
all limitations through common sense. But the reason America
has shown such ready receptivity to far-fetched ideas and gro-
tesque notions may simply be that the human mind stands
in need of concepts if it is to function at all; hence it will accept
almost anything whenever its foremost task, the comprehensive
understanding of reality and the coming to terms with it, is in
clanger of being compromised.
The Revolutionary Tradition and Its Lost Treasure 221
Obviously, what was lost through the failure of thought and
remembrance was the revolutionary spirit. If we leave aside
personal motives and practical goals and identify this spirit
with the principles which, on both sides of the Atlantic, origin-
ally inspired the men of the revolutions, we must admit that the
tradition of the French Revolution - and that is the only
revolutionary tradition of any consequence - has not preserved
them any better than the liberal, democratic and, in die main,
outspokenly anti-revolutionary trends of political thought in
America. 5 We have mentioned these principles before and, fol-
- lowing eighteenth-century political language, we have called
them public freedom, public happiness, public spirit. What re-
mained of them in America, after the revolutionary spirit
had been forgotten, were civil liberties, the individual welfare
of the greatest number, and public .opinion as the greatest force
ruling an egalitarian, democratic society. This transformation
corresponds with great precision to the invasion of the public
realm by society; it is as though the originally political prin-
ciples were translated into social values. But this transformation
was not possible in those countries which were affected by the
French Revolution. In its school, the revolutionists learned
that the early inspiring principles had been overruled by the
naked forces of want and need, and they finished their appren-
ticeship with the firm conviction that it was precisely the Revo-
lution which had revealed these principles for what they actually
were - a heap of rubbish. To denounce this 'rubbish' as preju-
dices of the lower middle classes came to them all the easier
as it was true indeed that society had monopolized these prin-
ciples and perverted them into 'values'. Forever haunted by the
desperate urgency of the 'social question', that is, by the spectre
of the vast masses of the poor whom every revolution was bound
to. liberate, they seized invariably, and perhaps inevitably, upon
the most violent events in the French Revolution, hoping
against hope that violence would conquer poverty. This, to be
sure, was a counsel of despair; for had they admitted that the
most obvious lesson to be learned from the French Revolution
was that la terreur as a means to achieve le bonheur sent rcvo-
222 On Revolution
lutions to their doom, they would also have had to admit that
no revolution, no foundation of a new body politic, was pos-
sible where the masses were loaded down with misery.
The revolutionists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
in sharp contrast to their predecessors in the eighteenth, were
desperate men, and the cause of revolution, therefore, attracted
more and more the desperadoes, namely, 'an unhappy species
of the population . . . who, during the calm of regular govern-
ment, are sunk below the level of men; but who, in the tempes-
tuous scenes of civil violence, may emerge into the human
character, and give a superiority of strength to any party with
which they may associate themselves.' 6 These words of Madison
are true enough, except that we must add, if we are to apply
them to the affairs of European revolutions, that this mixture of
the unhappy and the worst received their chance to rise again
'into the human character' from the despair of the best, who,
after the disasters of the French Revolution, must have known
that all the odds were against them, and who still could not
abandon the cause of revolution - partly because they were
driven by compassion and a deeply and constantly frustrated
sense of justice, partly because they too knew that 'it is action,
not rest, which constitutes our pleasure'. In this sense, Tocque-
ville's dictum, 'In America men have the opinions and passions
of democracy; in Europe we have still the passions and opinions
of revolution', 7 has remained valid deep into our own century.
But these passions and opinions have also failed to preserve the
revolutionary spirit for the simple reason that they never repre-
sented it; on the contrary, it was precisely such passions and
opinions, let loose in the French Revolution, which even then
"suffocated its original spirit, that is, the principles of public
freedom, public happiness, and public spirit which originally
inspired its actors.
Abstractly and superficially speaking, it seems easy enough to
pin down the chief difficulty in arriving at a plausible definition
of the revolutionary spirit without having to rely exclusively, as
we did before, on a terminology which was coined prior to the
revolutions. To the extent that the greatest event in every revo-
lution is the act of foundation, the spirit of revolution contains
The Revolutionary Tradition and Its Lost Treasure 223
two elements which to us seem irreconcilable and even contra-
dictory. The act of founding the new body politic, of devising
the new form of government involves the grave concern with
the stability and durability of the new structure; the experience,
on the other hand, which those who are engaged in this grave
business are bound to have is the exhilarating awareness of the
human capacity of beginning, the high spirits which have al-
ways attended the birth of something new on earth. Perhaps the
very fact that these two elements, the concern with stability and
the spirit of the new, have become opposites in political thought
and terminology - the one being identified as conservatism and
the other being claimed as the monopoly of progressive liberal-
ism - must be recognized to be among the symptoms of our loss.
Nothing, after all, compromises the understanding of political
issues and their meaningful debate today more seriously than
the automatic thought-reactions conditioned by the beaten paths
of ideologies which all were born in the wake and aftermath of
revolution. For it is by no means irrelevant that our political
vocabulary cither dates back to classical, Roman and Greek,
antiquity, or can be traced unequivocally to the revolutions of
the eighteenth century. In other words, to the extent that our
political terminology is modern at all, it is revolutionary in
origin. And the chief characteristic of this modern, revolutionary
vocabulary seems to be that it always talks in pairs of opposites
- the right and the left, reactionary and progressive, conservat-
ism and liberalism, to mention a few at random. How ingrained
this habit of thought has become with the rise of the revolutions
may best be seen when we watch the development of new mean-
ing given to old terms, such as democracy and aristocracy; for
the notion of democrats versus aristocrats did not exist prior to
the revolutions. To be sure, these opposites have their origin,
and ultimately their justification, in the revolutionary experience
as a while, but the point of the matter is that in the act of
foundation they were not mutually exclusive opposites but two
sides of the same event, and it was only after the revolutions had
come to their end, in success or defeat, that they parted com-
pany, solidified into ideologies, and began to oppose each other.
Terminologically speaking, the effort to recapture the lost
224 On Revolution
spirit of revolution must, to a certain extent, consist in the at-
tempt at thinking together and combining meaningfully what
our present vocabulary presents to us in terms of opposition and
contradiction. For this purpose, it may be well to turn our atten-
tion once more to the public spirit which, as we saw, antedated
the revolutions and bore its first theoretical fruition in James
Harrington and Montesquieu rather than in Locke and Rous-
seau. While it is true that the revolutionary spirit was born in
the revolutions and not before, we shall not search in vain for
those great exercises in political thought, practically oeval with
the modern age, through which men prepared themselves for an
event whose true magnitude they hardly could foresee. And this
spirit of the modern age, interestingly and significantly enough,
was preoccupied, from the beginning, with the stability and
durability of a purely secular, worldly realm - which means,
among other things, that its political expression stood in fla-
grant contradiction to the scientific, philosophic, and even artistic
utterances of the age, all of which were much more concerned
with novelty as such than with anything else. In other words, the
political spirit of modernity was born when men were no longer
satisfied that empires would rise and fall in sempiternal change;
it is as though men wished to establish a world which could
be trusted to last forever, precisely because they knew how
novel everything was that their age attempted to do.
Hence, the republican form of government recommended it-
self to the pre-rcvolutionary political thinkers not because of
its egalitarian character (the confusing and confused equation
of republican with democratic government dates from the nine-
teenth century) but because of its promise of great durability.
This also explains the surprisingly great respect the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries showed for Sparta and Venice, two
republics which even to the limited historical knowledge of
the time had not much more to recommend themselves than
that they were thought to have been the most stable and last-
ing governments in recorded history. Hence, also, the curious
predilection the men of the revolutions showed for 'senates',
a word they bestowed upon institutions which had nothing in
common with the Roman or even the Venetian model but
The Revolutionary Tradition and Its host Treasure 225
which they loved because it suggested to their minds an un-
equalled stability resting on authority. 8 Even the well-known
arguments of the Founding Fathers against democratic govern-
ment hardly ever mention its egalitarian character; the objection
to it was that ancient history and theory had proved the 'tur-
bulent' nature of democracy, its instability — democracies 'have
in general been as short in their lives as violent in their death' 9 —
and the fickleness of its citizens, their lack of public spirit, their
inclination to be swayed by public opinion and mass sentiments.
Hence, 'nothing but a permanent body can check the im-
prudence of democracy'. 10
Democracy, then, to the eighteenth century still a form of
government, and neither an ideology nor an indication of class
preference, was abhorred because public opinion was held to
rule where the public spirit ought to prevail, and the sign of this
perversion was the unanimity of the citizenry : for 'when men
exert their reason coolly and freely on a variety of distinct
questions, they inevitably fall into different opinions on some
of them. When they are governed by a common passion, their
opinions, if they are so to be called, will be the same.' 11 This
text is remarkable in several respects. To be sure, its simplicity
is somewhat deceptive in that it is due to an 'enlightened', in
fact rather mechanical, opposition of reason and passion which
does not enlighten us very much on the great subject of the
human capabilities, although it has the great practical merit of
bypassing the faculty of the will - the trickiest and the most
dangerous of modern concepts and misconceptions. 12 But this
does not concern us here; in our context it is of greater impor-
tance that these sentences hint at least at the decisive incompati-
bility between the rule of a unanimously held 'public opinion*
and freedom of opinion, for the truth of the matter is that no
formation of opinion is ever possible where all opinions have
become the same. Since no one is capable of forming his own
opinion without the benefit of a multitude of opinions held by
others, the rule of public opinion endangers even the opinion of
those few who may have the strength not to share it. This is
one of the reasons for the curiously sterile negativism of all
opinions which oppose a popularly acclaimed tyranny. It is not
226 On Revolution
only, and perhaps not even primarily, because of the over-
whelming power of the many that the voice of the few loses
all strength and all plausibility under such circumstances; pub-
lic opinion, by virtue of its unanimity, provokes a unanimous
opposition and thus kills true opinions everywhere. This is the
reason why the Founding Fathers tended to equate rule based
on public opinion with tyranny; democracy in this sense was
to them but a newfangled form of despotism. Hence, their ab-
horrence of democracy did not spring so much from the old fear
of licence or the possibility of factional strife as from their
apprehension of the basic instability of a government devoid of
public spirit and swayed by unanimous 'passions'.
The institution originally designed to guard against rule by
public opinion or democracy was the Senate. Unlike judicial
control, currently understood to be 'the unique contribution of
America to the science of government', 13 the novelty and unique-
ness of the American Senate has proved more difficult to
identify - partly because it was not recognized that the ancient
name was a misnomer (see p. 199), partly because an upper
chamber was automatically equated with the House of Lords in
the government of England. The political decline of the House
of Lords in English government during the last century, the
inevitable result of the growth of social equality, should be proof
enough that such an institution could never have made sense
in a country without a hereditary aristocracy, or in a republic
which insisted on 'absolute prohibition of titles of nobility'. 14
And it was indeed no imitation of English government but
their very original insights into the role of opinion in govern-
ment which inspired the founders to add to the lower house,
in which the 'multiplicity of interests' was represented, an upper
chamber, entirely devoted to the representation of opinion on
which ultimately 'all governments rest'. 15 Both multiplicity of
interests and diversity of opinions were accounted among the
characteristics of 'free government'; their public representation
constituted a republic as distinguished from a democracy, where
'a small number of citizens . . . assemble and administer the
government in person'. But representative government, accord-
ing to the men of the revolution, was much more than a tech-
The Revolutionary Tradition and Its Lost Treasure 227
nical device for government among large populations; limitation
to a small and chosen body of citizens was to serve as the great
purifier of both interest and opinion, to guard 'against the
confusion of a multitude'.
Interest and opinion are entirely different political phenom-
ena. Politically, interests are relevant only as group interests,
and for the purification of such group interests it seems to suf-
fice that they are represented in such a way that their partial
character is safeguarded under all conditions, even under the
condition that the interest of one group happens to be the
interest of the majority. Opinions, on the contrary, never be-
long to groups but exclusively to individuals, who 'exert their
reason coolly and freely', and no multitude, be it the multitude
of a part or of the whole society, will ever be capable of
forming an opinion. Opinions will rise wherever men communi-
cate freely with one another and have the right to make their
views public; but these views in their endless variety seem to
stand also in need of purification and representation, and it was
originally the particular function of the Senate to be the 'medi-
um' through which all public views must pass. 16 Even though
opinions are formed by individuals and must remain, as it were,
their property, no single individual - neither the wise man of
the philosophers nor the divinely informed reason, common to
all men, of the Enlightenment - can ever be equal to the task of
sifting opinions, of passing them through the sieve of an
intelligence which will separate the arbitrary and the merely
idiosyncratic, and thus purify them into public views. For 'the
reason of man, like man himself, is timid and cautious when
left alone, and acquires firmness and confidence in propor-
tion to the number with which it is associated'. 17 Since opinions
are formed and tested in a process of exchange of opinion
against opinion, their differences can be mediated only by
passing them through the medium of a body of men, chosen
for the purpose; these men, taken by themselves, are not wise,
and yet their common purpose is wisdom - wisdom under the
conditions of the fallibility and frailty of the human mind.
Historically speaking, opinion - its relevance for the political
realm in general and its role in government in particular - was
228 On Revolution
discovered in the very event and course of revolution. This, of
course, is not surprising. That all authority in the last analysis
rests on opinion is never more forcefully demonstrated than
when, suddenly and unexpectedly, a universal refusal to obey
initiates what then turns into a revolution. To be sure, this
moment - perhaps the most dramatic moment in history -
opens the doors wide to demagogues of all sorts and colours,
but what else does even revolutionary demagogy testify if not
to the necessity of all regimes, old and new, 'to rest on opinion'?
Unlike human reason, human power is not only 'timid and
cautious when left alone', it is simply non-existent unless it can
rely on others; the most powerful king and the least scrupu-
lous of all tyrants are helpless if no one obeys them, that is,
supports them through obedience; for, in politics, obedience and
support are the same. Opinion was discovered by both the
French and the American Revolutions, but only the latter -
and this shows once more the high rank of its political creativity
- knew how to build a lasting institution for the formation of
public views into the very structure of the republic. What the
alternative was, we know only too well from the course of the
French Revolution and of those that followed it. In all these
instances, the chaos of unrepresented and unpurified opinions,
because there existed no medium to pass them through, crystal-
lized into a variety of conflicting mass sentiments under the pres-
sure of emergency, waiting for a 'strong man' to mould them
into a unanimous 'public opinion', which spelled death to all
opinions. In actual fact, the alternative was the plebiscite, the
only institution which corresponds closely to the unbridled
rule of public opinion; and just as public opinion is the death
"of opinions, the plebiscite puts an end to the citizen's right to
vote, to choose and to control their government.
In novelty and uniqueness, the institution of the Senate equals
the discovery of judicial control as represented in the institution
of Supreme Courts. Theoretically, it only remains to note that
in these two acquisitions of revolution - a lasting institution for
opinion and a lasting institution for judgement - the Founding
Fathers transcended their own conceptual framework, which, of
course, antedated the Revolution; they thus responded to the
The Revolutionary Tradition and Its Lost Treasure 229
enlarged horizon of experiences which the event itself had
opened up to them. For the three pivotal concepts on which the
century's pre-revolutionary thought had turned, and which
theoretically still dominated the revolutionary debates, were
power, passion, and reason : the power of government was sup-
posed to control the passion of social interests and to be con-
trolled, in its turn, by individual reason. In this scheme, opinion
and judgement obviously belong among the faculties of reason,
but the point of the matter is that these two, politically most im-
portant, rational faculties had been almost entirely neglected
by the tradition of political as well as philosophic thought.
Obviously it was no theoretical or philosophical interest that
made the men of the Revolution aware of the importance of these
faculties; they might have remembered dimly the severe blows
which first Parmenides and then Plato had dealt to the reputa-
tion of opinion, which, ever since, has been understood as the
opposite of truth, but they certainly did not try consciously to
reassert the rank and dignity of opinion in the hierarchy of
human rational abilities. The same is true With respect to judge-
ment, where we would have to turn to Kant's philosophy, rather
than to the men of the revolutions, if we wished to learn some-
thing about its essential character and amazing range in the
realm of human affairs. What enabled the Founding Fathers to
transcend the narrow and tradition-bound framework of their
general concepts was the urgent desire to assure stability to their
new creation, and to stabilize every factor of political life into a
'lasting institution'.
Nothing perhaps indicates more clearly that the revolutions
brought to light the new, secular, and worldly yearnings of the
modern age than this all-pervasive preoccupation with perma-
nence, with a 'perpetual state' which, as the colonists never tired
of repeating, should be secure for their 'posterity'. It would be
quite erroneous to mistake these claims for the later bourgeois
desire to provide for the future of one's children and grand-
children. What lay behind them was the deeply felt desire for an
Eternal City on earth, plus the conviction that 'a Common-
wealth rightly ordered, may for any internal causes be as im-
230 On Revolution
mortal or long-lived as the World'. 18 And this conviction was so
un-Christian, so basically alien to the religious spirit of the
whole period which separates the end of antiquity from the
modern age, that we must go back to Cicero to find anything
similar in emphasis and outlook. For the Paulinian notion that
'the wages of sin is death' echoed only for the individual what
Cicero had stated as a law ruling communities - Civitatibus
autem mors ipsa poena est, quae videtur a poena singulos vindi-
cate; debet enim constituta sic esse civitas ut aeterna sit. 10 ('Since
a political body must be so constituted that it might be eternal,
death is for communities the punishment [of their wrong-
doing], the same death which seems to nullify punishment
for individuals.') Politically, the outstanding characteristic of the
Christian era had been that this ancient view of world and man
- of mortal men moving in an everlasting or potentially ever-
lasting world — was reversed: men in possession of an ever-
lasting life moved in an ever-changing world whose ultimate
fate was death; and the outstanding characteristic of the mod-
ern age was that it turned once more to antiquity to find a
precedent for its own new preoccupation with the future of
the man-made world on earth. Obviously the sccularity of the
world and the worldliness of men in any given age can best be
measured by the extent to which preoccupation with the future
of the world takes precedence in men's minds over preoccupa-
tion with their own ultimate destiny in a hereafter. Hence, it
was a sign of the new age's sccularity when even very re-
ligious people desired not only a government which would leave
them free to work out their individual salvation but wished 'to
establish a government . . . more agreeable to the dignity of
human nature, . . . and to transmit such a government down
to their posterity with the means of securing and preserving it
forever'. 20 This, at any rate, was the deepest motive which John
Adams ascribed to the Puritans, and the extent to which he
might have been right is the extent to which even the Puritans
were no longer mere pilgrims on earth but 'Pilgrim Fathers* -
founders of colonies with their stakes and claims not in the
hereafter but in this world of mortal men.
What was true for modern, pre-revolutionary political thought
The Revolutionary Tradition and Its Lost Treasure 231
and for the founders of the colonies became even truer for the
revolutions and the Founding Fathers. It was the modern 'pre-
occupation with the perpetual state', so evident in Harring-
ton's writings, 21 which caused Adams to call 'divine' the new
political science which dealt with 'institutions that last for many
generations', and it was in Robespierre's 'Death is the begin-
ning of immortality' that the specifically modern emphasis on
politics, evidenced in the revolutions, found its briefest and
most grandiose definition. On a less exalted but certainly not
less significant level, we find preoccupation with permanence
and stability running like a red thread through the constitutional
debates, with Hamilton and Jefferson standing at two opposite
poles which still belong together - Hamilton holding that con-
stitutions 'must necessarily be permanent and [that] they can-
not calculate for the possible change of things', 22 and Jeffcr- ^
son, though no less concerned with the 'solid basis for a free,
durable and well-administered republic', firmly convinced that
'nothing is unchangeable but the inherent and unalienable rights
of man' because they are not the work of man but of his
Creator. 23 Thus, the whole discussion of the distribution and
balance of power, the central issue of the constitutional debates,
was still partly conducted in terms of the age-old notion of a
mixed form of government which, combining the monarchic,
the aristocratic, and the democratic elements in the same body
politic, would be capable of arresting the cycle of sempiternal
change, the rise and fall of empires, and establish an immortal
city.
Popular and learned opinion are agreed that the two absolutely
new institutional devices of the American republic, the Senate
and the Supreme Court, represent the most 'conservative' fac-
tors in the body politic, and no doubt they are right. The
question is only whether that which made for stability and
answered so well the early modern preoccupation with perma-
nence was enough to preserve the spirit which had become mani-
fest during the Revolution itself. Obviously this was not the case.
2 3 2
On Revolution
The failure of post-revolutionary thought to remember the revo-
lutionary spirit and to understand it conceptually was preceded
by the failure of the revolution to provide it with a lasting
institution. The revolution, unless it ended in the disaster of
terror, had come to an end with the establishment of a repub-
lic which, according to the men of the revolutions, was 'the
only form of government which is not eternally at open or
secret war with the rights of mankind'. 24 But in this republic,
as it presently turned out, there was no space reserved, no room
left for the exercise of precisely those qualities which had been
instrumental in building it. And this was clearly no mere over-
sight, as though those who knew so well how to provide for
power of the commonwealth and the liberties of its citizens,
for judgement and opinion, for interests and rights, had simply
forgotten what actually they cherished above everything else,
the potentialities of action and the proud privilege of being be-
ginners of something altogether new. Certainly, they did not
want to deny this privilege to their successors, but they also
could not very well wish to deny their own work, although
Jefferson, more concerned with this perplexity than anybody
else, almost went to this extremity. The perplexity was very
simple and, stated in logical terms, it seemed unsolvable: if
foundation was the aim and the end of revolution, then the
revolutionary spirit was not merely the spirit of beginning some-
thing new but of starting something permanent and enduring; a
lasting institution, embodying this spirit and encouraging it to
new achievements, would be self-defeating. From which it un-
fortunately seems to follow that nothing threatens the very
achievements of revolution more dangerously and more acutely
than the spirit which has brought them about. Should freedom
in its most exalted sense as freedom to act be the price 'to be
paid for foundation? This perplexity, namely, that the principle
of public freedom and public happiness without which no
revolution would ever have come to pass should remain the priv-
ilege of the generation of the founders, has not only produced
The Revolutionary Tradition and Its Lost Treasure 233
Robespierre's bewildered and desperate theories about the distinc-
tion between revolutionary and constitutional government which
we mentioned earlier, but has haunted all revolutionary think-
ing ever since.
On the American scene, no one has perceived this seemingly
inevitable flaw in the structure of the republic with greater
clarity and more passionate preoccupation than Jefferson. His
occasional, and sometimes violent, antagonism against the Con-
stitution and particularly against those who 'look at constitu-
tions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the
ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched', 25 was motivated
by a feeling of outrage about the injustice that only his genera-
tion should have it in their power 'to begin the world over
again'; for him, as for Paine, it was plain 'vanity and presump-
tion f to govern] beyond the grave'; it was, moreover, the 'most
ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies'. 26 When he said, 'We
have not yet so far perfected our constitutions as to venture to
make them unchangeable*, he added at once, clearly in fear
of such possible perfection, 'Can they be made unchangeable?
I think not'; for, in conclusion: 'Nothing is unchangeable but
the inherent and unalienable rights of man', among which he
counted the rights to rebellion and revolution. 27 When the news
of Shay's rebellion in Massachusetts reached him while he was
in Paris, he was not in the least alarmed, although he conceded
that its motives were 'founded in ignorance', but greeted it with
enthusiasm : 'God forbid we should ever be twenty years with-
out such a rebellion.' The very fact that the people had taken
it upon themselves to rise and act was enough for him, regard-
less of the rights or wrongs of their case. For 'the tree of liberty
must be refreshed, from time to time, with the blood of patriots
and tyrants. It is its natural manure.' 28
These last sentences, written two years before the outbreak
of the French Revolution and in this form without parallel in
Jefferson's later writings, 29 may give us a clue to the fallacy
which was bound to becloud the whole issue of action in the
thinking of the men of the revolutions. It was in the nature of
their experiences to see the phenomenon of action exclusively
in the image of tearing down and building up. Although they
234 O n Revolution
had known public freedom and public happiness, in dream or
in reality, prior to the revolution, the impact of revolutionary ex-
perience had overruled all notions of a freedom which was not
preceded by liberation, which did not derive its pathos from
the act of liberation. By the same token, to the extent that they
had a positive notion of freedom which would transcend the
idea of a successful liberation from tyrants and from necessity,
this notion was identified with the act of foundation, that is,
the framing of a constitution. Jefferson, therefore, when he
had learned his lesson from the catastrophes of the French
Revolution, where the violence of liberation had frustrated all
attempts at founding a secure space for freedom, shifted from
his earlier identification of action with rebellion and tearing
down to an identification with founding anew and building up.
He thus proposed to provide in the Constitution itself 'for its
revision at stated periods' which would roughly correspond to
the periods of the coming and going of generations. His justi-
fication, that each new generation has 'a right to choose for itself
the form of government it believes most promotive of its own
happiness', sounds too fantastic (especially if one considers the
then prevailing tables of mortality, according to which there
was 'a new majority' every nineteen years) to be taken seriously;
it is, moreover, rather unlikely that Jefferson, of all people,
should have granted the coming generations the right to estab-
lish non-republican forms of government. What was uppermost
in his mind was no real change of form of government, not even
a constitutional provision to hand on the Constitution 'with
periodical repairs, from generation to generation, to the end of
time'; it was rather the somewhat awkward attempt at securing
for each generation the 'right to depute representatives to a
convention 1 , to find ways and means for the opinions of the
whole people to be 'fairly, fully, and peaceably expressed, dis-
cussed, and decided by the common reason of the society*. 80 In
other words, what he wished to provide for was an exact repe-
tition of the whole process of action which had accompanied
the course of the Revolution, and while in his earlier writings he
saw this actipn primarily in terms of liberation, in terms of the
violence that had preceded and followed the Declaration of
The Revolutionary Tradition and Its Lost Treasure 235
Independence, he later was much more concerned with the con-
stitution-making and the establishment o£ a new government,
that is, with those activities which by themselves constituted
the space of freedom.
No doubt only great perplexity and real calamity can explain
that Jefferson — so conscious of his common sense and so
famous for his practical turn of mind - should have proposed
these schemes of recurring revolutions. Even in their least ex-
treme form, recommended as the remedy against 'the endless
circle of oppression, rebellion, reformation', they would either
have thrown the whole body politic out of gear periodically or,
more likely, have debased the act of foundation to a mere routine
performance, in which case even the memory of what he most
ardently wished to save - 'to the end of time, if anything
human can so long endure* - would have been lost. But the
reason Jefferson, throughout his long life, was carried away by
such impracticabilities was that he knew, however dimly, that
the Revolution, while it had given freedom to the people, had
failed to provide a space where this freedom could be exercised.
Only the representatives of the people, not the people them-
selves, had an opportunity to engage in those activities of 'ex-
pressing, discussing, and deciding' which in a positive sense are
the activities of freedom. And since the state and federal govern-
ments, the proudest results of revolution, through sheer weight
of their proper business were bound to overshadow in political
importance the townships and their meeting halls - until what
Emerson still considered to be 'the unit of the Republic' and 'the
school of the people' in political matters had withered away 31 -
one might even come to the conclusion that there was less op-
portunity for the exercise of public freedom and the enjoyment
of public happiness in the republic of the United States than
there had existed in the colonies of British America. Lewis
Mumford recently pointed out how the political importance of
the township was never grasped by the founders, and that the
failure to incorporate it into either the federal or the state con-
stitutions was 'one of the tragic oversights of post-revolutionary
political development'. Only Jefferson among the founders had
a clear premonition of this tragedy, for his greatest fear was
236 On Revolution
indeed lest 'the abstract political system of democracy lacked
concrete organs'. 32
The failure of the founders to incorporate the township and
the town-hall meeting into the Constitution, or rather their
failure to find ways and means to transform them under radic-
ally changed circumstances, was understandable enough. Their
chief attention was directed toward the most troublesome of
all their immediate problems, the question of representation,
and this to such an extent that they came to define republics, as
distinguished from democracies, in terms of representative gov-
ernment. Obviously direct democracy would not do, if only
because 'the room will not hold all' (as John Selden, more than
a hundred years earlier, had described the chief cause for the
birth of Parliament). These were indeed the terms in which
the principle of representation was still discussed at Phila-
delphia; representation was meant to be a mere substitute for
direct political action through the people themselves, and the
representatives they elected were supposed to act according to
instructions received from their electors, and not to transact busi-
ness in accordance with their own opinions as they might be
formed in the process. 33 However, the founders, as distinguished
from the elected representatives in colonial times, must have
been the first to know how far removed this theory was from
reality. 'With regard to the sentiments of the people*, James
Wilson, at the time of the convention, 'conceived it difficult to
know precisely what they are', and Madison knew very well that
'no member of the convention could say what the opinions of
his constituents were at this time; much less could he say what
they would think if possessed of the information and lights pos-
sessed by the members here'. 34 Hence, they could hear with
approval, though perhaps not entirely without misgivings, when
Benjamin Rush proposed the new and dangerous doctrine that
although 'all power is derived from the people, they possess it
only on the days of their elections. After this it is the property
of their rulers.' 35
These few quotations may show as in a nutshell that the
whole question of representation, one of the crucial and most
troublesome issues of modern politics ever since the revolutions,
The Revolutionary Tradition and Its Lost Treasure 237
actually implies no less than a decision on the very dignity of
the political realm itself. The traditional alternative between
representation as a mere substitute for direct action of the people
and representation as a popularly controlled rule of the people's
representatives over the people constitutes one of those dilemmas
which permit of no solution. If the elected representatives are so
bound by instructions that they gather together only to dis-
charge the will of their masters, they may still have a choice of
regarding themselves as either glorified messenger boys or hired
experts who, like lawyers, are specialists in representing the in-
terests of their clients. But in both instances the assumption
is, of course, that the electorate's business is more urgent and
more important than theirs; they are the paid agents of people
who, for whatever reasons, are not able, or do not wish, to
attend to public business. If, on the contrary, the representatives
are understood to become for a limited time the appointed
rulers of those who elected them - with rotation in office, there
is of course no representative government strictly speaking -
representation means that the voters surrender their own power,
albeit voluntarily, and that the old adage, 'AH power resides in
the people,' is true only for the day of election. In the first in-
stance, government has degenerated into mere administration,
the public realm has vanished; there is no space either for
seeing and being seen in action, John Adams' spectemur agendo^
or for discussion and decision, Jefferson's pride of being 'a par-
ticipator in government'; political matters are those that are
dictated by necessity to be decided by experts, but not open to
opinions and genuine choice; hence, there is no need for Madi-
son's 'medium of a chosen body of citizens' through which
opinions must pass and be purified into public views. In the
second instance, somewhat closer to realities, the age-olc} dis-
tinction between ruler and ruled which the Revolution had
set out to abolish through the establishment of a republic has
asserted itself again; once more, the people are not^aamitted to
the public realm, once more the business of government has
become the privilege of the few, who alone ma^exercise [their]
virtuous dispositions' (as Jefferson still called men's political
talents). The result is that the people ^hust either sink into
238 On Revolution
'lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty', or
'preserve the spirit of resistance 1 to whatever government they
have elected, since the only power they retain is *the reserve
power of revolution'. 88
For thes e jvils there was no remedy, since rotation in office,
so highly valued by the founders and so carefully elaborated by
them, could hardly do more than prevent the governing few
from constituting themselves as a separate group with vested
interests of their own. Rotation could never provide everybody,
or even a sizeable portion of the population, with the chance
to become temporarily *a participator in government*. Had
this evil been restricted to die people at large, it would have
been bad enough in view of the fact that the whole issue of
republican versus kingly or aristocratic government turned
about rights of equal admission to the public, political realm;
and yet, one suspects, the founders should have found it easy
enough to console themselves with the thought that the Revolu-
tion had opened the political realm at least to those whose in-
clination for 'virtuous disposition* was strong, whose passion
for distinction was ardent enough to embark upon the extra-
ordinary hazards of a political career. Jefferson, however, re-
fused to be consoled. He feared an 'elective despotism* as bad
as, or worse than, the tyranny they had risen against : 'If once
[our people] become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I,
and Congress and Assemblies, Judges and Governors, shall all
become wolves.* 37 And while it is true that historical develop-
ments in the United States have hardly borne out this fear, it
is also true that this is almost exclusively due to the founders'
'political science' in establishing a government in which the
"divisions of powers have constituted through checks and
balances their own control. What eventually saved the United
States from the dangers which Jefferson feared was the
machinery of government; but this machinery could not save the
people from lethargy and inattention to public business, since
the Constitution itself provided a public space only for the
representatives of the people, and not for the people them-
selves.
It may seem strange that only Jefferson among the men of
The Revolutionary Tradition and Its Lost Treasure 239
the American Revolution ever asked himself the obvious ques-
tion of how to preserve the revolutionary spirit once the revolu-
tion had come to an end, but the explanation for this lack of
awareness does not lie in that they themselves were no revolu-
tionaries. On the contrary, the trouble was that they took this
spirit for granted, because it was a spirit which had been formed
and nourished throughout the colonial period. Since, moreover,
the people remained in undisturbed possession of those institu-
tions which had been the breeding grounds of the revolution,
they could hardly become aware of the fateful failure of the
Constitution to incorporate and duly constitute, found anew, the
original sources of their power and public happiness. It was
precisely because of the enormous weight of the Constitution
and of the experiences in founding a new body politic that
the failure to incorporate the townships and the town-hall meet-
ings, the original springs of all political activity in the country,
amounted to a death sentence for them. Paradoxical as it may
sound, it was in fact under the impact of the Revolution that
the revolutionary spirit in America began to wither away,
and it was the Constitution itself, this greatest achievement of
the American people, which eventually cheated them of their
proudest possession.
In order to arrive at a more precise understanding of these
matters, and also to gauge correctly the extraordinary wisdom
of Jefferson's forgotten proposals, we must turn our attention
once more to the course of the French Revolution, where the
exact opposite took place. What for the American people had
been a pre-revolutionary experience and hence seemed not to
stand in need of formal recognition and foundation was in
France the unexpected and largely spontaneous outcome of the
Revolution itself. The famous forty-eight sections of the Parisian
Commune had their origin in the lack of duly constituted popu-
lar bodies to elect representatives and to send delegates to the
National Assembly. These sections, however, constituted them-
selves immediately as self-governing bodies, and they elected
from their midst no delegates to the National Assembly, but
formed the revolutionary municipal council, the Commune of
Paris, which was to play such a decisive role in the course of the
240 On Revolution
Revolution. Moreover, side by side with these municipal bodies,
and without being influenced by them, we find a great number
of spontaneously formed clubs and societies - the societes popu-
lates - whose origin cannot be traced at all to the task of
representation, of sending duly accredited delegates to the
National Assembly, but whose sole aims were, in the words of
Robespierre, 'to instruct, to enlighten their fellow citizens on
the true principles of the constitution, and to spread a light
without which the constitution will not be able to survive'; for
the survival of the constitution depended upon 'the public
spirit', which, in its turn, existed only in 'assemblies where the
citizens [could] occupy themselves in common with these
[public] matters, with the dearest interests of their fatherland'.
To Robespierre, speaking in September 1791 before the National
Assembly, to prevent the delegates from curtailing the political
power of clubs and societies, this public spirit was identical with
the revolutionary spirit. For the assumption of the Assembly
then was that the Revolution had come to its end, that the
societies which the Revolution had brought forward were no
longer needed, that 'it was time to break the instrument which
had served so well'. Not that Robespierre denied this assump-
tion, although he added he did not quite understand what the
Assembly wanted to affirm with it : for if they assumed, as he
himself did, that the end of revolution was 'the conquest and
the conservation of freedom', then, he insisted, the clubs and
societies were the only places in the country where this freedom
could actually show itself and be exercised by the citizens.
Hence, they were the true 'pillars of the constitution', not
merely because from their midst had come 'a very great number
of men who once will replace us', but also because they con-
stituted the very 'foundations of freedom'; whoever interfered
with their meeting was guilty of 'attacking freedom', and
among the crimes against the Revolution, 'the greatest was the
persecution of the societies'. 38 However, no sooner had Robes-
pierre risen to power and become the political head of the new
revolutionary government - which happened in the summer of
1793, a matter of weeks, not even of months, after he had
uttered some of the comments which I have just quoted - than
The Revolutionary Tradition and Its Lost Treasure 241
he reversed his position completely. Now it was he who fought
relentlessly against what he chose to name 'the so-called popu-
lar societies' and invoked against them 'the great popular Society
of the whole French people*, one and indivisible. The latter,
alas, in contrast to the small popular societies of artisans or
neighbours, could never be assembled in one place, since no
'room would hold all'; it could exist only in the form of repre-
sentation, in a Chamber of Deputies who assumedly held in
their hands the centralized, indivisible power of the French
nation. 39 The only exception he now was ready to make was
in favour of the Jacobins, and this not merely because their
club belonged to his own party but, even more importantly,
because it never had been a 'popular' club or society; it had
developed in 1789 out of the original meeting of the States-
General, and it had been a club fordeputies ever since.
That this conflict between government and the people, be-
tween those who were in power and those who had helped
them into it, between the representatives and the represented,
turned into the old conflict between rulers and ruled and
was essentially a struggle for power is true and obvious enough
to stand in no need of further demonstration. Robespierre
himself, before he became head of government, used to de-
nounce 'the conspiracy of the deputies of the people against
the people' and the 'independence of its representatives' from
those they represented, which he equated with oppression. 40
Such accusations, to be sure, came rather naturally to Rousseau's
disciples, who did not believe in representation to begin with -
'a people that is represented is not free, because the will cannot be
represented'; 41 but since Rousseau's teachings demanded the
union sacree t the elimination of all differences and distinctions,
including the difference between people and government, the
argument, theoretically, could as well be used the other way
round. And when Robespierre had reversed himself and had
turned against the societies, he could have appealed again to
Rousseau and could have said with Couthon that so long as the
societies existed 'there could be no unified opinion'. 42 Actually
Robespierre needed no great theories but only a realistic evalua-
tion of the course of the Revolution to come to the conclusion
242 On Revolution
that the Assembly hardly had any share in its more important
events and transactions, and that the revolutionary government
had been under the pressure of the Parisian sections and societies
to an extent which no government and no form of government
could withstand. One glance at the numerous petitions and
addresses of these years (which now have been published for
the first time) 43 is indeed enough to realize the predicament of
the revolutionary government. They were told to remember that
'only the poor had helped them', and that the poor now wished
'to begin to earn the fruits' of their labours; that it was 'always
the fault of the legislator' if the poor man's 'flesh showed the
colour of want and misery' and his soul 'walked without energy
and without virtue'; that it was time to demonstrate to the
people how the constitution 'would make them actually happy,
for it is not enough to tell them that their happiness approaches*.
In short, the people, organized outside the National Assembly in
its own political societies, informed its representatives that 'the
republic must assure each individual the means of subsistence',
that the primary task of the lawgivers was to legislate misery
out of existence.
There is, however, another side to this matter, and Robes-
pierre had not been wrong when he had greeted in the societies
the first manifestation of freedom and public spirit. Side by side
with these violent demands for a 'happiness' which is indeed a
prerequisite of freedom but which, unfortunately, no political
action can deliver, we find an altogether different spirit and
altogether different definitions of the societies' tasks. In the by-
laws of one of the Parisian sections we hear, for instance, how
the people organized themselves into a society - with president
and vice-president, four secretaries, eight censors, a treasurer,
and an archivist; with regular meetings, three in every ten days;
with rotation in office, once a month for the president; how
they defined its main task: 'The society will deal with every-
thing that concerns freedom, equality, unity, indivisibility of the
republic; [its members] will mutually enlighten themselves and
they will especially inform themselves on the respect due to the
laws and decrees which are promulgated'; how they intended to
keep order in their discussion: if a speaker digresses or gets
The Revolutionary Tradition and Its Lost Treasure 243
tiresome, the audience will stand up. From another section we
hear of a speech *on the development of the republican prin-
ciples which ought to animate the popular societies', delivered
by one of the citizens and printed by order of the members.
There were societies which adopted among their by-laws an
explicit prohibition 'ever to intrude upon or to try to influence
the General Assembly', and these, obviously, regarded it as their
main, if not their sole task to discuss all matters pertaining to
public affairs, to talk about them and to exchange opinions with-
out necessarily arriving at propositions, petitions, addresses, and
the like. It seems to be no accident that it is precisely from one
of these societies which had foresworn direct pressure upon the
Assembly that we hear the most eloquent and the most moving
praise of the institution as such : 'Citizens, the word "popular
society" has become a sublime word ... If the right to gather
together in a society could be abolished or even altered, freedom
would be but a vain name, equality would be a chimera, and
the republic would have lost its most solid stronghold . . . The
immortal Constitution which we have just accepted . . . grants
all Frenchmen the right to assemble in popular societies.'"
Saint-Just - writing at about the same time that Robespierre
still defended the rights of the societies against the Assembly -
had in mind these new promising organs of the republic, rather
than the pressure groups of the Sans-Culottes, when he stated :
'The districts of Paris constituted a democracy which would
have changed everything if, instead of becoming the prey of
factions, they would have conducted themselves according to
their own proper spirit. The district of the Cordeliers, which had
become the most independent one, was also the most persecuted
one' - since it was in opposition to and contradicted the projects
of those who happened to be in power. 45 But Saint-Just, no less
than Robespierre, once he had come into power, reversed him-
self and turned against the societies. In accordance with the
policy of the Jacobin government which successfully transformed
the sections into organs of government and into instruments of
terror, he asked in a letter to the popular society of Strasbourg
to give him 'their opinion on the patriotism and the republican
virtues of each of the members in the administration' of their
244 On Revolution
province. Left without answer, he proceeded to arrest the whole
administrative corps, whereupon he received a vigorous letter
of protest from the not yet defunct popular society. In his answer
he gave the stereotyped explanation that he had dealt with a
'conspiracy'; obviously he had no use any longer for popular
societies unless they spied for the government. 46 And the im-
mediate consequence of this turning about was, naturally
enough, that he now insisted : 'The freedom of the people is in
its private life; don't disturb it. Let the government be a force
only in order to protect this state of simplicity against force
itself.'* 7 These words indeed spell out the death sentence for all
organs of the people, and they express in rare unequivocality the
end of all hopes for the Revolution.
No doubt the Parisian Commune, its sections, and the popular
societies which had spread all over France during the Revolu-
tion constituted the mighty pressure groups of the poor, the
'diamond point* of urgent necessity 'that nothing could with-
stand' (Lord Acton); but they also contained the germs, the first
feeble beginnings, of a new type of political organization, of a
system which would permit the people to become Jefferson's
'participators in government'. Because of these two aspects, and
even though the former by far outweighed the latter, the con-
flict between the communal movement and the revolutionary
government is open to a twofold interpretation. It is, on one
hand, the conflict between the street and the body politic,
between those who 'acted for the elevation of no one but for the
abasement of all', 48 and those whom the waves of the revolution
had elevated so high in hope and aspiration that they could
exclaim with Saint-Just, 'The world has been empty since the
Romans, their memory is now our only prophecy of freedom,'
or could state with Robespierre, 'Death is the beginning of im-
mortality.' It is, on the other hand, the conflict between the
people and a mercilessly centralized power apparatus which,
under the pretence of representing the sovereignty of the nation,
actually deprived the people of their power and hence had to
persecute all those spontaneous feeble power organs which the
revolution had brought into existence.
In our context, it is primarily the latter aspect of the conflict
The Revolutionary Tradition and Its Lost Treasure 245
which must interest us, and it is therefore of no small importance
to note that the societies, in distinction from the clubs, and
especially from the Jacobin club, were in principle non-partisan,
and that they 'openly aimed at the establishment of a new
federalism' * 9 Robespierre and the Jacobin government^ because
they hated the very notion of a separation and division of
powers, had to emasculate the societies as well as the sections
of the Commune; under the condition of centralization of
power, the societies, each a small power structure of its own, and
the self-government of the Communes were clearly a danger for
the centralized state power.
Schematically speaking, the conflict between the Jacobin
government and the revolutionary societies was fought over
three different issues : the first issue was the fight of the republic
for its survival against the pressure of Sans-Culottism, that is,
the fight for public freedom against overwhelming odds of
private misery. The second issue was the fight of the Jacobin
faction for absolute power against the public spirit of the
societies; theoretically, this was the fight for a unified public
opinion, a 'general will', against the public spirit, the diversity
inherent in freedom of thought and speech; practically, it was
the power struggle of party and party interest against la chose
publique, the common weal. The third issue was the fight of the
government's monopoly of power against the federal principle
with its separation and division of power, that is, the fight of the
nation-state against the first beginnings of a true republic. The
clash on all three issues revealed a profound rift between the
men who had made the Revolution and had risen to the public
realm through it, and the people's own notions of what revolu-
tion should and could do. To be sure, foremost among the revo-
lutionary notions of the people themselves was happiness, that
bonheur of which Saint-Just rightly said that it was a new word
in Europe; and it must be admitted that, in this respect, the
people defeated very rapidly the older, pre-revolutionary motives
of their leaders, which they neither understood nor shared. We
have seen before how 'of all ideas and sentiments which prepared
the Revolution, the notion and the taste of public liberty, strictly
speaking, have been the first ones to disappear* (Tocqueville),
246 On Revolution
because they could not withstand the onslaught of wretchedness
which the Revolution brought into the open and, psychologically
speaking, died away under the impact of compassion with
human misery. However, while the Revolution taught the men
in prominence a lesson of happiness, it apparently taught the
people a first lesson in 'the notion and taste of public liberty'.
An enormous appetite for debate, for instruction, for mutual
enlightenment and exchange of opinion, even if all these were to
remain without immediate consequence on those in power,
developed in the sections and societies; and when, by fiat from
above, the people in the sections were made only to listen to
party speeches and to obey, they simply ceased to show up.
Finally and unexpectedly enough, the federal principle - practi-
cally unknown in Europe and, if known, nearly unanimously
rejected - came to the fore only in the spontaneous organizational
efforts of the people themselves, who discovered it without even
knowing its proper name. For if it is true that the Parisian
sections had originally been formed from above for purposes of
election for the Assembly, it is also true that these electors'
assemblies changed, of their own accord, into municipal bodies
which from their own midst constituted the great municipal
council of the Parisian Commune. It was this communal council
system, and not the electors' assemblies, which spread in the
form of revolutionary societies all over France.
Only a few words need to be said about the sad end of these
first organs of a republic which never came into being. They
were crushed by the central and centralized government, not
because they actually menaced it but because they were indeed,
by virtue of their existence, competitors for public power. No
one in France was likely to forget Mirabcau's words that 'ten
men acting together can make a hundred thousand tremble
apart'. The methods employed for their liquidation were so
simple and ingenious that hardly anything altogether new was
discovered in the many revolutions which were to follow the
French Revolution's great example. Interestingly enough, of all
points of conflict between the societies and the government, the
decisive one eventually proved to be the non-partisan character of
the societies. The parties, or rather the factions, which played
The Revolutionary Tradition and Its Lost Treasure 247
such a distastrous role in the French Revolution and then became
the roots of the whole continental party system, had their origin
in the Assembly, and the ambitions and fanaticism that
developed between them - even more than the pre-revolutionary
motives of the men of the revolution - were things which the
people at large neither understood nor shared. However, since
there existed no area of agreement between the parliamentary
factions, it became a matter of life and death for each of them
to dominate all others, and the only way to do this was to
organize the masses outside of parliament and to terrorize the
Assembly with this pressure from without its own ranks.
Hence, the way to dominate the Assembly was to infiltrate and
eventually to take over the popular societies, to declare that only
one parliamentary faction, the Jacobins, was truly revolutionary,
that only societies affiliated with them were untrustworthy, and
that all other popular societies were 'bastard societies'. We can
see here how, at the very beginning of the party system, the one-
party dictatorship developed out of a multi-party system. For
Robespierre's rule of terror was indeed nothing else but the
attempt to organize the whole French people into a single
gigantic party machinery - 'the great popular Society is the
French people' - through which the Jacobin club would spread
a net of party cells all over France; and their tasks were no
longer discussion and exchange of opinions, mutual instruction
and information on public business, but to spy upon one another
and to denounce members and non-members alike. 50
These things have become very familiar through the course
of the Russian Revolution, where the Bolshevik party emascu-
lated and perverted the revolutionary soviet system with exactly
the same methods. However, this sad familiarity should not pre-
vent us from recognizing that we are confronted even in the
midst of the French Revolution with the conflict between the
modern party system and the new revolutionary organs of self-
government. These two systems, so utterly unlike and even
contradictory to each other, were born at the same moment. The
spectacular success of the party system and the no less spectacular
failure of the council system were both due to the rise of the
nation-state, which elevated the one and crushed the other,
248 On Revolution
whereby the leftist and revolutionary parties have shown them-
selves to be no less hostile to the council system than the con-
servative or reactionary right. Wc have become so used to think-
ing of domestic politics in terms of party politics that we are
inclined to forget that the conflict between the two systems has
actually always been a conflict between parliament, the source
and seat of power of the party system, and the people, who have
surrendered their power to their representatives; for no matter
how successfully a party may ally itself with the masses in the
street and turn against the parliamentary system, once it has
decided to seize power and establish a one-party dictatorship,
it can never deny that its own origin lies in the factional strife
of parliament, and that it therefore remains a body whose
approach to the people is from without and from above.
When Robespierre established the tyrannical force of the
Jacobin faction against the non-violent power of the popular
societies, he also asserted and re-established the power of the
French Assembly with all its inner discord and factional strife.
The seat of power, whether he knew it or not, was again in the
Assembly and not, despite all revolutionary oratory, in the
people. Hence, he broke the most pronounced political ambition
of the people as it had appeared in the societies, the ambition
to equality, the claim to be able to sign all addresses and
petitions directed to delegates or to the Assembly as a whole
with the proud words *our Equal'. And while the Jacobin Terror
may have been conscious and overconscious of social fraternity,
it certainly abolished this equality - with the result that when
it was their turn to lose in the incessant factional strife in the
National Assembly, the people remained indifferent and the
sections of Paris did not come to their aid. Brotherhood, it
turned out, was no substitute for equality.
'As Cato concluded every speech with the words, Carthago
delenda est, so do I every opinion, with the injunction, "divide
the counties into wards".' 51 Thus Jefferson once summed up an
The Revolutionary Tradition and Its Lost Treasure 249
exposition of his most cherished political idea, which, alas,
turned out to be as incomprehensible to posterity as it had been
to his contemporaries. The reference to Cato was no idle slip of
a tongue used to Latin quotations; it was meant to emphasize
that Jefferson thought the absence of such a subdivision of the
country constituted a vital threat to the very existence of the
republic. Just as Rome, according to Cato, could not be safe so
long as Carthage existed, so the republic, according to Jefferson,
would not be secure in its very foundations without the ward
system. "Could I once see this I should consider it as the dawn of
the salvation of the republic, and say with old Simeon, "Nunc
dimittis Domine." ' a
Had Jefferson's plan of 'elementary republics* been carried
out, it would have exceeded by far the feeble germs of a new
form of government which we are^able to detect in the sections
of the Parisian Commune and the popular societies during the
French Revolution. However, if Jefferson's political imagina-
tion surpassed them in insight and in scope, his thoughts were
still travelling in the same direction. Both Jefferson's plan and
the French sociStis rivolutionaires anticipated with an utmost
weird precision those councils, Soviets and Rate, which were to
make their appearance in every genuine revolution throughout
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Each time they appeared,
they sprang up as the spontaneous organs of the people, not only
outside of all revolutionary parties but entirely unexpected by
them and their leaders. Like Jefferson's proposals, they were
utterly neglected by statesmen, historians, political theorists, and,
most importantly, by the revolutionary tradition itself. Even
those historians whose sympathies were clearly on the side of
revolution and who could not help writing the emergence of
popular councils into the record of their story regarded them as
nothing more than essentially temporary organs in the revolu-
tionary struggle for liberation; that is to say, they failed to
understand to what an extent the council system confronted
them with an entirely new form of government, with a new
public space for freedom which was constituted and organized
during the course of the revolution itself.
This statement must be qualified. There are two relevant ex-
250 On Revolution
ceptions to it, namely a few remarks by Marx at the occasion
of the revival of the Parisian Commune during the short-lived
revolution of 1871, and some reflections by Lenin based not
on the text by Marx, but on the actual course of the Revolution
of 1905 in Russia. But before we turn our attention to these
matters, we had better try to understand what Jefferson had in
mind when he said with utmost self-assurance, 'The wit of man
cannot devise a more solid basis for a free, durable, and well-
administered republic.' 53
It is perhaps noteworthy that we find no mention of the ward
system in any of Jefferson's formal works, and it may be even
more important that the few letters in which he wrote of it
with such emphatic insistence all date from the last period of
his life. It is true, at one time he hoped that Virginia, because
it was 'the first of the nations of the earth which assembled its
wise men peaceably together to form a fundamental constitu-
tion', would also be the first 'to adopt the subdivision of our
counties into wards', 5 * but the point of the matter is that the
whole idea seems to have occurred to him only at a time when
he himself was retired from public life and when he had with-
drawn from the affairs of state. He who had been so explicit in
his criticism of the Constitution because it had not incorporated
a Bill of Rights never touched on its failure to incorporate the
townships which so obviously were the original models of his
'elementary republics' where 'the voice of the whole people
would be fairly, fully, and peaceably expressed, discussed, and
decided by the common reason' of all citizens. 55 In terms of his
own role in the affairs of his country and the outcome of the
Revolution, the idea of the ward system clearly was an after-
thought; and, in terms of his own biographical development, the
repeated insistence on the 'peaceable' character of these wards
demonstrates that this system was to him the only possible non-
violent alternative to his earlier notions about the desirability of
recurring revolutions. At any event, we find the only detailed
description of what he had in mind in letters written in the year
1 816, and these letters repeat rather than supplement one
another.
Jefferson himself knew well enough that what he proposed as
The Revolutionary Tradition and Its Lost Treasure 251
the 'salvation of the republic' actually was the salvation of the
revolutionary spirit through the republic. His expositions of the
ward system always began with a reminder of how 'the vigour
given to our revolution in its commencement' was due to the
'little republics', how they had 'thrown the whole nation into
energetic action', and how, at a later occasion, he had felt 'the
foundations of the government shaken under [his] feet by the
New England townships', 'the energy of this organization' being
so great that 'there was not an individual in their States whose
body was not thrown with all its momentum into action'. Hence,
he expected the wards to permit the citizens to continue to do
what they had been able to do during the years of revolution,
namely, to act on their own and thus to participate in public
business as it was being transacted from day to day. By virtue of
the Constitution, the public business of the nation as a whole
had been transferred to Washington and was being transacted
by the federal government, of which Jefferson still thought as
4 the foreign branch' of the republic, whose domestic affairs were
taken care of by the state governments. 56 But state government
and even the administrative machinery of the county were by
far too large and unwieldy to permit immediate participation;
in all these institutions, it was the delegates of the people rather
than the people themselves who constituted the public realm,
whereas those who delegated them and who, theoretically, were
the source and the seat of power remained forever outside its
doors. This order of things should have sufficed if Jefferson had
actually believed (as he sometimes professed) that the happi-
ness of the people lay exclusively in their private welfare; for
because of the way the government of the union was constituted
- with its division and separation of powers, with controls,
checks, and balances, built into its very centre - it was highly
unlikely, though of course not impossible, that a tyranny could
arise out of it. What could happen, and what indeed has hap-
pened over and over again since, was that 'the representative
organs should become corrupt and perverted', 57 but such corrup-
tion was not likely to be due (and hardly ever has been due) to a
conspiracy of the representative organs against the people
whom they represented. Corruption in this kind of government
0^
252 On Revolution
is much more likely to spring from the midst of society, that is,
from the people themselves.
Corruption and perversion are more pernicious, and at the
same time more likely to occur, in an egalitarian republic than
in any other form of government. Schematically speaking, they
come to pass when private interests invade the public domain,
that is, they spring from below and not from above. It is
precisely because the republic excluded on principle the old
dichotomy of ruler and ruled that corruption of the body politic
did not leave the people untouched, as in other forms of govern-
ment, where only the rulers or the ruling classes needed to be
affected, and where therefore an 'innocent' people might indeed
first suffer and then, one day, effect a dreadful but necessary
insurrection. Corruption of the people themselves - as distin-
guished from corruption of their representatives or a ruling
class - is possible only under a government that has granted
them a share in public power and has taught them how to mani-
pulate it. Where the rift between ruler and ruled has been
closed, it is always possible that the dividing line between public
and private may become blurred and, eventually, obliterated.
Prior to the modern age and the rise of society, this danger,
inherent in republican government, used to arise from the public
realm, from the tendency of public power to expand and to
trespass upon private interests. The age-old remedy against this
danger was respect for private property, that is, the framing of a
system of laws through which the rights of privacy were publicly
guaranteed and the dividing line between public and private
legally protected. The Bill of Rights in the American Constitu-
tion forms the last, and the most exhaustive, legal bulwark for the
private realm against public power, and Jefferson's preoccupation
with the dangers of public power and this remedy against them
is sufficiently well known. However, under conditions, not of
prosperity as such, but of rapid and constant economic growth,
that is, of a constantly increasing expansion of the private realm
- and these were of course the conditions of the modern age -
the dangers of corruption and perversion were much more likely
to arise from private interests than from public power. And it
speaks for the high calibre of Jefferson's statesmanship that he
The Revolutionary Tradition and Its Lost Treasure 253
was able to perceive this danger despite his preoccupation with
the older and better-known threats of corruption in bodies
politic.
The only remedies against the misuse of public power by
private individuals lie in the public realm itself, in the light
which exhibits each deed enacted within its boundaries, in the
very visibility to which it exposes all those who enter it. Jeffer-
son, though the secret vote was still unknown at the time, had
at least a foreboding of how dangerous it might be to allow the
people a share in public power without providing them at the
same time with more public space than the ballot box and with
more opportunity to make their voices heard in public than
election day. What he perceived to be the mortal danger to the
republic was that the Constitution had given all power to the
citizens, without giving them the«opportunity of being republi-
cans and of acting as citizens. In other words, the danger was
that all power had been given to the people in their private
capacity and that there was no space established for them in
their capacity of being citizens. When, at the end of his life, he
summed up what to him clearly was the gist of private and
public morality, 'Love your neighbour as yourself, and your
country more than yourself,' 58 he knew that this maxim re-
mained an empty exhortation unless the 'country' could be made
as present to the 'love' of its citizens as the 'neighbour* was to
the love of his fellow men. For just as there could not be much
substance to neighbourly love if one's neighbour should make a
brief apparition once every two years, so there could not be much
substance to the admonition to love one's country more than
oneself unless the country was a living presence in the midst of
its citizens.
Hence, according to Jefferson, it was the very principle of
republican government to demand 'the subdivision of the coun-
ties into wards', namely, the creation of 'small republics' through
which 'every man in the State' could become 'an acting member
of the Common government, transacting in person a great
portion of its rights and duties, subordinate indeed, yet import-
ant, and entirely within his competence'. 29 It was 'these little
republics [that] would be the main strength of the great one'; 60
254 On Revolution
for inasmuch as the republican government of the Union was
based on the assumption that the seat of power was in the
people, the very condition for its proper functioning lay in a
scheme 'to divide [government] among the many, distributing,
to every one exactly the functions he [was] competent to\ With-
out this, the very principle of republican government could
never be actualized, and the government of the United States
would be republican in name only.
Thinking in terms of the safety of the republic, the question
was how to prevent 'the degeneracy of our government', and
Jefferson called every government degenerate in which all powers
were concentrated 'in the hands of the one, the few, the well-
born or the many'. Hence, the ward system was not meant to
strengthen the power of the many but the power of 'every one'
within the limits of his competence; and only by breaking up
'the many' into assemblies where every one could count and
be counted upon 'shall we be as republican as a large society
can be'. In terms of the safety of the citizens of the republic,
the question was how to make everybody feel 'that he is a
participator in the government of affairs, not merely at an
election one day in the year, but every day; when there shall
not be a man in the State who will not be a member of some one
of its councils, great or small, he will let the heart be torn out
of his body sooner than his power wrested from him by a
Caesar or a Bonaparte'. Finally, as to the question of how to
integrate these smallest organs, designed for everyone, into the
governmental structure of the Union, designed for all, his answer
was: 'The elementary republics of the wards, the county
republics, the State republics, and the republic of the Union
would form a gradation of authorities, standing each on the
basis of. law, holding every one its delegated share of powers,
and constituting truly a system of fundamental balances and
checks for the government,' On one point, however, Jefferson
remained curiously silent, and that is the question of what the
specific functions of the elementary republics should be. He
mentioned occasionally as 'one of the advantages of the ward
divisions I have proposed' that they would offer a better way to
collect the voice of the people than the mechanics of representa-
The Revolutionary Tradition and Its Lost Treasure 255
tive government; but in the main, he was convinced that if one
would 'begin them only for a single purpose' they would 'soon
show for what others they [were] the best instruments'. 61
This vagueness of purpose, far from being due to a lack of
clarity, indicates perhaps more tellingly than any other single
aspect of Jefferson's proposal that the afterthought in which he
clarified and gave substance to his most cherished recollections
from the Revolution in fact concerned a new form of govern-
ment rather than a mere reform of it or a mere supplement to
the existing institutions. If the ultimate end of revolution was
freedom and the constitution of a public space where freedom
could appear, the constitutio libertatis, then the elementary
republics of the wards, the only tangible place where everyone
could be free, actually were the end of the great republic whose
chief purpose in domestic affairs should have been to provide the
people with such places of freedom and to protect them. The
basic assumption of the ward system, whether Jefferson knew
it or not, was that no one could be called happy without his
share in public happiness, that no one could be called free with-
out his experience in public freedom, and that no one could be
called either happy or free without participating, and having
a share, in public power.
It is a strange and sad story that remains to be told and remem-
bered. It is not the story of revolution on whose thread the
historian might string the history of the nineteenth century in
Europe, 62 whose origins could be traced back into the Middle
Ages, whose progress had been irresistible 'for centuries in spite
of every obstacle', according to Tocqueville, and which Marx,
generalizing the experiences of several generations, called 'the
locomotive of all history'. 63 I do not doubt that revolution was
the hidden leitmotif of the century preceding ours, although I
doubt both Tocqueville's and Marx's generalizations, especially
their conviction that revolution had been the result of an ir-
resistible force rather than the outcome of specific deeds and
256 On Revqlution
events. What seems to be beyond doubt and belief is that no
historian will ever be able to tell the tale of our century without
stringing it 'on the thread of revolutions'; but this tale, since
its end still lies hidden in the mists of the future, is not yet fit to
be told.
The same, to an extent, is true for the particular aspect of
revolution with which we now must concern ourselves. This
aspect is the regular emergence, during the course of revolution,
of a new form of government that resembled in an amazing
fashion Jefferson's ward system and seemed to repeat, under no
matter what circumstances, the revolutionary societies and
municipal councils which had spread all over France after 1789.
Among the reasons that recommend this aspect to our attention
must first be mentioned that we deal here with the phenomenon
that impressed most the two greatest revolutionists of the whole
period, Marx and Lenin, when they were witnessing its spon-
taneous rise, the former during the Parisian Commune of 1871
and the latter in 1905, during the first Russian Revolution. What
struck them was not only the fact that they themselves were
entirely unprepared for these events, but also that they knew
they were confronted with a repetition unaccounted for by any
conscious imitation or even mere remembrance of the past. To
be sure, they had hardly any knowledge of Jefferson's ward
system, but they knew well enough the revolutionary role the
sections of the first Parisian Commune had played in the French
Revolution, except that they had never thought of them as pos-
sible germs for a new form of government but had regarded
them as mere instruments to be dispensed with once the revolu-
tion came to an end. Now, however, they were confronted with
popular organs - the communes, the councils, the Rate, the
Soviets - which clearly intended to survive the revolution. This
contradicted all their theories and, even more importantly, was
in flagrant conflict with those assumptions about the nature of
power and violence which they shared, albeit unconsciously,
with the rulers of the doomed or defunct regimes. Firmly
anchored in the tradition of the nation-state, they conceived of
revolution as a means to seize power, and they identified power
with the monopoly of the means of violence. What actually
The Revolutionary Tradition and Its Lost Treasure 257
happened, however, was a swift disintegration of the old power,
the sudden loss of control over the means of violence, and, at the
same time, the amazing formation of a new power structure
which owed its existence to nothing but the organizational im-
pulses of the people themselves. In other words, when the
moment of revolution had come, it turned out that there was no
power left to seize, so that the revolutionists found themselves
before the rather uncomfortable alternative of either putting
their own pre-revolutionary 'power', that is, the organization of
the part apparatus, into the vacated power centre of the defunct
government, or simply joining the new revolutionary power
centres which had sprung up without their help.
For a brief moment, while he was the mere witness of some-
thing he never had expected, Marx understood that the Kom-
munalverjassung of the Parisian Commune in 1871, because it
was supposed to become 'the political form of even the smallest
village', might well be 'the political form, finally discovered, for
the economic liberation of labour'. But he soon became aware
to what an extent this political form contradicted all notions of a
'dictatorship of the proletariat' by means of a socialist or com-
munist party whose monopoly of power and violence was
modelled upon the highly centralized governments of nation-
states, and he concluded that the communal councils were, after
all, only temporary organs of the revolution. 61 It is almost the
same sequence of attitudes which, one generation later, we find
in Lenin, who twice in his life, in 1905 and in 1917, came under
the direct impact of the events themselves, that is to say, was
temporarily liberated from the pernicious influence of a revolu-
tionary ideology. Thus he could extol with great sincerity in 1905
'the revolutionary creativity of the people', who spontaneously
had begun to establish an entirely new power structure in the
midst of revolution, 65 just as, twelve years later, he could let loose
and win the October Revolution with the slogan : 'All power to
the Soviets' But during the years that separated the two revolu-
tions he had done nothing to reorient his thought and to in-
corporate the new organs into any of the many party pro-
grammes, with the result that the same spontaneous develop-
ment in 1917 found him and his party no less unprepared than
258 On Revolution
they had been in 1905. When, finally, during the Kronstadt
rebellion, the Soviets revolted against the party dictatorship and
the incompatibility of the new councils with the party system
became manifest, he decided almost at once to crush the councils,
since they threatened the power monopoly of the Bolshevik
party. The name 'Soviet Union' for post-revolutionary Russia has
been a lie ever since, but this lie has also contained, ever since,
the grudging admission of the overwhelming popularity, not of
the Bolshevik party, but of the soviet system which the party
reduced to impotence. 66 Put before the alternative of either
adjusting their thoughts and deeds to the new and the unex-
pected or going to the extreme of tyranny and suppression, they
hardly hesitated in their decision for the latter; with the except-
tions of a few moments without consequence, their behaviour
from beginning to end was dictated by considerations of party
strife, which played no role in the councils but which indeed had
been of paramount importance in the pre-revolutionary parlia-
ments. When the Communists decided, in 1919, 'to espouse only
the cause of a soviet republic in which the Soviets possess a
Communist majority' , 67 they actually behaved like ordinary
party politicians. So great is the fear of men, even of the most
radical and least conventional among them, of things never seen,
of thoughts never thought, of institutions never tried before.
The failure of the revolutionary tradition to give any serious
thought to the only new form of government born out of
revolution can partly be explained by Marx's obsession with the
social question and his unwillingness to pay serious attention to
questions of state and government. But this explanation is weak
and, to an extent, even question-begging, because it takes for
granted the overtowering influence of Marx on the revolutionary
movement and tradition, an influence which itself still stands
in need of explanation. It was, after all, not only the Marxists
among the revolutionists who proved to be utterly unprepared
for the actualities of revolutionary events. And this unprcpared-
ness is all the more noteworthy as it surely cannot be blamed
upon lack of thought or interest in revolution. It is well known
that the French Revolution had given rise to an entirely new
figure on the political scene, the professional revolutionist, and
The Revolutionary Tradition and Its Lost Treasure 259
his life was spent not in revolutionary agitation, for which there
existed but few opportunities, but in study and thought, in
theory and debate, whose sole object was revolution. In fact, no
history of the European leisure classes would be complete with-
out a history of the professional revolutionists of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, who, together with the modern artists
and writers, have become the true heirs of the hommes de lettres
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The artists and
writers joined the revolutionists because 'the very word bour-
geois came to have a hated significance no less aesthetic than
political* ; G8 together they established Bohemia, that island of
blessed leisure in the midst of the busy and overbusy century
of the Industrial Revolution. Even among the members of this
new leisure class, the professional revolutionist enjoyed special
privileges since his way of life demanded no specific work what-
soever. If there was a thing he had no reason to complain of, it
was lack of time to think, whereby it makes little difference if
such an essentially theoretical way of life was spent in the
famous libraries of London and Paris, or in the coffee houses of
Vienna and Zurich, or in the relatively comfortable and undis-
turbed jails of the various amciens regimes.
The role the professional revolutionists played in all mod-
ern revolutions is great and significant enough, but it did not
consist in the preparation of revolutions. They watched and
analysed the progressing disintegration in state and society; they
hardly did, or were in a position to do, much to advance and
direct it. Even the wave of strikes that spread over Russia in
1905 and led into the first revolution was entirely spontaneous,
unsupported by any political or trade-union organizations,
which, on the contrary, sprang up only in the course of the
revolution. 69 The outbreak of most revolutions has surprised
the revolutionist groups and parties no less than all others, and
there exists hardly a revolution whose outbreak could be blamed
upon their activities. It usually was the other way round : revo-
lution broke out and liberated, as it were, the professional revo-
lutionists from wherever they happened to be - from jail, or
from the coffee house, or from the library. Not even Lenin's
party of professional revolutionists would ever have been able
260 On Revolution
to 'make' a revolution; the best they could do was to be around,
or to hurry home, at the right moment, that is, at the moment of
collapse. Tocqueville's observation in 1848, that the monarchy
fell 'before rather than beneath the blows of the victors, who
were as astonished at their triumph as were the vanquished
at their defeat', has been verified over and over again.
The part of the professional revolutionists usually consists
not in making a revolution but in rising to power after it has
broken out, and their great advantage in this power struggle
lies less in their theories and mental or organizational preparation
than in the simple fact that their names are the only ones which
are publicly known. 70 It certainly is not conspiracy that
causes revolution, and secret societies - though they may suc-
ceed in committing a few spectacular crimes, usually with the
help of the secret police 71 - are as a rule much too secret to be.
able to make their voices heard in public. The loss of authority
in the powers-that-be, which indeed precedes all revolutions, is
actually a secret to no one, since its manifestations are open and
tangible, though not necessarily spectacular; but its symptoms,
general dissatisfaction, widespread malaise, and contempt for
those in power, are difficult to pin down since their meaning is
never unequivocal. 72 Nevertheless, contempt, hardly among the
motives of the typical professional revolutionist, is certainly one
of the most potent springs of revolution; there has hardly been
a revolution for which Lamartine's remark about 1848, 'the
revolution of contempt', would be altogether inappropriate.
However, while the part played by the professional revolu-
tionist in the outbreak of revolution has usually been insignifi-
cant to the point of non-existence, his influence upon the actual
course a revolution will take has proved to be very great. And
since he spent his apprenticeship in the school of past revolu-
tions, he will invariably exert this influence not in favour of
the new and the unexpected, but in favour of some action which
remains in accordance with the past. Since it is his very task to
assure the continuity of revolution, he will be inclined to argue
in terms of historical precedents, and the conscious and per-
nicious imitation of past events, which we mentioned earlier, lies,
partially at least, in the very nature of his profession. Long be-
The Revolutionary Tradition and Its Lost Treasure 261
fore the professional revolutionists had found in Marxism their
official guide to the interpretation and annotation of all history,
past, present and future, Tocqueville, in 1848, could already
note : 'The imitation [i.e. of 1789 by the revolutionary Assembly]
was so manifest that it concealed the terrible originality of the
facts; I continually had the impression they were engaged in
play-acting the French Revolution far more than continuing it.' 7S
And again, during the Parisian Commune of 1871, on which
Marx and Marxists had no influence whatsoever, at least one
of the new magazines, Le Pere Duchene, adopted the old revolu-
tionary calendar's names for the months of the year. It is strange
indeed that in this atmosphere, where every incident of past
revolutions was mulled over as though it were part of sacred
history, the only entirely new and entirely spontaneous institu-
tion in revolutionary history should have been neglected to the
point of oblivion.
Armed with the wisdom of hindsight, one is tempted to quali-
fy this statement. There are certain paragraphs in the writings
of the Utopian Socialists, especially in Proudhon and Bakunin,
into which it has been relatively easy to read an awareness of
the council system. Yet the truth is that these essentially anarch-
ist political thinkers were singularly unequipped to deal with
a phenomenon which demonstrated so clearly how a revolution
did not end with the abolition of state and government but,
on the contrary, aimed at the foundation of a new state and the
establishment of a new form of government. More recently, his-
torians have pointed to the rather obvious similarities between
the councils and the medieval townships, the Swiss cantons, the
English seventeenth-century 'agitators' - or rather 'adjustators',
as they were originally called - and the General Council of
Cromwell's army, but the point of the matter is that none of
them, with the possible exception of the medieval town, 7 * had
ever the slightest influence on the minds of the people who in
the course of a revolution spontaneously organized themselves in
councils.
Hence, no tradition, either revolutionary or pre-revolutionary,
can be called to account for the regular emergence and re-
emergence of the council system ever since the French Revo-
262 On Revolution
lution. If we leave aside the February Revolution of 1848 in
Paris, where a commission pour les travailleurs, set up by the
government itself, was almost exclusively concerned with ques-
tions of social legislation, the main dates of appearance of these
organs of action and germs of a new state are the following:
the year 1870, when the French capital under siege by the Prus-
sian army 'spontaneously reorganized itself into a miniature
federal body', which then formed the nucleus for the Parisian
Commune government in the spring of 1871; 75 the year 1905,
when the wave of spontaneous strikes in Russia suddenly de-
veloped a political leadership of its own, outside all revolution-
ary parties and groups, and the workers in the factories organ-
ized themselves into councils, Soviets, for the purpose of repre-
sentative self-government; the February Revolution of 1917 in
Russia, when 'despite different political tendencies among the
Russian workers, the organization itself, that is the soviet, was
not even subject to discussion'; 76 the years 1918 and 1919 in
Germany, when, after the defeat of the army, soldiers and wor-
kers in open rebellion constituted themselves into Arbeiter- und
Soldatenrate, demanding, in Berlin, that this Ratesystem be-
come the foundation stone of the new German constitution,
and establishing, together with the Bohemians of the coffee
houses, in Munich in the spring of 1919, the short-lived Bavarian
Rdterepubli\'^ the last date, finally, is the autumn of 1956, when
the Hungarian Revolution from its very beginning produced the
council system anew in Budapest, from which it spread all over
the country 'with incredible rapidity'. 78
The mere enumeration of these dates suggests a continuity
that in fact never existed. It is precisely the absence of con-
tinuity, tradition, and organized influence that makes the same-
ness of the phenomenon so very striking. Outstanding among
the councils' common characteristics is, of course, the spontaneity
of their coming into being, because it clearly and flagrantly con-
tradicts the theoretical 'twentieth-century model of revolution -
planned, prepared, and executed almost to cold scientific exact-
ness by the professional revolutionaries'. 79 It is true that wher-
ever the revolution was not defeated and not followed by some
sort of restoration the one-party dictatorship, that is, the model
The Revolutionary Tradition and Its Lost Treasure 263
of the professional revolutionary, eventually prevailed, but it
prevailed only after a violent struggle with the organs and insti-
tutions of the revolution itself. The councils, moreover, were
always organs of order as much as organs of action, and it was
indeed their aspiration to lay down the new order that brought
them into conflict with the groups of professional revolution-
aries, who wished to degrade them to mere executive organs of
revolutionary activity. It is true enough that the members of
the councils were not content to discuss and 'enlighten them-
selves' about measures that were taken by parties or assemblies;
they consciously and explicitly desired the direct participation of
every citizen in the public affairs of the country, 80 and as long as
they lasted, there is no doubt that 'every individual found his
own sphere of action and could behold, as it were, with his own
eyes his own contribution to the eyents of the day'. 81 Witnesses
of their functioning were often agreed on the extent to which
the revolution had given birth to a 'direct regeneration of
democracy', whereby the implication was that all such regenera-
tions, alas, were foredoomed since, obviously, a direct handling
of public business through the people was impossible under
modern conditions. They looked upon the councils as though
they were a romantic dream, some sort of fantastic Utopia come
true for a fleeting moment to show, as it were, the hopelessly
romantic yearnings of the people, who apparently did not yet
know the true facts of life. These realists took their own bear-
ings from the party system, assuming as a matter of course that
there existed no other alternative for representative government
and forgetting conveniently that the downfall of the old regime
had been due, among other things, precisely to this system.
For the remarkable thing about the councils was of course
not only that they crossed all party lines, that members of the
various parties sat in them together, but that such party mem-
bership played no role whatsoever. They were in fact the only
political organs for people who belonged to no party. Hence,
they invariably came into conflict with all assemblies, with the
old parliaments as well as with the new 'constituent assemblies',
for the simple reason that the latter, even in their most ex-
treme wings, were still the children of the party system. At this
264 On Revolution
stage of events, that is, in the midst of revolution, it was the
party programmes more than anything else that separated the
councils from the parties; for these programmes, no matter how
revolutionary, were all 'ready-made formulas' which demanded
not action but execution - 'to be carried out energetically in
practice', as Rosa Luxemburg pointed out with such amazing
clearsightedness about the issues at stake. 82 Today we know
how quickly the theoretical formula disappeared in practical
execution, but if the formula had survived its execution, and
even if it had proved to be the panacea for all evil s, social and
political, the councils were bound to rebel against any such
policy since the very cleavage between the party experts who
'knew' and the mass of the people who were supposed to
apply this knowledge left out of account the average citizen's
capacity to act and to form his own opinion. The councils,
in other words, were bound to become superfluous if the spirit
of the revolutionary party prevailed. Wherever knowing and
doing have parted company, the space of freedom is lost.
The councils, obviously, were spaces of freedom. As such,
they invariably refused to regard themselves as temporary or-
gans of revolution and, on the contrary, made all attempts at
establishing themselves as permanent organs of government.
Far from wishing to make the revolution permanent, their ex-
plicitly expressed goal was 'to lay the foundations of a republic
acclaimed in all its consequences, the only government which
will close forever the era of invasions and civil wars'; no para-
dise on earth, no classless society, no dream of socialist or com-
munist fraternity, but the establishment of 'the true Republic'
was the 'reward' hoped for as the end of the struggle. 83 And
what had been true in Paris in 1871 remained true for Russia
in 1905, when the 'not merely destructive but constructive' inten-
tions of the first Soviets were so manifest that contemporary wit-
nesses 'could sense the emergence and the formation of a force
which one day might be able to effect the transformation of the
State'. 8 *
It was nothing more or less than this hope for a transforma-
tion of the state, for a new form of government that would per-
mit every member of the modern egalitarian society to become
The Revolutionary Tradition and Its Lost Treasure 265
a 'participator* in public affairs, that was buried in the disasters
of twentieth-century revolutions. Their causes were manifold
and, of course, varied from country to country, but the forces
of what is commonly called reaction and counter-revolution are
not prominent among them. Recalling the record of revolution in
our century, it is the weakness rather than the strength of these
forces which is impressive, the frequency of their defeat, the
ease of revolution, and - last, not least - the extraordinary insta-
bility and lack of authority of most European governments res-
tored after the downfall of Hitler's Europe. At any rate, the role
played by the professional revolutionaries and the revolutionary
parties in these disasters was important enough, and in our
context it is the decisive one. Without Lenin's slogan, 'All power
to the soviets\ there would never have been an October Revolu-
tion in Russia, but whether or not Lenin was sincere in pro-
claiming the Soviet Republic, the fact of the matter was even
then that his slogan was in conspicuous contradiction to the
openly proclaimed revolutionary goals of the Bolshevik party
to 'seize power', that is, to replace the state machinery with the
party apparatus. Had Lenin really wanted to give all power to
the Soviets, he would have condemned the Bolshevik party to
the same impotence which now is the outstanding characteristic
of the Soviet parliament, whose party and non-party deputies
are nominated by the party and, in the absence of any rival
list, are not even chosen, but only acclaimed by the voters. But
while the conflict between party and councils was greatly
sharpened because of a conflicting claim to be the only 'true*
representative of the Revolution and the people, the issue at
stake is of a much more far-reaching significance.
What the councils challenged was the party system as such,
in all its forms, and this conflict was emphasized whenever the
councils, born of revolution, turned against the party or parties
whose sole aim had always been the revolution. Seen from the
vanguard point of a true Soviet Republic, the Bolshevik party
was merely more dangerous but no less reactionary than all the
other parties of the defunct regime. As far as the form of govern-
ment is concerned - and the councils everywhere, in contradis-
tinction to the revolutionary parties, were infinitely more inter-
266 On Revolution
ested in the political than in the social aspect of revolution 85 - the
one-party dictatorship is only the last stage in the development
of the nation-state in general and of the multi-party system in
particular. This may sound like a truism in the midst of the
twentieth century when the multi-party democracies in Europe
have declined to the point where in every French or Italian elec-
tion 'the very foundations of the state and the nature of the
regime' are at stake. 86 It is therefore enlightening to see that in
principle the same conflict existed even in 1871, during the
Parisian Commune, when Odysse Barrot formulated with rare
precision the chief difference in terms of French history between
the new form of government, aimed at by the Commune, and
the old regime which soon was to be restored in a different, non-
monarchical disguise : 'En tant que revolution sociale, 1871 pro-
cede directement de 1793, qu'il continue et qu'il doit achever.
... En tant que revolution politique, au contraire, 1871 est re-
action contre 1793 et un rct o u J" a 1789 • • • H a efface du pro-
gramme les mots "une et indivisible" et rejette l'idee autoritaire
qui est une idee toute monarchique . . . pour se rallier a l'idee
federative, qui est par excellence l'idee liberale et republicaine'* 1
(my italics).
These words are surprising because they were written at a
time when there existed hardly any evidence - at any rate not for
people unacquainted with the course of the American Revolu-
tion - about the intimate connection between the spirit of
revolution and the principle of federation. In order to prove
what Odysse Barrot felt to be true, we must turn to the Febru-
ary Revolution of 1917 in Russia and to the Hungarian Revolu-
tion of 1956, both of which lasted just long enough to show in
bare outlines what a government would look like and how a
republic was likely to function if they were founded upon the
principles of the council system. In both instances councils or
Soviets had sprung up everywhere, completely independent of
one another, workers*, soldiers', and peasants' councils in the
case of Russia, the most disparate kinds of councils in the case
of Hungary : neighbourhood councils that emerged in all resi-
dential districts, so-called revolutionary councils that grew out
of fighting together in the streets, councils of writers and artists,
The Revolutionary Tradition and Its Lost Treasure 267
born in the coffee houses of Budapest, students' and youths'
councils at the universities, workers' councils in the factories,
councils in the army, among the civil servants, and so on. The
formation of a council in each of these disparate groups turned
a more or less accidental proximity into a political institution.
The most striking aspect of these spontaneous developments is
that in both instances it took these independent and highly dis-
parate organs no more than a few weeks, in the case of Russia,
or a few days, in the case of Hungary, to begin a process of
co-ordination and integration through the formation of higher
councils of a regional or provincial character, from which finally
the delegates to an assembly representing the whole country
could be chosen. 88 As in the case of the early covenants, 'cosocia-
tions', and confederations in the colonial history of North
America, we see here how the federal principle, the principle of
league and alliance among separate units, arises out of the
elementary conditions of action itself, uninfluenced by any
theoretical speculations about the possibilities of republican
government in large territories and not even threatened into
coherence by a common enemy. The common object was the
foundation of a new body politic, a new type of republican
government which would rest on 'elementary republics' in such
a way that its own central power did not deprive the constituent
bodies of their original power to constitute. The councils, in
other words, jealous of their capacity to act and to form opinion,
were bound to discover the divisibility of power as well as its
most important consequence, the necessary separation of powers
in government.
It has frequently been noted that the United States and Great
Britain are among the few countries where the party system
has worked sufficiently well to assure stability and authority. It
so happens that the two-party system coincides with a constitu-
tion that rests on the division of power among the various
branches of government, and the chief reason for its stability is,
of course, the recognition of the opposition as an institution of
government. Such recognition, however, is possible only under
the assumption that the nation is not une et indivisible, and that
a separation of powers, far from causing impotence, generates
268 On Revolution
and stabilizes power. It is ultimately the same principle which
enabled Great Britain to organize her far-flung possessions and
colonies into a Commonwealth, that made it possible for the
British colonies in North America to unite into a federal system
of government. What distinguishes the two-party systems of
these countries, despite all their differences, so decisively from
the multi-party systems of the European nation-states is by no
means a technicality, but a radically different concept of power
which permeates the whole body politic. 89 If we were to classify
contemporary regimes according to the power principle upon
which they rest, the distinction between the one-party dictator-
ships and the multi-party systems would be revealed as much
less decisive than the distinction that separates them both from
the two-party systems. After the nation during the nineteenth
century 'had stepped into the shoes of the absolute prince', it
became, in the course of the twentieth century, the turn of the
party to step into the shoes of the nation. It is, therefore, almost
a matter of course that the outstanding characteristics of the
modern party - its autocratic and oligarchic structure, its lack
of internal democracy and freedom, its tendency to 'become to-
talitarian', its claim to infallibility - are conspicuous by their
absence in the United States and, to a lesser degree, in Great
Britain. 90
However, while it may be true that, as a device of government,
only the two-party system has proved its viability and, at the
same time, its capacity to guarantee constitutional liberties, it is
no less true that the best it has achieved is a certain control of
the rulers by those who are ruled, but that it has by no means
enabled the citizen to become a 'participator' in public affairs.
The most the citizen can hope for is to be 'represented 1 , where-
by it is obvious that the only thing which can be represented
and delegated is interest, or the welfare of the constituents, but
neither their actions nor their opinions. In this system the
opinions of the people are indeed unascertainable for the simple
reason that they are non-existent. Opinions are formed in a
process of open discussion and public debate, and where no
opportunity for the forming of opinions exists, there may be
moods - moods of the masses and moods of individuals, the
The Revolutionary Tradition and Its Lost Treasure 260
latter no less fickle and unreliable than the former - but no
opinion. Hence, the best the representative can do is to act as
his constituents would act if they themselves had any oppor-
tunity to do so. The same is not true for questions of interest and
welfare, which can be ascertained objectively, and where the
need for action and decision arises out of the various conflicts
among interest groups. Through pressure groups, lobbies, and
other devices, the voters can indeed influence the actions of their
representatives with respect to interest, that is, they can force
their representatives to execute their wishes at the expense of
the wishes and interests of other groups of voters. In all these
instances the voter acts out of concern with his private life and
well-being, and the residue of power he still holds in his hands
resembles rather the reckless coercion with which a blackmailer
forces his victim into obedience than the power that arises out
of joint action and joint deliberation.
Be that as it may, neither the people in general nor the
political scientists in particular have left much doubt that the
parties, because of their monopoly of nomination, cannot be
regarded as popular organs, but that they are, on the contrary,
the very efficient instruments through which the power of the
people is curtailed and controlled. That representative govern-
ment has in fact become oligarchic government is true enough,
though not in the classical sense of rule by the few in the inter-
est of the few; what we today call democracy is a form of govern-
ment where the few rule, at least supposedly, in the interest of
the many. This government is democratic in that popular wel-
fare and private happiness are its chief goals; but it can be
called oligarchic in the sense that public happiness and public
freedom have again become the privilege of the few.
The defenders of this system, which actually is the system of
the welfare state, if they are liberal and of democratic convic-
tions must deny the very existence of public happiness and pub-
lic freedom; they must insist that politics is a burden and that
its end is itself not political. They will agree with Saint-Just : 'La
liber te du peuple est dans sa vie privee; ne la troublez point.
Que le gouvernement . . . ne soit une force que pour proteger
cet etat de simplicite contre la force meme.' If, on the other
270 On Revolution
hand, taught by the profound turmoil of this century, they have
lost their liberal illusion about some innate goodness_oi the
people, they are likely to conclude that 'no people has ever been
known to govern itself,' that 'the will of the people is pro-
foundly anarchic: it wants to do as it pleases', that its attitude
toward all government is 'hostility' because 'government and
constraint are inseparable', and constraint by definition 'is ex-
ternal to the constrained'. 91
Such statements, difficult to prove, are even more difficult to
refute, but the assumptions upon which they rest are not diffi-
cult to point out. Theoretically, the most relevant and the most
pernicious among them is the equation of 'people' and masses,
which sounds only too plausible to everyone who lives in a
mass society and is constantly exposed to its numerous irrita-
tions. This is true for all of us, but the author from whom I
quoted lives, in addition, in one of those countries where parties
have long since degenerated into mass movements which operate
outside of parliament and have invaded the private and social
domains of family life, education, cultural and economic con-
cerns. 92 And in these cases the plausibility of the equation will
amount to self-evidence. It is true that the movements' principle
of organization corresponds to the existence of the modern
masses, but their enormous attraction lies in the people's sus-
picion and hostility against the existing party system and the
prevailing representation in parliament. Where this distrust does
not exist, as for instance in the United States, the conditions of
mass society do not lead to the formation of mass movements,
whereas even countries where mass society is still very far from
being developed, as for instance France, fall prey to mass move-
ments, if only enough hostility to the party and parliamentary
system is extant. Terminological ly speaking, one could say that
the more glaring the failures of the party system are, the easier
it will be for a movement not only to appeal to and to organize
the people, but to transform them into masses. Practically, the
current 'realism', despair of the people's political capacities, not
unlike the realism of Saint-Just, is based solidly upon the con-
scious or unconscious determination to ignore the reality of the
The Revolutionary Tradition and Its Lost Treasure 271
councils and to take for granted that there is not, and never has
been, any alternative to the present system.
The historical truth of the matter is that the party and council
systems are almost coeval; both were unknown prior to the
revolutions and both are the consequences of the modern and
revolutionary tenet that all inhabitants of a given territory are
entitled to be admitted to the public, political realm. The coun-
cils, as distinguished from parties, have always emerged during
the revolution itself, they sprang from the people as spon-
taneous organs of action and of order. The last point is worth
emphasizing; nothing indeed contradicts more sharply the old
adage of the anarchistic and lawless 'natural' inclinations of a
people left without the constraint of its government than the
emergence of the councils that, wherever they appeared, and
most pronouncedly during the Hungarian Revolution, were con-
cerned with the reorganization of the political and economic life
of the country and the establishment of a new order. 93 Parties -
as distinguished from factions typical of all parliaments and as-
semblies, be these hereditary or representative - have thus far
never emerged during a revolution; they either preceded it, as in
the twentieth century, or they developed with the extension of
popular suffrage. Hence the party, whether an extension of par-
liamentary faction or a creation outside parliament, has been
an institution to provide parliamentary government with the
required support of the people, whereby it was always under-
stood that the people, through voting, did the supporting, while
action remained the prerogative of government. If parties be-
come militant and step actively into the domain of political
action, they violate their own principle as well as their function
in parliamentary government, that is, they become subversive,
and this regardless of their doctrines and ideologies. The dis-
integration of parliamentary government - in Italy and Ger-
many aft x the First World War, for instance, or in France after
the Second World War - has demonstrated repeatedlv how
even parties supporting the status quo actually helped to under-
mine the regime the moment they overstepped their institu-
tional limitations. Action and participation in public affairs, a
272 On Revolution
natural aspiration of the councils, obviously are not signs of
health and vitality but of decay and perversion in an institu-
tion whose primary function has always been representation.
For it is indeed true that the essential characteristic of the
otherwise widely differing party systems is 'that they "nominate"
candidates for elective offices or representative government', and
it may even be correct to say that 'the act of nominating itself is
enough to bring a political party into being'. 94 Hence, from the
very beginning, the party as an institution presupposed either
that the citizen's participation in public affairs was guaranteed
by other public organs, or that such participation was not neces-
sary and that the newly admitted strata of the population should
be content with representation, or, finally, that all political ques-
tions in the welfare state are ultimately problems of administra-
tion, to be handled and decided by experts, in which case even
the representatives of the people hardly possess an authentic area
of action but are administrative officers, whose business, though
in the public interest, is not essentially different from the business
of private management. If the last of these presuppositions
should turn out to be correct - and who could deny the extent to
which in our mass societies the political realm has withered
away and is being replaced by that 'administration of things*
which Engels predicted for a classless society? - then, to be sure,
the councils would have to be considered as atavistic institutions
without any relevance in the realm of human affairs. But
the same, or something very similar, would then soon enough
turn out to be true for the party system; for administration
and management, because their business is dictated by the
necessities which underlie all economic process, are essen-
tially not only non-political but even nonpartisan. In a society
under the sway of abundance, conflicting group interests need
no longer be settled at one another's expense, and the principle
of opposition is valid only as long as there exist authentic choices
which transcend the objective and demonstrably valid opinions
of experts. When government has really become administration,
the party system can only result in incompetence and wasteful-
ness. The only non-obsolete function the party system might
conceivably perform in such a regime would be to guard it
The Revolutionary Tradition and Its Lost Treasure 273
against corruption of public servants, and even this function
would be much better and more reliably performed by the
police. 95
The conflict between the two systems, the parties and the
councils, came to the fore in all twentieth-century revolutions.
The issue at stake was representation versus action and participa-
tion. The councils were organs of action, the revolutionary
parties were organs of representation, and although the revolu-
tionary parties halfheartedly recognized the councils as instru-
ments of 'revolutionary struggle', they tried even in the midst of
revolution to rule them from within; they knew well enough
that no party, no matter how revolutionary it was, would be
able to survive the transformation of the government into a true
Soviet Republic. For the parties, the need for action itself was
transitory, and they had no doubt that after the victory of the
revolution further action would simply prove unnecessary or sub-
versive. Bad faith and the drive for power were not the decisive
factors that made the professional revolutionists turn against the
revolutionary organs of the people; it was rather the elementary
convictions which the revolutionary parties shared with all
other parties. They agreed that the end of government was the
welfare of the people, and that the substance of politics was not
action but administration. In this respect, it is only fair to say
that all parties from right to left have much more in common
with one another than the revolutionary groups ever had in
common with the councils. Moreover, what eventually decided
the issue in favour of the party and the one-party dictatorship
was by no means only superior power or determination to crush
the councils through ruthless use of the means of violence.
If it is true that the revolutionary parties never understood to
what an extent the council system was identical with the emer-
gence of a new form of government, it is no less true that the
councils were incapable of understanding to what enormous
extent the government machinery in modern societies must
indeed perform the functions of administration. The fatal mis-
take of the councils has always been that they themselves did not
distinguish clearly between participation in public affairs, and
administration or management of things in the public interest.
274 On Revolution
In the form of workers' councils, they have again and again
tried to take over the management of the factories, and all these
attempts have ended in dismal failure. 'The wish of the working
class', we are told, 'has been fulfilled. The factories will be
managed by the councils of the workers.' 96 This so-called wish of
the working class sounds much rather like an attempt of the
revolutionary party to counteract the councils' political aspira-
tions, to drive their members away from the political realm and
back into the factories. And this suspicion is borne out by two
facts: the councils have always been primarily political, with
social and economic claims playing a very minor role, and it was
precisely this lack of interest in social and economic questions
which, in the view of the revolutionary party, was a sure sign
of their 'lower-middle-class, abstract, liberalistic' mentality. 97 In
fact, it was a sign of their political maturity, whereas the
workers' wish to run the factories themselves was a sign of the
understandable, but politically irrelevant desire of individuals to
rise into positions which up to then had been open only to the
middle class.
No doubt, managerial talent should not be lacking in people
of working-class origins; the trouble was merely that the
workers' councils certainly were the worst possible organs for its
detection. For the men whom they trusted and chose from their
own midst were selected according to political criteria, for their
trustworthiness, their personal integrity, their capacity of judge-
ment, often for their physical courage. The same men, entirely
capable of acting in a political capacity, were bound to fail if
entrusted with the management of a factory or other administra-
tive duties. For the qualities of the statesman or the political
man and the qualities of the manager or administrator are not
only not the same, they very seldom are to be found in the same
individual; the one is supposed to know how to deal with men
in a field of human relations, whose principle is freedom, and
the other must know how to manage things and people in a
sphere of life whose principle is necessity. The councils in the
factories brought an element of action into the management of
things, and this indeed could not but create chaos. It was
precisely these foredoomed attempts that have earned the coun-
The Revolutionary Tradition and Its Lost Treasure 275
cil system its bad name. But while it is true that they were
incapable of organizing, or rather of rebuilding, the economic
system of the country, it is also true that the chief reason for
their failure was- not any lawlessness of the people, but their
political qualities. Whereas, on the other hand, the reason why
the party apparatuses, despite many shortcomings - corruption,
incompetence and incredible wastefulness - eventually succeeded
where the councils had failed lay precisely in their original
oligarchic and even autocratic structure, which made them so
utterly unreliable for all political purposes.
Freedom, wherever it existed as a tangible reality, has always
been spatially limited. This is especially clear for the greatest and
most elementary of all negative liberties, the freedom of move-
ment; the borders of national territory or the walls of the city-
state comprehended and protected a space in which men could
move freely. Treaties and international guarantees provide an
extension of this territorially bound freedom for citizens outside
their own country, but even under these modern conditions the
elementary coincidence of freedom and a limited space remains
manifest. What is true for freedom of movement is, to a large
extent, valid for freedom in general. Freedom in a positive sense
is possible only among equals, and equality itself is by no means
a universally valid principle but, again, applicable only with
limitations and even within spatial limits. If we equate these
spaces of freedom - which, following the gist, though not the
terminology, of John Adams, we could also call spaces of
appearances - with the political realm itself, we shall be in-
clined to think of them as islands in a sea or as oases in a desert.
This image, I believe, is suggested to us not merely by the con-
sistency of a metaphor but by the record of history as well.
The phenomenon I am concerned with here is usually called
the 'elite', and my quarrel with this term is not that I doubt that
the political way of life has never been and will never be the way
of life of the many, even though political business, by definition,
concerns more than the many, namely strictly speaking, the sum
total of all citizens. Political passions - courage, the pursuit of
public happiness, the taste of public freedom, an ambition that
276 On Revolution
strives for excellence regardless not only of social status and
administrative office but even of achievement and congratula-
tion - are perhaps not as rare as we are inclined to think, living
in a society which has perverted all virtues into social values;
but they certainly are out of the ordinary under all circumstances.
My quarrel with the 'elite* is that the term implies an oligarchic
form of government, the domination of the many by the rule of
a few. From this, one can only conclude - as indeed our whole
tradition of political thought has concluded - that the essence of
politics is rulership and that the dominant political passion is
the passion to rule or to govern. This, I propose, is profoundly
untrue. The fact that political 'elites' have always determined
the political destinies of the many and have, in most instances,
exerted a domination over them, indicates, on the other hand,
the bitter need of the few to protect themselves against the many,
or rather to protect the island of freedom they have come to
inhabit against the surrounding sea of necessity; and it indicates,
on the other hand, the responsibility that falls automatically
upon those who care for the fate of those who do not. But
neither this need nor this responsibility touches upon the essence,
the very substance of their lives, which is freedom; both are
incidental and secondary with respect to what actually goes on
within the limited space of the island itself. Put into terms of
present-day institutions, it would be in parliament and in con-
gress, where he moves among his peers, that the political life of
a member of representative government is actualized, no matter
how much of his time may be spent in campaigning, in trying
to get the vote and in listening to the voter. The point of the
matter is not merely the obvious phoniness of this dialogue in
modern party government, where the voter can only consent or
refuse to ratify a choice which (with the exception of the Ameri-
can primaries) is made without him, and it does not even concern
conspicuous abuses such as the introduction into politics of
Madison Avenue methods, through which the relationship
between representative and elector is transformed into that of
seller and buyer. Even if there is communication between repre-
sentative and voter, between the nation and parliament - and the
existence of such communication marks the outstanding differ-
The Revolutionary Tradition and Its Lost Treasure 277
ence between the governments of the British and the Americans
on one side, and those of Western Europe, on the other - this
communication is never between equals but between those who
aspire to govern and those who consent to be governed. It is
indeed in the very nature of the party system to replace 'the
formula "government of the people by the people" by this for-
mula : "government of the people by an tlite sprung from the
people" \>*
It has been said that 'the deepest significance of political
parties' must be seen in their providing 'the necessary frame-
work enabling the masses to recruit from among themselves
their own elites', 89 and it is true enough that it was primarily the
parties which opened political careers to members of the lower
classes. No doubt the party as the outstanding institution of
democratic government corresponds to one of the major trends
of the modern age, the constantly and universally increasing
equalization of society; but this by no means implies that it
corresponds to the deepest significance of revolution in the
modern age as well. The 'elite sprung from the people' has
replaced the pre-modern elites of birth and wealth; it has
nowhere enabled the people qua people to make their entrance
into political life and to become participators in public affairs.
The relationship between a ruling elite and the people,
between the few, who among themselves constitute a public
space, and the many, who spend their lives outside it and in
obscurity, has remained unchanged. From the viewpoint of
revolution and the survival of the revolutionary spirit, the trouble
does not lie in the factual rise of a new elite: it is not the
revolutionary spirit but the democratic mentality of an
egalitarian society that tends to deny the obvious inability and
conspicuous lack of interest of large parts of the population in
political matters as such. The trouble lies in the lack of public
spaces to which the people at large would have entrance and
from which an elite could be selected, or rather, where it could
select itself. The troub l e, in other words, is that politics ha&__
become ^profe ssion and a career, and that the 'elite' therefor e
is being chosen according to standards and criteria which jure
themselves profoundly unpoliti cal, T it is m~the^ature~bTairparty
278 On Revolution
systems that the authentically political talents can assert them-
selves only in rare cases, and it is even rarer that the specifically
political qualifications survive the petty manoeuvres of party
politics with its demands for plain salesmanship. Of course the
men who sat in the councils were also an elite, they were even
the only political elite, of the people and sprung from the people,
the modern world has ever seen, but they were not nominated
from above and not supported from below. With respect to the
elementary councils that sprang up wherever people lived or
worked together, one is tempted to say that they had selected
themselves; those who organized themselves were those who
cared and those who took the initiative; they were the political
elite of the people brought into the open by the revolution. From
these 'elementary republics', the councilmen then chose their
deputies for the next higher council, and these deputies, again,
were selected by their peers, they were not subject to any pressure
either from above or from below. Their title rested on nothing
but the confidence of their equals, and this equality was not
natural but political, it was nothing they had been born with; it
was the equality of those who had committed themselves to, and
now were engaged in, a joint enterprise. Once elected and sent
in the next higher council, the deputy found himself again
among his peers, for the deputies on any given level in
this system were those who had received a special trust. No
doubt this form of government, if fully developed, would have
assumed again the shape of a pyramid, which, of course, is the
shape of an essentially authoritarian government. But while, in
all authoritarian government we know of, authority is filtered
down from above, in this case authority would have been
generated neither at the top nor at the bottom, but on each of the
pyramid's layers; and this obviously could constitute the solu-
tion to one of the most serious problems of all modern politics,
which is not how to reconcile freedom and equality but how to
reconcile equality and authority.
(To avoid misunderstanding : The principles for the selection
of the best as suggested in the council system, the principle of
self-selection in the grass-roots political organs, and the principle
of personal trust in their development into a federal form of
The Revolutionary Tradition and Its Lost Treasure 279
government are not universally valid; they are applicable only
within the political realm. The cultural, literary, and artistic, the
scientific and professional and even the social elites of a
country are subject to very different criteria among which the
criterion of equality is conspicuously absent. But so is the prin-
ciple of authority. The rank of a poet, for instance, is decided
neither by a vote of confidence of his fellow poets nor by fiat
coming from the recognized master, but, on the contrary, by
those who only love poetry and are incapable of ever writing
a line. The rank of a scientist, on the other hand, is indeed deter-
mined by his fellow scientists, but not on the basis of highly
personal qualities and qualifications; the criteria in this instance
are objective and beyond argument or persuasion. Social elites,
finally, at least in an egalitarian society where neither birth nor
wealth counts, come into being through processes of discrimina-
tion.)
It would be tempting to spin out further the potentialities of
the councils, but it certainly is wiser to say with Jefferson, 'Begin
them only for a single purpose; they will soon show for what
others they are the best instruments' - the best instruments, for
example, for breaking up the modern mass society, with its
dangerous tendency toward the formation of pseudo-political
mass movements, or rather, the best, the most natural way for
interspersing it at the grass roots with an 'elite' that is chosen
by no one but constitutes itself. The joys of public happiness
and the responsibilities for public business would then become
the share of those few from all walks of life who have a taste
for public freedom and cannot be 'happy' without it. Politically,
they are the best, and it is the task of good government and the
sign of a well-ordered republic to assure them of their rightful
place in the public realm. To be sure, such an 'aristocratic* form
of government would spell the end of general suffrage as we
understand it today; for only those who as voluntary members
of an 'elementary republic' have demonstrated that they care for
more than their private happiness and are concerned about the
state of the world would have the right to be heard in the con-
duct of the business of the republic. However, this exclusion
from politics should not be derogatory, since a political elite is
280 On Revolution
by no means identical with a social or cultural or professional
elite. The exclusion, moreover, would not depend upon an out-
side body; if those who belong are self-chosen, those who do not
belong are self-excluded. And such self-exclusion, far from being
arbitrary discrimination, would in fact give substance and reality
to one of the most important negative liberties we have enjoyed
since the end of the ancient world, namely, freedom from
politics, which was unknown to Rome or Athens and which is
politically perhaps the most relevant part of our Christian
heritage.
This, and probably much more, was lost when the spirit of
revolution - a new spirit and the spirit of beginning something
new - failed to find its appropriate institution. There is nothing
that could compensate for this failure or prevent it from becom-
ing final, except memory and recollection. And since the store-
house of memory is kept and watched over by the poets, whose
business it is to find and make the words we live by, it may be
wise to turn in conclusion to two of them (one modern, the other
ancient) in order to find an approximate articulation of the
actual content of our lost treasure. The modern poet is Rene
Char, perhaps the most articulate of the many French writers
and artists who joined the Resistance during the Second World
War. His book of aphorisms was written during the last year of
the war in a frankly apprehensive anticipation of liberation; for
he knew that as far as they were concerned there would be not
only the welcome liberation from German occupation but libera-
tion from the 'burden' of public business as well. Back they
would have to go to the Spaisseur triste of their private lives and
pursuits, to the 'sterile depression* of the pre-war years, when it
was as though a curse hung over everything they did : 'If I sur-
vive, I know that I shall have to break with the aroma of these
essential years, silently reject (not repress) my treasure.' The
treasure, he thought, was that he had 'found himself , that he
no longer suspected himself of 'insincerity', that he needed no
mask and no make-believe to appear, that wherever he went he
appeared as he was to others and to himself, that he could afford
'to go naked'. 100 These reflections are significant enough as they
testify to the involuntary self-discourse, to the joys of appearing
The Revolutionary Tradition and Its Lost Treasure 281
in word and -deed without equivocation and without self-
reflection that are inherent in action. And yet they are perhaps
too 'modern', too self-centred to hit in pure precision the centre
of that 'inheritance which was left to us by no testament'.
Sophocles in Oedipus at ColonuSj the play of his old age,
wrote the famous and frightening lines :
Mf| (pflvcu tov ckavTa vi-
Ka ^6yov. to 8' friei (pavfl,
Pnvai xeta' 6rt60ev nep ii-
K£i ttoXu 8euTepov wc, idxioia.
'Not to be born prevails over all meaning uttered in words; by
far the second-best for life, once it has appeared, is to go as
swiftly as possible whence it came.' There he also let us know,
through the mouth of Theseus, the legendary founder of Athens
and hence her spokesman, what- it was that enabled ordinary
men, young and old, to bear life's burden : it was the polis, the
space of men's free deeds and living words, which could endow
life with splendour - t6v Piov ^aujipdv TtoieiaGai.
Notes
Introduction. War and Revolution
i. The only discussion of the war question I know of which
dares to face both the horrors of nuclear weapons and the threat
of totalitarianism, and is therefore entirely free of mental reser-
vation, is Karl Jaspers' The Future of Mankind, Chicago, 1961.
2. See Raymond Aron, 'Political Action in the Shadow of
Atomic Apocalypse', in The Ethics of Power, edited by Harold
D. Lasswell and Harlan Cleveland^ New York, 1962.
3. De Maistre in his Considerations sur la France, 1796, thus
replied to Condorcet, who had defined counter-revolution as
'une revolution au sens contraire'. See his Sur le sens du mot
revolutionnaire (1793) in CEuvres, 1847-9, vol. XII.
Historically speaking, both conservative thought and reac-
tionary movements derive not only their most telling points
and their elan but their very existence from the event of the
French Revolution. They have remained derivative ever since
in the sense that they have hardly produced a single idea or
notion that was not primarily polemical. This, incidentally,
is the reason conservative thinkers have always excelled in
polemics, while revolutionaries, to the extent that they too
developed an authentically polemical style, learned this part
of their trade from their opponents. Conservatism, and neither
liberal nor revolutionary thought, is polemical in origin and
indeed almost by definition.
Chapter One. The Meaning of Revolution
1. Classicists have been aware of the fact that 'our word
"revolution" docs not exactly correspond to either ot&ctic, or
284 Notes
jieraPoWi itoJtueCov' (W. L. Newman, The Politics of Aristotle,
Oxford, 1887-1902). For a detailed discussion, see Heinrich
RyfTel, MetaboU Politeion, Bern, 1949.
2. See his Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law
(1765), Works* 1850-6", vol. Ill, p. 452.
3. It is for this reason that Polybius says that the transforma-
tion of governments from one to another comes about kclt&
qtCoiv, in accordance with nature. Histories, VI. 5.1.
4. For a discussion of the influence of the American Revolu-
tion on the French Revolution of 1789, see Alphonse Aulard,
'Revolution francaise, et revolution americaine* in Etudes et
lecons sur la Revolution francaise, vol. VIII, 1921. For Abbe*
Raynal's description of America, see Tableau et revolutions des
colonies anglaises dans YAmerique du Nord, 1781.
5. John Adams's A Defense of the Constitutions of Govern-
ment of the United States of America was written in reply to
Turgot's attack in a letter to Dr Price in 1778. The issue at
stake was Turgot's insistence on the necessity of centralized
power against the Constitution's separation of power. See
especially Adams's Treliminary Observations', in which he
quotes extensively from Turgot's letter. WorJ(s, vol. IV.
6. Of J. Hector St John de Crevecceur, Letters from an
American Farmer (1782), Dutton paperback, 1957, see especially
letters III and XII.
7. I am paraphrasing the following sentences from Luther's
De Servo Arbitrio (Werfe, edition Weimar, vol. XVIII, p. 626):
'Fortunam constantissimam verbi Dei, ut ob ipsum mundus
tumultuetur. Sermo enim Dei venit mutaturus et innovaturus
orbem. quotiens venit.* The most permanent fate of God's word
is that for its sake the world is put into uproar. For the sermon of
God comes in order to change and revive the whole earth to the
extent that it reaches it.*
8. By Eric Voegelin in A New Science of Politics, Chicago,
1952; and by Norman Cohn in The Pursuit of Millennium, Fair
Lawn, N. J., 1947.
9. Polybius VI. 9.5 and XXXI. 23-5.1, respectively.
10. Condorcet, Sur le sens du mot rivolutionnoire, (Euvres,
1847-9, vol. XII.
Chapter One 2 g*
ii. I am following the famous paragraphs in which Herodotus
defines - it seems for the first time - the chief three forms of
government, rule by one, rule by the few, rule by the many, and
discusses their merits (Book III, 80-2). There tne spokesman
for Athenian democracy, which, however, is called isonomy,
declines the kingdom which is offered him and gives as his
reason: 'I want neither to rule nor to be ruled.' Whereupon
Herodotus states that his house became the only free house in
the whole Persian Empire.
12. For the meaning of isonomy and its use in political
thought, see Victor Ehrenberg, 'Isonomia 1 , in Pauly-Wissowa,
Realenzy^lopadie des Mlassischen Altertums, Supplement, vol.
VII. Especially telling seems a remark of Thucydides (III, 82,8),
who notes that party leaders in factional strife liked to call them-
selves by 'fair-sounding names*,™ some preferring to invoke
isonomy and some moderate aristocracy, while, as Thucydides
implies, the former stood for democracy and the latter for
oligarchy. (I owe this reference to the kind interest of Professor
David Grene of Chicago University.)
13. As Sir Edward Coke put it in 1627: 'What a word is that
franchise? The lord may tax his villain high or low; but it is
against the franchise of the land for freemen to be taxed, but by
their consent in parliament. Franchise is a French word, and in
Latin it is Libertas.' Quoted from Charles Howard Mcllwain,
Constitutionalism Ancient and Modern, Ithaca, 1940.
14. In this and the following, I follow Charles E. Shattuck,
'The True Meaning of the Term "Liberty" ... in the Federal
and State Constitutions . . .*, Harvard Law Review, 1891.
15. See Edward S. Corwin, The Constitution and What It
Means Today, Princeton, 1958, p. 203.
16. Thus Jefferson in The Anas, quoted from Life and Selec-
ted Writings, Modern Library edition, p. 117.
17. The quotations are from John Adams, op. cit. {Wor\s,
vol. IV, p. 293), and from his remarks 'On MachiavehT (Worfa
vol. V, p. 40), respectively.
18. The Prince, chapter 15.
19. See (Euvres, ed. Laponneraye, 1840, vol. 3, p. 540.
20. This sentence occurs, it seems, for the first time in Gino
286 Notes
Capponi's Ricordi of 1420: 'Faites membres de la Balia des
hommes experimentes, et aimant leur commune plus que leur
propre bien et plus que leur ame.' (See Machiavelli, CEuvre*
completes, ed. Pleiades, p. 1535.) Machiavelli uses a similar ex-
pression in the Histories of Florence, III, 7, where he praises
Florentine patriots who dared to defy the Pope, showing thus
'how much higher they placed their city than their souls'. He
then applies the same expression to himself at the end of his
life, writing to his friend Vettori : 'I love my native city more
than my own soul' (Quoted from The Letters of Machiavelli,
ed. Allan Gilbert, New York, 1961, no. 225.)
We, who no longer take for granted the immortality of the
soul, are apt to overlook the poignancy of Machiavelli's credo.
At the time he wrote, the expression was no cliche but meant
literally one was prepared to forfeit an everlasting life or to risk
the punishments of hell for the sake of one's city. The question,
as Machiavelli saw it, was not whether one loved God more
than the world, but whether one was capable of loving the
world more than one's own self. And this decision indeed has
always been the crucial decision for all who devoted their lives
to politics. Most of Machiavelli's arguments against religion are
directed against those who love themselves, namely their own
salvation, more than the world; they are not directed against
those who really love God more than they love either the
world or themselves.
21. In Letters, op. cit., no. 137.
22. I am following the recent book of Lewis Mumford, The
City in History, New York, 1961, which develops the extremely
interesting and suggestive theory that the New England village
is actually 'a happy mutation' of the medieval town, that 'the
medieval order renewed itself, as it were, by colonization' in
the New World, and that while 'the multiplication of cities
ceased' in the Old World, 'that activity was largely transferred
between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries to the New
World'. (See pp. 328 rr. and p. 356.)
23. See The Discourses, Book I, 11. On the point of Machia-
velli's place in Renaissance culture, I am inclined to agree with
J. H. Whitfield, who, in his book Machiavelli, Oxford, 1947, p.
Chapter One 2 g-
18, points out: Machiavelli 'does not represent the double de-
generacy of both politics and culture. He represents instead the
culture that is born of humanism becoming aware of political
problems because they are at a crisis. It is because of this that he
seeks to solve them from the elements with which humanism
had endowed the western mind.' For the men of the eighteenth-
century revolutions, however, it was no longer 'humanism'
which sent them to the ancients in search of a solution for their
political problems. For a detailed discussion of this question,
see Chapter Five.
24. The word comes from the Latin status ret publicae,
whose equivalent is 'form of government' in which sense we
find it still in Bodin. Characteristic is that the stato ceases to
mean 'form' or one of the possible 'states' of the political realm,
and instead comes to mean that underlying political unity of a
people that can survive the coming and going not only of govern-
ments but also of forms of government. What Machiavelli had
in mind was of course the nation-state, that is, the fact, which is
a matter of course only to us, that Italy, Russia, China, and
France, within their historic boundaries, do not cease to exist
together with any given form of government.
25. In this whole chapter I have used rather extensively the
work of the German historian Karl Griewank, which unfortu-
nately is not yet available in English. His earlier article
'Staatsumwalzung und Revolution in der AufTassung der
Renaissance und Barockzeit', which appeared in the Wissen-
schaftliche Zeitschrift der FriedrichSchiller-Universitat Jena,
1952-3, Heft I, and his later book Der neuzeitliche Revolu-
tionsbegriff, 1955, supersede all other literature on the subject.
26. See 'Revolution' in the Oxford English Dictionary.
27. Clinton Rossiter, The First American Revolution, New
York, 1956, p. 4.
28. LAncien Regime, Paris, 1953, vol. II, p. 72.
29. In the 'Introduction' to the second part of Rights of Man.
30. See Fritz Schulz, Prinzipien des romischen Rechts y Ber-
lin, 1954, p. 147.
31. Griewank, in the article cited in note 25, notes that the
phrase 'This is a revolution' was first applied to Henri IV of
288 Notes
France and his conversion to Catholicism. He quotes as evi-
dence Hardouin de Perefixe's biography of Henri IV (Histoire
du roy Henri le grand, Amsterdam, 1661), which comments on
the events of the spring of 1594 with the following words : the
Governor of Poitiers vpyant quil ne pout/ait pas empecher cette
revolution, s'y laissa entrainer et composa avec le Roy. As Grie-
wank himself points out, the notion of irresistibility is here still
strongly combined with the originally astronomic meaning of a
movement that 'revolves' back to its point of departure. For
'Hardouin considered all these events as a return of the French
to their prince naturel* Nothing of the sort could be meant by
Liancourt.
32. Robespierre's words, spoken on 17 November 1793, at the
National Convention, which I have paraphrased, read as fol-
lows : 'Les crimes de la tyrannie accelererent les progres de la
liberte, et les progres de la liberte multiplierent les crimes de la
tyrannie . . . une reaction continuelle dont la violence progres-
sive a opere en peu d'annees l'ouvrage de plusieurs siecles.'
CEuvres, ed. Laponneraye, 1840, vol. Ill, p. 446.
33. Quoted from Griewank's book, op. cit., p. 243.
34. In his speech of 5 February 1794, op. cit., p. 543.
35. The Federalist (1787), ed. Jacob E. Cooke, Meridian, 1961,
no. 11.
36. Quoted from Theodor Schieder, 'Das Problem der Revo-
lution im 19. Jahrhundert', Historische Zeitschrift, vol. 170,
1950.
37. See 'Author's Introduction* to Democracy in America: 'A
new science of politics is needed for a new world.'
38. Griewank - in his article cited in note 25 - noticed the
role of the spectator in the birth of a concept of revolution:
'Wollen wir dem Bewusstsein des revolutionaren Wandels in
seiner Entstehung nachgehen, so linden wir es nicht so sehr bei
den Handelnden selbst wie bei ausserhalb der Bewegung ste-
henden Beobachtern zuerst klar erfasst.' He made this discovery
probably under the influence of Hegel and Marx, although he
applies it to the Florentine historiographers - wrongly, I think,
because these histories were written by Florentine statesmen and
politicians. Neither Machiavelli nor Guicciardini was a specta-
Chapter Two 289
tor in the sense in which Hegel and other nineteenth-century
historians were spectators.
39. For Saint-Just's and incidentally also Robespierre's stand
on these matters, see Albert Ollivier, Saint-Just et la force des
choses, Paris, 1954.
40. Quoted from Edward S. Corwin, The "Higher Law'*
Background of American Constitutional Law', in Harvard Law
Review, vol. 42, 1928.
41. Tocqueville, op. cit., vol. II, Fourth Book, chapter 8.
42. This attitude is in striking contrast to the conduct of the
revolutionaries in 1848. Jules Michelet writes: 'On s'identifiait
a ces lugubres ombres. L'un etait Mirabeau, Vergniaud, Dan-
ton, un autre Robespierre.' In Histoire de la rSvolution fran-
caise, 1868, vol. I, p. 5.
Chapter Two. The Social Question
1. (Euvres, ed. Laponneraye, 1840, vol. 3, p. 514.
2. A 'Declaration of the Rights of Sans-Culottes' was proposed
by Boisset, a friend of Robespierre. See J. M. Thompson, Robes-
pierre, Oxford, 1939, p. 365.
3. Le But de la Revolution est le bonheur du peuple, as the
manifest of Sans-Culottism proclaimed it in November 1793.
See no. 52 in Die Sans\ulotten von Paris. Dofytmente zur Ge~
schichte der Vol\sbewegung 1793-1794, ed. Walter Markov and
Albert Soboul, Berlin (East), 1957.
4. James Monroe in J. Elliot, Debates in the Several State Con-
ventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution . . ., vol.
3, 1861.
5. Both quotations are drawn from Lord Acton, Lectures on
the French Revolution (1910), Noonday paperback edition, 1959.
6. In a letter from Paris to Mrs Trist, 18 August 1785.
7. Jefferson in a letter from Paris to Mr Wythe, 13 August
1786; John Adams in a letter to Jefferson, 13 July 1813.
8. In a letter to John Adams, 28 October 1813.
9. Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (1791), Everyman's
Library edition, pp. 48, 77.
290 Notes
10. John Adams, Discourses on Vavila, Wor\s t Boston, 1851,
vol. VI, p. 280.
11. ibid., pp. 267 and 279.
12. ibid., pp. 239-40.
13. ibid., p. 234.
14. Quoted from D. Echeverria, Mirage in the West: A His-
tory of the French Image of American Society to 1815, Prince-
ton, 1957, p. 152.
15. See Jefferson, 'A Bill for the More General Diffusion of
Knowledge' of 1779 and his 'Plan for an Educational System*
of 1814, in The Complete Jefferson, edited by Saul K. Padover,
1943, pp. 1048 and 1065.
16. A recent study of the opinions of working-class men on
the subject of equality by Robert E. Lane - The Fear of
Equality' in American Political Science Review, vol. 53, March
1959 - for instance, evaluates the lack of resentment on the part
of the working man as 'fear of equality', their conviction that the
rich are not happier than other people as an attempt 'to take
care of a gnawing and illegitimate envy', their refusal to disre-
gard their friends if they came into money as lack of 'security',
et cetera. The short essay manages to turn every virtue into a
hidden vice - a tour de force in the art of hunting for non-exist-
ent ulterior motives.
17. Robespierre, (Euvres completes, ed. G. Laurent, 1939,
vol. IV; Le Defenseur de la constitution (1792), no. 11, p. 328.
18. Le peuple was identical with menu or petit peuple, and it
consisted of 'small businessmen, grocers, artisans, workers, em-
ployees, salesmen, servants, day labourers, lumpenproletariern 9
but also of poor artists, play-actors, penniless writers'. See Wal-
ter Markov, 'Uber das Ende der Pariser Sansculottenbewegung',
in Beitrage zum neuen Geschichtsbild, zum 60. Geburtstag von
Alfred Meusel, Berlin, 1956.
19. Robespierre in 'Adresse aux Franc, ais' of July 1791, quoted
from J. M. Thompson, op. cit., 1939, P* 1 7^>
20. ibid., p. 365, and speech before the National Convention of
February 1794.
21. See Du contrat social (1762), translated by G. D. H. Cole,
New York, 1950, Book II, chapter 3.
Chapter Two 2 q!
22. ibid., Book II, chapter i.
23. Albert Ollivier, Saint-Just et la force des choses, Paris,
1954, p. 203.
24. This sentence contains the key to Rousseau's concept of
the general will. The fact that it appears merely in a footnote
(op. cit., II, 3) shows only that the concrete experience from
which Rousseau derived his theory had become so natural to
him that he hardly thought it worth mentioning. For this
rather common difficulty in the interpretation of theoretical
works, the empirical and very simple background to the com-
plicated general-will concept is quite instructive, since very few
concepts in political theory have been surrounded with a mysti-
fying aura of so much plain nonsense.
25. The classical expression of this revolutionary version of
republican virtue can be found in -Robespierre's theory of magis-
tracy and popular representation, which he himself summed up
as follows: 'Pour aimer la justice et l'egalite le peuple n'a pas
besoin d'une grande vertue; il lui suffit de s'aimer lui-meme.
Mais le magistrat est oblige d'immoler son interet a l'interet du
peuple, et Porgueil du pouvoir a 1'egalite. ... II faut done que le
corps representatif commence par soumettre dans son sein toutes
les passions privees a la passion generale du bien public. . . .'
Speech to the National Convention, 5 February 1794; see
(Euvres, ed. Laponneraye, 1840, vol. Ill, p. 548.,
26. For Rousseau, see Discours sur Vorigine de VinigalitS
parmi les hommes (1755), translated by G. D. H. Cole, New
York, 1950, p. 226. Saint-just is quoted from Albert Ollivier, op.
cit., p. 19.
27. R. R. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of the Terror
in the French Revolution, Princeton, 1941, from which the
words of Robespierre are quoted (p. 265), is, together with
Thompson's biography, mentioned earlier, the fairest and most
painstakingly objective study of Robespierre and the men
around him in recent literature. Palmer's book especially is an
outstanding contribution to the controversy over the nature of
the Terror.
28. Quoted from Zoltan Haraszti, John Adams and the
Prophets of Progress, Harvard, 1952, p. 205.
292 Notes
29. Rousseau, A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, p.
226.
30. The documents of the Parisian sections, now first pub-
lished in a bilingual edition (French-German) in the work
quoted in note 3, are full of such and similar formulations. I
have quoted from no. 57. Generally speaking, one may say that
the more bloodthirsty the speaker the more likely that he will
insist on ces tendres auctions de I'dme - on the tenderness of
his soul.
31. Thompson (op. cit., p. 108) recalls that Desmoulins told
Robespierre as early as 1790, 'You are faithful to your principles,
however it may be with your friends.'
32. To give an instance, Robespierre, speaking on the subject
of revolutionary government, insisted: 'II ne s'agit point
d'entraver la justice du peuple par des formes nouvelles; la loi
penale doit necessairement avoir quelque chose de vague, parce
que le caractere actuel des conspirateurs etant la dissimulation et
l'hypocrisie, il faut que la justice puisse les saisir sous toutes les
formes.' Speech in the National Convention, 26 July 1794;
(Euvres, ed. Laponneraye, vol. Ill, p. 723. About the problem of
hypocrisy with which Robespierre justified the lawlessness of
popular justice, see below.
33. The phrase occurs as a principle in the 'Instruction to the
Constituted Authorities' drawn up by the temporary commis-
sion charged with the administration of revolutionary law in
Lyons. Characteristically enough, the Revolution here was ex-
clusively made for 'the immense class of the poor'. See Markov
and Soboul, op. cit., No. 52.
34. Crevecceur, Letters from an American Farmer (1782),
Dutton paperback edition, 1957, Letter 3.
35. In a letter to Madison from Paris of 16 December 1786.
36. The Federalist (1787), ed. Jacob E. Cooke, Meridian, 1961,
no. 10.
37. R. R. Palmer, op. cit., p. 163.
38. Quoted from Lord Acton, op. cit., Appendix.
39. The lack of factual evidence for Beard's famous theory has
recently been demonstrated by R. E. Brown, Charles Beard and
the Constitution, Princeton, 1956, and by Forrest McDonald, We
Chapter Two 293
the People: The Economic Origins of the Constitution, Chicago,
1958.
40. The quotations from La Rochefoucauld's Maxims are
given in the recent translation by Louis Kronenberger, New
York, 1959.
41. J. M. Thompson once calls the Convention during the time
of the Reign of Terror 'an Assembly of political play-actors' (op.
cit., p. 334), a remark probably suggested not only by the
\rhetoric of the speakers but also by the number of theatrical
metaphors.
42. Although the etymological root of persona seems to derive
from per-zonare, from the Greek £©vn, and hence to mean
originally 'disguise', one is tempted to believe that the word
carried for Latin ears the significance of per-sonare, 'to sound
through', whereby in Rome the voice that sounded through the
mask was certainly the voice of the ancestors rather than the
voice of the individual actor.
43. See the very illuminating discussion by Ernest Barker in
his Introduction to the English translation of Otto Gierke's
Natural Law and the Theory of Society 1500 to 1800, Cam-
bridge, 1950, pp. lxx ff.
44. ibid., p. lxxiv.
45. Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Preface.
46. Lord Acton, op. cit., chapter 9.
47. ibid., chapter 14.
48. Robespierre in his speech to the National Convention on
17 November 1793, (Euvres, ed. Laponneraye, 1840, vol. Ill, p.
336.
49. The Hungarian Revolution was also unique in that the
Gettysburg Address was broadcast to the people during the
rebellion. See Janko Musulin in his introduction to Prolrfama-
tionen der Freiheit, von der Magna Charta bis zur ungarischen
Vol\serhebung, Frankfurt, 1959.
50. Acton, op. cit., chapter 9.
51. Democracy in America, vol. II, chapter 20.
294 Notes
Chapter Three. The Pursuit of Happiness
i. I am paraphrasing the following passage in the Esprit des
his (Book VIII, chapter 8): 'La plupart des peuples d'Europe
sont encore gouvernes par les moeurs. Mais si par un long abus
du pouvoir, si, par une grande conquete, le despotisme s'etablis-
sait a un certain point, il n'y aurait pas de mceurs ni de climat
qui tinssent; et, dans cette belle partie du monde, la nature
humaine souffrirait, au moins pour un temps, les insultes qu'on
lui fait dans les trois autres.'
2. Hume is quoted from Wolfgang H. Kraus, 'Democratic
Community and Publicity', in Nomos (Community), vol. II,
1959; Burke is quoted from Lord Acton, Lectures on the French
Revolution, 2nd lecture.
3. L'Ancien Regime et la Revolution (1856), (Euvres com-
pletes, Paris, 1952, p. 197.
4. In a letter to Niles, 14 January 181 8.
5. In a letter to the Abbe Mably, 1782.
6. Discourses on Davila, Worlds, Boston, 1851, vol. VI, pp.
232-3.
7. John Adams especially was struck by the fact that 'the self-
styled philosophers of the French Revolution' were like 'monks'
and 'knew very little of the world'. (See Letters to John Taylor
on the American Constitution (1814), Wor\s, vol. VI, p. 453 ff.)
8. J. M. Thompson, Robespierre, Oxford, 1939, pp. 53-4.
9. See Wolfgang H. Kraus, op. cit., an excellent and illumin-
ating paper, which I did not know when this book was first
published.
10. Cicero, De Natura Deorum I, 7 and Academica I, 11.
ii. Tocqueville, op. cit., p. 195, speaking about la condition des
icrivains and their eloignement presque infini ... de la pra-
tique, insists: 'L' absence complete de toute liberte politique
faisait que le monde des affaires ne leur etait pas seulement mal
connu, mais invisible.' And after describing how this lack of
experience made their theories more radical, he stresses ex-
plicitly : 'La meme ignorance leur livrait Poreille et le cceur de
la foule.' Kraus, op. cit., shows that over all of western and cen-
Chapter Three 2 ge
tral Europe a new 'curiosity about public affairs' spread not only
among the 'intellectual elite' but also among the lower orders
of the people.
12. The 'happiness' of the king's subjects presupposed a king
who would take care of his kingdom as a father would his
family; as such, it ultimately derived, in the words of Black-
stone, from a 'creator [who] . . . has graciously reduced the rule
of obedience to this one paternal precept, "that man should pur-
sue his own happiness" '. (Quoted from Howard Mumford
Jones, The Pursuit of Happiness, Harvard, 1953.) Clearly, this
right guaranteed by a father on earth could not have survived
the transformation of the body politic into a republic.
13. See A Summary View of the Rights of British America,
1774, in The Life and Selected Writings, Modern Library edi-
tion, p. 293 ff.
14. Interesting in this respect is the Scottish moral philoso-
pher Adam Ferguson (in his Essay on the History of Civil
Society, 3rd ed., 1768), who, writing on the proper order in civil
society, sounds very much like John Adams. The notion of
order, he remarks, 'being taken from the analogy of subjects
inanimate and dead, is frequently false. . . . The good order of
stones in a wall is their being properly fixed in the places for
which they are hewn; were they to stir, the building must fall:
but the good order of men in society is their being placed where
they are properly qualified to act. . . . When we seek in society
for the order of mere inaction and tranquillity, we forget the
nature of our subject and find the order of slaves, not that of
free men.' Quoted from Wolfgang H. Kraus, op. cit. (italics
added).
15. In the important letter on the 'republics of the wards' to
Joseph C. Cabell, 2 February 1816. ibid., p. 661.
16. See James Madison in The Federalist, no. 14. How felici-
tous Jefferson's pen was may be seen by the fact that his newly
found 'right' came to be included in 'approximately two-thirds
of the state constitutions between 1776 to 1902', regardless of the
fact that, then as now, it was 'by no means easy to know what
either Jefferson or the committee meant by the pursuit of happi-
ness'. It is tempting indeed to conclude with Howard Mumford
296 Notes
Jones, from whose monograph I have quoted, that 'the right to
pursue happiness in America had as it were, grown up in a fit
of absence of mind. . . .*
17. Jones, op. cit., p. 16.
18. Clinton Rossiter, The First American Revolution, New
York, 1956, pp. 229-30.
19. Vernon L. Parrington calls it 'the primary principle of
[Jefferson's] political philosophy, that the "care of human life
and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only
legitimate object of good government" '. Main Currents in
American Thought, Harvest Books edition, vol. I, p. 354.
20. These are the words of John Dickinson, but there was
generally a consensus in theory among the men of the American
Revolution on this subject. Thus, even John Adams would argue
that 'the happiness of society is the end of government ... as
the happiness of the individual is the end of man' (in 'Thoughts
on Government', Wor\s, 1851, vol. IV, p. 193), and they all
would have agreed with Madison's famous formula: 'If men
were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were
to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on govern-
ment would be necessary' (The Federalist, no. 51).
21. In a letter to Madison, 9 June 1793. op. cit., p. 523.
22. Thus John Adams, in a letter to his wife from Paris in
1780, gives a curious twist to the old hierarchy when he writes:
M must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty
to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study
mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and
naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture, in
order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry,
music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain' (Worfa
vol. II, p. 68).
George Mason, the principal author of the Virginia Declara-
tion of Rights, sounds more convincing when he exhorts his
sons in his last will 'to prefer the happiness of a private station
to the troubles and vexations of public business', although one
can never be quite sure in view of the enormous weight of tra-
dition and convention against the 'meddling' in public affairs,
ambition, and love of glory. It probably needed nothing less than
Chapter Three 297
John Adams's boldness of mind and character to break through
the cliches of 'the blessings of a private station' and to own up
to one's own very different experiences. (For George Mason, see
Kate Mason Rowland, The Life of George Mason, 1725-1792,
vol. I, p. 166.)
23. See Jefferson's letter to John Adams, 5 July 1814, in The
Adams-Jefferson Letters, ed. L. J. Cappon, Chapel Hill, 1959.
24. See Carl L. Becker in the Introduction to the second edi-
tion of his The Declaration of Independence, New York, 1942.
25. See Jefferson's letter to Henry Lee, 8 May 1825.
26. It was not a foregone conclusion that the revolutions would
end with the establishment of republics, and even in 1776 a
correspondent to Samuel Adams could still write: 'We now
have a fair opportunity of choosing what form of government
we think proper, and contract with any nation we please for a
king to reign over us.' See William S. Carpenter, The Develop'
ment of American Political Thought, Princeton, 1930, p. 35.
27. See letter quoted in note 25.
28. Adam-Jefferson, op. cit., letter of 11 April 1823, p. 594.
29. See the letter to Madison quoted in note 21.
30. For Thomas, see Sum ma Theologica I qu. 1, 4 c and qu.
12, 1 c. Also, ibid., 1 2, qu. 4, 8 o.
31. Tocqueville, Ancien Regime, chapter 3.
32. In his address to the National Convention on 'The Princi-
ples of Revolutionary Government*. See CEuvres, ed. Lappone-
raye, 1840, vol. III. For the translation into English, I have used
Robert R. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled, Princeton, 1958.
33. That these words of Madison seem to echo John Adams's
awareness of the role 'the passion for distinction' must play in a
body politic is no more than an indication of how large the area
of agreement between the Founding Fathers actually was.
34. See Letter XII, 'Distresses of a Frontier Man', in the Let-
ters from an American Farmer (1782), Dutton paperback edition,
1957-
35. The strain of lawlessness, violence, and anarchy was as
strong in America as in other colonial countries. There is the
famous story which John Adams relates in his autobiography
{Wor\s, vol. II, pp. 420-21) : he met a man, 'a common horse
298 Notes
jockey . . . who was always in the law, and had been sued in
many actions at almost every court. As soon as he saw me, he
came up to me, and his first salutation to me was, "Oh 1 Mr
Adams what great things have you and your colleagues done for
us ! We can never be grateful enough to you. There are no
courts of justice now in the province, and I hope there never will
be another.** ... Is this the object for which I have been contend-
ing? said I to myself . . . Are these the sentiments of such people,
and how many of them are there in the country? Half the
nation for what I know; for half the nation are debtors, if not
more, and these have been, in all countries, the sentiments of
debtors. If the power of the country should get into such hands,
and there is great danger that it will, to what purpose have we
sacrificed our time, health, and everything else? Surely we must
guard against this spirit and these principles, or we shall repent
our conduct.' This story happened in 1775, and the point of the
matter is that this spirit and these principles disappeared be-
cause of war and revolution, the best test of the issue being the
ratification of the Constitution by debtors.
36. See 'On the Advantages of a Monarchy* in James Feni-
more Cooper's The American Democrat (1838).
37. Edward S. Corwin in Harvard Law Review, vol. 42, p. 395.
38. Thus Madison in The Federalist, no. 45.
39. In the words of John Adams, in Discourses on Davila,
Wor\s, 1851, vol. VI, p. 233.
40. Ancien Rigime, loc. cit.
41. See note 32.
42. In Niles, Principles and Acts of the Revolution, Balti-
more, 1822, p. 404.
- 43. See Robert R, Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolu-
tion, Princeton, 1959, P' 2I0 >
44. Such was the verdict of Parrington. There is, however, an
excellent essay by Clinton Rossiter, 'The Legacy of John Adams*
(Yale Review, 1957), which - written with insight and love for
the man - does more than justice to this strangest figure of the
Revolution. 'In the realm of political ideas, he had no master -
and I would think no peer - among the founding fathers.*
45. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859).
Chapter Four 2 ^p
Chapter Four. Foundation I: Constitutio Libertatis
i. There is perhaps nothing more detrimental to an under-
standing of revolution than the common assumption that the
revolutionary process has come to an end when liberation is
achieved and the turmoil and the violence, inherent in all wars of
independence, have come to an end. This view is not new. In
1787, Benjamin Rush complained that c there is nothing more
common, than to confound the term of American revolution
with those of the late American war. The American war is over:
but this is far from being the case with the American revolution.
On the contrary, nothing but the first act of the great drama is
closed. It remains yet to establish and perfect our new forms of
government. 1 (In Niles, Principles and Acts of the Revolution,
Baltimore, 1822, p. 402.) We may add that there still is nothing
more common than to confound the travail of liberation with
the foundation of freedom.
2. These fears were expressed in 1765, in a letter to William
Pitt in which Dickinson had voiced his assurance that the colo-
nies would win a war against England. See Edmund S. Morgan,
The Birth of the Republic, 1763-1789, Chicago, 1956, p. 136.
3. In a letter to James Madison of 20 December 1787.
4. It is seldom recognized and of some importance that, to
put it in Woodrow Wilson's words, *power is a positive thing,
control a negative thing', and that 'to call these two things by
the same name is simply to impoverish language by making one
word serve for a variety of meanings' (An Old Master and Other
Political Essays, 1893, p. 91). This confusion of the power to
act with the right to control the 'organs of initiative' is of a
somewhat similar nature as the previously mentioned confusion
of liberation with freedom. The quotation in the text is from
James Fenimore Cooper, The American Democrat (1838).
5. The latter is the view of Carl Joachim Friedrich, Constitu-
tional Government and Democracy, revised edition, 1950. For
the former - that 'the clauses in our American constitutions are
. , . mere copies of the thirty-ninth article of Magna Charta' -
see Charles £. Shattuck, The True Meaning of the Term
300 Notes
"Liberty" in the Federal and State Constitutions*, Harvard Law
Review, 1891.
6. Quoted from Charles Howard Mcllwain, Constitutional-
ism, Ancient and Modern, Ithaca, 1940. Those who wish to see
this matter in historical perspective may recall the fate of Locke's
constitution for Carolina, which was perhaps the first such con-
stitution framed by an expert and then offered to a people.
William C. Morey's verdict, 'It was created out of nothing, and
it soon relapsed into nothing', has been true for almost all of
them ('The Genesis of a Written Constitution', in American
Academy of Politics and Social Science, Annals I, April 1891).
7. The best study of this kind of constitution-making is Karl
Loewenstein's 'Verfassungsrecht und Verfassungsrealitat (in
Beitrage zur Staatssoziologie, Tubingen, 1961), which I regret
not having consulted for the original edition of this book.
Loewenstein's paper deals with the 'flood of constitutions' after
the Second World War, of which only a few were ratified
by the people. He emphasizes 'the deep distrust of the people' in
these constitutions, which, in the hands of 'relatively small
groups of experts and specialists', have for the most part become
'means to an end*, instruments for 'obtaining or maintaining
the special privileges of various groups or classes whose interests
they serve*.
8. Or, phrased somewhat differently: 'A constitution is a
thing antecedent to a government, and a government is only
the creature of a constitution.' Both phrases occur in the second
part of The Rights of Man.
9. According to Morgan, op. cit., 'Most states allowed their
provincial congresses to assume the task of drafting a constitu-
* tion and putting it into effect. The people of Massachusetts seem
to have been the first to see the danger of this procedure ...
Accordingly a special convention was held in 1780 and a con-
stitution established by the people acting independently of gov-
ernment . . . Though by this time it was too late for the states
to use it, the new method was shortly followed in creating a
government for the United" States* (p. 91). Even Forrest
McDonald, who holds that the state legislatures were 'circum-
vented' and ratifying conventions elected because 'ratification
Chapter Four - 0I
would [have been] much more difficult ... if the Constitution
had to overcome the machinations ... of the legislatures 1 , con-
cedes in a footnote: 'In point of legal theory, ratification by
state legislatures would be no more binding than any other laws
and could be repealed by subsequent legislatures.* See We the
People: The Economic Origins of the Constitution, Chicago,
1958, p. 114.
10. Quoted from Zoltan Haraszti, John Adams and the
Prophets of Progress, Cambridge, Mass., 1952, p. 221.
11. See The Federalist, no. 51.
12. These are the words of a Pennsylvanian, and 'Pennsyl-
vania, the most thoroughly cosmopolitan colony, had almost as
many people of English descent as of all other nationalities put
together.' See Clinton Rossiter, The First American Revolution,
New York, 1956, pp. 20 and 228.
13. Even in the early sixties, 'James Otis envisaged the trans-
formation within the British constitution of the common-law
rights of Englishmen into the natural rights of man, but he also
saw these natural rights as limitations upon the authority of
government.' William S. Carpenter, The Development of
American Political Thought, Princeton, 1930, p. 29.
14. On the perplexities, historical and conceptual, of the
Rights of Man, see the extensive discussion in the author's
Origins of Totalitarianism, revised edition, New York, 1958,
pp. 290-302.
15. The words are Benjamin Rush's in Niles, op. cit., p. 402.
16. No other passage from the 'divine writings* of the 'great
Montesquieu 1 is more frequently quoted in the debates than the
famous sentence about England : 'II y a aussi une nation dans le
monde qui a pour objet direct de sa constitution la liberte*
politique' (Esprit des his, XI, 5). For the enormous influence of
Montesquieu on the course of the American Revolution, see
especially Paul Merrill Spurlin, Montesquieu in America, 1760-
1801, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1940, and Gilbert Chinard, The
Commonplace Bool( of Thomas Jefferson, Baltimore and Paris,
1926.
17. Montesquieu distinguishes between philosophic freedom,
which consists 'in the exercise of will* (Esprit des his XII, 2),
302 Notes
and political freedom, which consists in pouvoir faire ce que Yon
doit vouloir (ibid., XI, 3), whereby the emphasis is on the word
pouvoir. The element of power in political freedom is strongly
suggested by the French language, in which the same word,
pouvoir, signifies power and 'to be able*.
18. See Rossiter, op. cit., p. 231, and 'The Fundamental
Orders of Connecticut' of 1639 in Documents of American His-
tory, ed. Henry Steele Commager, New York, 1949, 5th edition.
19. The sentence occurs in XI, 4 and reads as follows : 'Pour
qu'on ne puisse abuser du pouvoir, il faut que, par la disposition
des choses, le pouvoir arrete le pouvoir.' At first glance, even in
Montesquieu this seems to mean no more than that the power of
the laws must check the power of men. But this first impression
is misleading, for Montesquieu does not speak of laws in the
sense of imposed standards and commands but, in full agree-
ment with the Roman tradition, understands by laws les rap-
ports qui se trouvent entte \une raison primitive] et les dif-
fer en ts etres, et les rapports de ces divers etres entre eux (I, 1).
Law, in other words, is what relates, so that religious law is
what relates man to God and human law what relates men to
their fellow men. (See also Book XXVI, where the first para-
graphs of the whole work are treated in detail.) Without divine
law there would be no relation between man and God, without
human law the space between men would be a desert, or rather
there would be no in-between space at all. It is within, this
domain of rapports^ or lawfulness, that power is being exerted;
non-separation of power is not the negation of lawfulness, it is
the negation of freedom. According to Montesquieu, one could
very well abuse power and stay within the limits of the law; the
need for limitation - la vertu meme a besoin de limites (XI, 4) -
arises out of the nature of human power, and not out of an an-
tagonism between law and power.
Montesquieu's separation of power, because it is so intimately
connected with the theory of checks and balances, has often
been blamed on the scientific, Newtonian spirit of the time. Yet
nothing could be more alien to Montesquieu than the spirit of
modern science. This spirit, it is true, is present in James Har-
rington and his 'balance of property', as it is present in Hobbes;
Chapter Four 203
no doubt this terminology drawn from the sciences carried even
then a great deal of plausibility - as when John Adams praises
Harrington's doctrine for being 'as infallible a maxim in poli-
tics as that action and reaction are equal in mechanics'. Still, one
may suspect that it was precisely Montesquieu's political, non-
scientific language which contributed much to his influence; at
any rate, it was in a non-scientific and non-mechanical spirit
and quite obviously under the influence of Montesquieu that
Jefferson asserted that 'the government we fought f or . . . should
not only be founded on free principles' (by which he meant the
principles of limited government), 'but in which the powers of
government should be so divided and balanced among several
bodies of magistracy, as that no one could transcend their legal
limits, without being effectually checked and restrained by the
others/ Notes on the State of Virginia, query XIII.
20. Esprit des lois XI, 4 and 6.
21. Thus, James Wilson held that 'a Federal Republic ... as
a species of government . . . secures all the internal advantages
of a republic; at the same time that it maintains the external
dignity and force of a monarchy' (quoted from Spurlin, op. cit.,
p. 206). Hamilton, The Federalist^ no. 9, arguing against the
opponents of the new Constitution who, 'with great assiduity,
cited and circulated the observations of Montesquieu on the
necessity of a contracted territory for a republican government',
quoted at length from L'Esprit des lois to show that Montes-
quieu 'explicitly treats of a Confederate Republic as the expedi-
ent for extending the sphere of popular government, and recon-
ciling the advantages of monarchy with those of republicanism/
22. From Haraszti, op. cit., p. 219.
23. Such notions, of course, were also quite current in
America. Thus John Taylor of Virginia argued against John
Adams as follows : 'Mr Adams considers our division of power
as the same principle with his balance of power. We consider
these principles as opposite and inimical . . . Our principle of
division is used to reduce power to that degree of temperature
which may make it a blessing and not a curse ... Mr Adams
contends for a government of orders, as if power would be a
safe sentinel over power, or the devil over Lucifer . . / (See
304 Notes
William S. Carpenter, op. cit.) Taylor, because of his mistrust
-in power, has been called the philosopher of Jeffersonian de-
mocracy; however, the truth of the matter is that Jefferson, no
less than Adams or Madison, emphatically held that it was the
balancing of powers and not the division of power which was
the proper remedy for despotism.
24. See Edward S. Corwin, 'The Progress of Constitutional
Theory between the Declaration of Independence and the Meet-
ing of the Philadelphia Convention', American Historical Re-
view, vol. 30, 1925.
25. The Federalist, no. 14.
26. Madison in a letter to Jefferson, 24 October 1787, in Max
Farrand, Records of the Federal Convention of ij8j, New
Haven, 1937, vol. 3, p. 137.
27. For Hamilton, see note 21; for Madison, The Federalist,
no. 43.
28. James Wilson, commenting on Montesquieu's Federal Re-
public, explicitly mentions that 'it consists in assembling distinct
societies which are consolidated into a new body, capable of
being increased by the addition of other members - an expand-
ing quality peculiarly fitted to the circumstances of America*
(Spurlin, op. cit., p. 206).
29. Thus Ernst Kantorowiz in 'Mysteries of State: An Ab-
solute Concept and Its Late Medieval Origin', Harvard Theo-
logical Review, 1955.
30. 'La nation', said Sieves, 'existe avant tout, elle est l'origine
de tout. Sa volonte est toujours legale, elle est la Loi elle-meme.*
*Le gouvernement n'exerce un pouvoir reel qu'autant qu'il est
constitutionnel ... La volonte nationale, au contraire, n'a besoin
que de sa realite pour etre toujours legale, elle est l'origine de
toute legaliteV See Quest-ce que le Tiers-ttat? 2nd edition,
1789, pp. 79, 82 ff.
31. Ernst Kantorowicz, The Kings Two Bodies: A Study in
Medieval Theology, Princeton, 1957, p. 24.
32. Edward S. Corwin, in 'The "Higher Law" Background of
American Constitutional Law', Harvard Law Review, vol. 42,
1928, p. 152, remarks as follows : 'The attribution of supremacy
to the Constitution on the ground solely of its rootage in popu-
Chapter Four - -
lar will represents ... a comparatively late outgrowth of Ameri-
can constitutional theory. Earlier the supremacy accorded to
constitutions was ascribed less to their putative source than to
their supposed content, to their embodiment of essential and
unchanging justice.'
33. Benjamin Hitchborn, who is thus quoted by Niles, op. cit.,
p. 27, sounds very French indeed. It is curious to note, however,
that he started by saying, 'I define civil liberty to be, not "a gov-
ernment by laws", . . . but a power existing in the people at
large'; in other words, he too, like practically all Americans,
draws a clear distinction between law and power and therefore
realizes that a government resting solely on the power in the
people can no longer be called a government by laws.
34. See Merrill Jensen, 'Democracy and the American Revo-
lution', Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. XX, no. 4, 1957.
35. Niles, op. cit., p. 307.
36. Sieves, op. cit., p. 81.
37. Quoted from Corwin, op. cit., p. 407.
38. ibid., p. 170.
39. See Sieves, op. cit., especially pp. 83 ff.
40. For Sieves, see the Seconde partie of op. cit., 4th edition,
1789, p. 7.
41. We know, of course, too many examples from recent his-
tory even to begin the enumeration of instances of this type of
democracy in the original sense of majority rule. It may there-
fore be enough to remind the reader that the curious claim of
the so-called 'people's democracy' from behind the Iron Curtain
to represent true democracy as against the constitutional and
limited government of the Western world could be justified on
these grounds. The political, though no longer physical, liquida-
tion of the losing minority in all conflicts is current practice
within the Communist parties; more importantly, the very
notion of one-party rule rests on majority rule - the seizure of
power through the party which at a given moment was able to
achieve an absolute majority.
42. Jefferson, currently held to have been the most democratic
of the founders, spoke quite frequently and eloquently of the
dangers of Elective despotism* when 'one hundred and seventy-
306 Notes
three despots would surely be as oppressive as one' (op. cit., loc.
cit.). And Hamilton noted early that 'the members most tena-
cious of republicanism were as loud as any in declaiming against
the vices of democracy'. See William S, Carpenter, op. cit., p. 77.
43. That there existed a few isolated instances in which reso-
lutions were passed to the effect that 'the whole procedure of the
Congress was unconstitutional', and that 'when the Declaration
of Independence took place, the Colonies were absolutely in a
state of nature', is of course no argument against this. For the
resolutions of some New Hampshire towns, see Jensen, op. cit.
44. In the letter to Jefferson of 24 October 1787, quoted in
note 26.
45. Winton U. Solbcrg, in his introduction to The Federal
Convention and the Formation of the Union of the American
States, New York, 1958, rightly stresses that the Federalists
'wished definitely to subordinate the states, but they did not,
with two exceptions, desire to destroy the states' (p. cii). Madi-
son himself once said 'he would preserve the State rights as
carefully as the trials by jury' (ibid., p. 196).
46. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, New York, 1945,
vol. I, p. 56. The extraordinary degree of political articulation of
the country may be realized by the fact that there were more
than 550 such towns in New England alone in 1776.
47. The bad-weather theory, which I find rather suggestive, is
contained in the 'Massachusetts' article in the Encyclopaedia
Britannica, nth edition, vol. XVII. For the perhaps more prob-
able alternative, see the introduction to the 'Mayflower Com-
pact' in Commager, op. cit.
48. The important distinction between states that are sovereign
and those that are 'only political societies' was made by Madison
in a speech in the Federal Convention. See Solberg, op. cit., p.
189, note 8.
49. See the 'Fundamental Orders of Connecticut 1 of 1639 and
'The New England Confederation' of 1643 in Commager, op.
cit.
50. Benjamin F. Wright - especially in the important article
'The Origins of the Separation of Powers in America* in Econo-
mica, May 1933 - has argued in a similar vein that 'the framers
Chapter Four -^
of the first American constitutions were impressed by the separa-
tion of powers theory only because their own experience . . . con-
firmed its wisdom'; and others have followed him. Sixty or
seventy years ago, it was almost a matter of course for American
scholarship to insist on an unbroken, autonomous continuity of
American history culminating in the Revolution and the estab-
lishment of the United States. Since Bryce had related the
American constitution-making to the royal colonial charters by
which the earliest English settlements were established, it had
been current to explain the origin of a written constitution as
well as the unique emphasis on statutory legislation by the fact
that the colonies were subordinate political bodies, which de-
rived from trading companies and were capable of assuming
powers only so far as delegated by special grants, patents, and
charters. (See William C. Morey's 'The First State Constitu-
tions' in Annals of the American Academy of Political and
Social Science , September 1893, vol. IV, and his essay on the
Written Constitution, quoted in Note 6.) Today this approach
is much less common, and the emphasis on European influences,
British or French, is more widely accepted. There are various
reasons for this shift in emphasis in American historical scholar-
ship, among them the strong recent influence of the history of
ideas, which obviously directs its attention to intellectual pre-
cedent rather than to political event, as well as the slightly older
abandonment of isolationist attitudes. All this is quite interest-
ing but of no great relevance in our context. What I should like
to underline here is that the importance of royal or company
charters seems to have been stressed at the expense of the far
more original and more interesting covenants and compacts
which the colonists made amongst themselves. For it seems to
me that Merrill Jensen - in his more recent article, op. cit. - is
entirely right when he states : 'The central issue in seventeenth-
century New England . . . was the source of authority for the
establishment of government. The English view was that no
government could exist in a colony without a grant of power
from the crown. The opposite view, held by certain English
dissenters in New England, was that a group of people could
create a valid government for themselves by means of a coven-
308 Notes
ant, compact, or constitution. The authors of the Mayflower
Compact and the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut operated
on this assumption ... It is the basic assumption of the Declara-
tion of Independence, a portion of which reads much like the
words of Roger Williams written 132 years earlier.'
51. Quoted from Solberg, op. cit., p. xcii.
52. Thus Rossiter, op. cit., p. 132.
53. The uniqueness of the Mayflower Compact was stressed
time and again in this period of American history. Thus, James
Wilson, referring to it in a lecture in 1790, reminds his audience
that he is presenting 'what, as to the nations in the Transatlantic
world, must be searched for in vain - an original compact of
a society, on its first arrival in this section of the globe*. And the
early histories of America are still quite explicitly insisting on 'a
spectacle . . . which rarely occurs, of contemplating a society in
the first moment of its political existence', as the Scottish his-
torian William Robertson put it. See W. F. Craven, The Legend
of the Founding Fathers, New York, 1956, pp. 57 and 64.
54. See especially op. cit., Section 131.
55. See the Cambridge Agreement of 1629 in Commager, op.
cit.
56. In these words, John Cotton, Puritan minister and 'The
Patriarch of New England' in the first half of the seventeenth
century, raised his argument against democracy, a government
not fit 'either for church or commonwealth*. Here and in the
following, I try to avoid as much as possible a discussion of the
relationship between Puritanism and American political institu-
tions. I believe in the validity of Clinton Rossiter's distinction
'between Puritans and Puritanism, between the magnificent
autocrats of Boston and Salem and their inherently revolutionary
way of life and thought' (op. cit., p. 91), the latter consisting in
their conviction that even in monarchies God c referreth the
sovereigntie to himselfe' and their being 'obsessed with the
covenant or contract'. But the difficulty is that these two tenets
are somehow incompatible, the notion of covenant presupposes
no-sovereignty and no-rulership, whereas the belief that God
retains his sovereignty and refuses to delegate it to any earthly
power 'setteth up Theocracy ... as the best form of govern-
Chapter Four ~qq
ment', as John Cotton rightly concluded. And the point of
the matter is that these strictly religious influences and move-
ments, including the Great Awakening, had no influence what-
soever on what the men of the Revolution did or thought.
57. Rossiter, op. cit., loc. cit.
58. A magnificent example of the Puritan notion of covenant
is contained in a sermon by John Winthrop, written aboard the
Arbella on the way to America : 'Thus stands the cause between
God and us, we are entered into Covenant with him for this
work, we have taken out a Commission, the Lord hath given us
leave to draw our own Articles, we have professed to enterprise
these actions upon these and these ends, we have hereupon be-
sought him of favor and blessing : Now if the Lord shall please
to hear us, and bring us in peace to the place we desire, then
hath he ratified this Covenant and sealed our Commission'
(quoted from Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The
Seventeenth Century, Cambridge, Mass., 1954, p. 477).
59. Thus in the Cambridge Agreement of 1629, drafted by
some of the leading members of the Massachusetts Bay Com-
pany before they embarked for America. Commager, op. cit.
60. The seemingly similar language in the famous Bund der
Waldstatte of 1291 in Switzerland is misleading; no 'Civil Body
Politick' arose out of these 'mutual promises', no new institu-
tions, and no new laws.
61. See Thoughts on Government (1776), Wor\s y Boston, 1851,
IV, 195.
62. This is from the Plantation agreement at Providence,
which founded the town of Providence in 1640 (Commager, op.
cit.). It is of special interest as the principle of representation is
found here for the first time, and also because those who were
*so betrusted' agreed 'after many Considerations and Consulta-
tions of our owne State and also of States abroad in way of
government' that no form of government would be so 'suitable
to their Condition as government by way of Arbitration*.
63. Thus in the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut of 1639
(Commager, op. cit.), which Bryce {American Commonwealth,
vol. I, p. 414, note) has called 'the oldest truly political constitu-
tion in America'.
310 Notes
64. The 'final adieu to Britain' occurs in the Instructions from
the Town of Maiden, Massachusetts, for a Declaration of Inde-
pendence, 27 May 1776 (Commager, op. cit.). The fierce lan-
guage of these instructions, the town renouncing 'with disdain
our connexion with a kingdom of. slaves', shows how right
Tocqueville was when he traced the origin of the American
Revolution to the spirit of the townships. Interesting for the
popular strength of republican sentiment throughout the states
is also Jefferson's testimony in The Anas, 4 February 1818 (The
Complete Jefferson, ed. Saul Padover, New York, 1943, p.
1206 ff.); it shows very convincingly that if 'the contests of that
day were contests of principle between the advocates of repub-
lican and those of kingly government*, it was the republican
opinions of the people that eventually settled the difference of
opinion among the statesmen. How strong republican senti-
ments were even before the Revolution because of this unique
American experience is evident in John Adams's early writings.
In a series of papers written in 1774 for the Boston Gazette, he
wrote : The first planters of Plymouth were "our ancestors" in
the strictest sense. They had no charter or patent for the land
they took possession of; and derived no authority from the
English parliament or crown to set up their government. They
purchased land of the Indians, and set up a government of their
own, on the simple principle of nature; ... and [they] con-
tinued to exercise all the powers of government, legislative,
executive, and judicial, upon the plain ground of an original
contract among independent individuals. 1 (My italics.) See
Novanglus, Wor\s, vol. IV, p. no.
65. This is' from a resolution of Freeholders of Albemarle
County, Virginia, 26 July 1774, which was drafted by Jefferson*
The royal charters are mentioned almost as an afterthought, and
the curious term character of compact', which reads like a con-
tradiction in terms, shows clearly that it was compact, and not
charter, that Jefferson had in mind (Commager, op. cit.). And
this insistence on compact at the expense of royal or company
charters is by no means a consequence of revolution. Almost ten
years before the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Frank-
lin argued 'that parliament was so far from having a hand in
Chapter Five ^ lt
the work of original settlement that it actually took no kind of
notice of them, till many years after they were established'
(Craven, op. cit., p. 44).
66. Merrill Jensen, op. cit.
Oj. This is from the Massachusetts Circular Letter, protest-
ing the Townshend Acts of 11 February 1768, drafted by
Samuel Adams. According to Commager, these addresses to
the British Ministry present 'one of the earliest formulations of
the doctrine of fundamental law in the British constitution'.
68. From the Instructions of the Town of Maiden (note 64).
69. As the Virginia Instructions to the Continental Congress
of 1 August 1774 put it (Commager, op. cit.).
Chapter Five, Foundation 11: Novus Ordo Saeclorum
1. In the words of Pietro Verri referring to the Austrian ver-
sion of enlightened absolutism under the rule of Maria Theresa
and Joseph II, quoted from Robert Palmer, The Age of Demo-
cratic Revolution, Princeton, 1959, p. 105.
2. I am aware that I disagree here with Robert Palmer's im-
portant book, which I have quoted. My own obligations to Mr
Palmer's work are great, and my sympathy with his main thesis
of an Atlantic civilization, 'a term probably closer to reality in
the eighteenth century than in the twentieth' (p. 4), is even
greater. Still, it seems to me that he does not see that one of the
reasons for this qualification is the different outcome of revolu-
tion in Europe and America. And this different outcome is
primarily due to the utter difference of the 'constituted bodies'
in the two continents. Whatever constituted bodies there may
have existed in Europe prior to the revolutions - estates, parlia-
ments, privileged orders of all kinds - were indeed part and par-
cel of the old order and were swept aside by the Revolution;
whereas in America, on the contrary, it was the old constituted
bodies of the colonial period which were, so-to speak, liberated
by the revolution. This distinction seems to me so decisive that
I am afraid it is somewhat misleading to use even the same
term, 'constituted bodies', for the townships and colonial assemb-
3" Notes
lies on one side and the feudal European institutions with their
privileges and liberties on the other.
3. Quoted from Palmer, op. cit., p. 322.
4. Sur le sens du mot r6volutionnaire (1793). See (Euvres,
1847-9, vol. XII.
5. Rousseau in a letter to the Marquis de Mirabeau, 26 July
1767.
6. See J. M. Thompson, Robespierre, Oxford, 1939, p. 489.
7. In the Preamble to The Report of a Constitution or Form
of Government for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts', 1779.
Wor\s, Boston, 1851, vol. IV. It is still in this sense that Justice
Douglas said : 'We are a religious people whose institutions pre-
suppose a Supreme Being* (quoted from Edward S. Corwin,
The Constitution and Whatsit Means Today, Princeton, 1958, p.
193).
8. Civil Government, Treatise I, section 86, and Treatise II,
section 20.
9. In the Dissertation on Canon and Feudal haw.
10. In A Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the
United States of America, 1778, Wor\s, vol. IV, p. 291.
11. Hence the highest praise accorded to an ancient legislator
was that his laws were so admirably framed that one could
hardly believe that they were not made by a god. This is usually
said of Lycurgus (see especially Polybius VI, 48. 2). The source
of Adams's error probably was Plutarch, who tells how Lycurgus
was assured at Delphi 'that the constitution he was about to
establish should be the best in the world'; Plutarch also relates
that Solon received an encouraging oracle from Apollo. To be
sure, Adams read his Plutarch with Christian eyes, for nothing
in the text permits the conclusion that either Solon or Lycurgus
was divinely inspired.
Much closer to the truth in this matter than John Adams was
Madison when he found it 'not a little remarkable that in every
case reported by ancient history, in which government has been
established with deliberation and consent, the task of framing it
has not been committed to an assembly of men, but has been
performed by some individual citizen of pre-eminent wisdom
and approved integrity' (The Federalist, no. 38). This was true
Chapter Five ^ Z n
at least for Greek antiquity, although it may be doubtful that
the reason 'the Greeks . . . should so far abandon the rules of
caution as to place their destiny in the hands of a single citizen*
was that 'the fears of discord . . . exceeded the appreciation of
treachery or incapacity in a single individual' (ibid.). The fact is
that lawmaking did not belong among the rights and duties of
a Greek citizen; the act of laying down the law was considered
to be pre-political.
12. Thus Cicero says explicitly about the legislator : Nee leges
imponit populo quibus ipse non parent - 'And he does not im-
pose laws on the people which he himself would not obey' - in
De Re Publica I 52.
13. In the words of F. M. Cornforth, From Religion to Phi-
losophy (1912), Torchbooks edition, chapter I, p. 30.
14. It would lead me too far to discuss the matter in detail. It
seems as though Plato's famous word in the Laws, 'A god is the
measure of all things', may indicate a 'higher Law' behind man-
made laws. I think this is an error, and not only for the obvious
reason that measure (metron) and law are not the same. For
Plato, the true object of laws is not so much to prevent injustice
as to improve the citizens. The standard for good and bad laws
is entirely utilitarian: what makes citizens better than they
were before is a good law, what leaves them as they were is in-
different and even superfluous, and what makes them worse is
bad.
15. Robespierre's 'extraordinary idea' is contained in Le D6-
fenseur de la Constitution (1792), no. 11, see (Euvres completes,
ed. G. Laurent, 1939, v °l* ^V, p. 333. The comment is quoted
from Thompson, op. cit., p. 134.
16. Aeneid, Book VII, Modern Library edition, p. 206.
17. Livy III, 31.8.
18. Esprit des lois, Book I, chapters 1-3. Compare also the
first chapter of Book XXVI. The fact that the Constitution holds
that not only 'the laws of the United States' but also 'all treaties
made . . . under the authority of the United States, shall be the
supreme law of the land', indicates to what an extent the
American concept of law harks back to the Roman lex and to
the original experiences of compacts and agreements.
314 Notes
19. Natural law in Roman antiquity was by no means a
'higher law'. On the contrary, the Roman jurists 'must haVe
thought of natural law as inferior rather than superior to the
law in force' (Ernst Levy, 'Natural Law in the Roman Period',
in Proceedings of the Natural Law Institute of Notre Dame, vol.
II, 1948).
20. Se Adams's draft for a Constitution of Massachusetts, op.
cit.
21. Thompson, op. cit., p. 97.
22. L'idee de l'Etre Supreme et de l'immortalite de l'dme est
un rappel continuel a la justice; elle est done sociale et republi-
caine.' See Robespierre's speech to the National Convention, 7
May 1794, CEuvres, ed. Laponneraye, 1840, vol. Ill, p. 623.
23. Discourses on Davila, Wor\s, vol. VI, p. 281. Robespierre,
in the speech just quoted, speaks in almost the same terms:
'Quel avantage trouves-tu a persuader a l'homme qu'une force
aveugle preside a ses destins, et frappe au hasard le crime et la
vertu?'
24. Robespierre, op. cit., loc. cit.
25. In his draft preamble to the Virginia Bill for Establishing
Religious Freedom.
26. See his L'Ordre naturel et essentiel des societes politiques
(1767), I, ch. XXIV.
27. Thomas Paine's remark in Rights of Man, Part II : John
Adams's in A Defense of the Constitutions of Government of
the United States (1778), Wor\s, vol. IV, p. 439. James Wilson's
prediction quoted from W. F. Craven, The Legend of the Found-
ing Fathers, New York, 1956, p. 64.
28. Both Adams's and Wilson's remarks are quoted from Ed-
ward S. Corwin, The "Higher Law" Background of American
Constitutional Law', in Harvard Law Review, vol. 42, 1928.
29. The Federalist, no. 16.
30. ibid., no. 78.
31. ibid., no. 50.
32. As quoted in Corwin's book, op. cit., p. 3.
33. Cicero, op. cit., I, 7, 12.
34. In 'Discourse on Reforming the Government of Florence',
in The Prince and Other Worlds, Chicago, 1941.
Chapter Five - x -
35. It was chiefly their preoccupation with the stability of re-
publican government that led seventeenth- and eighteenth-
century writers into their frequent enthusiasm for Sparta.
Sparta, at that time, was supposed to have lasted longer than
even Rome.
36. See Martin Diamond, 'Democracy and The Federalist:
A Reconsideration of the Framers' Intent', American Political
Science Review, March 1959.
37. The Federalist, nos. 14 and 49.
38. Thus John Adams in Thoughts on Government (1776),
Worlds, vol. IV, p. 200.
39. Thus 'Milton believed in heaven-sent, divinely appointed
great leaders ... as deliverers from bondage and tyranny like
Samson, as institutors of liberty like Brutus, or as great teachers
like himself, not as all-powerful -executives in a settled and
smoothly functioning mixed state. In Milton's scheme of things,
great leaders make their appearance on the stage of history and
play their proper roles in times of transition from bondage to
freedom* (Zera S. Fink, The Classical Republicans, Evanston,
1945, p. 105). The same is of course true for the settlers them-
selves. 'The basic reality in their life was the analogy with the
children of Israel. They conceived that by going out into the
wilderness they were reliving the story of Exodus', as Daniel J.
Boorstin rightly stresses in The Americans, New York, 1958,
p. 19.
40. It would be tempting to use the American example as the
historical demonstration of the old legendary truth, and to inter-
pret the colonial period as the transition from bondage to free-
dom, as the hiatus between leaving England and the Old World,
and the foundation of freedom in the New World. The tempta-
tion is all the stronger as the parallel with the legendary tales is
so very close because, here again, the new event and the new
foundation seem to have come about through the extraordinary
deeds of exiles. On this, Virgil insists no less than the biblical
tales - 'After it pleased heaven's lords to overthrow . . . Priam's
guiltless people, and Ilium fell, ... we are driven by divine
omens to seek distant places of exile in waste lands (Aencid, III,
1-12; here and in the following, I am quoting the translation
316 Notes
of J. W. Mackail, Virgil's Worfa Modern Library edition).
The reasons why I think it would be wrong to interpret Ameri-
can history in this light are obvious. The colonial period is by
no means a hiatus in American history, and for whatever rea-
sons the British settlers might have left their homes, once they
had arrived in America they had no trouble in recognizing
the rule of England and the authority of the mother country.
They were no exiles; on the contrary, they prided themselves on
being British subjects up to the last moment.
41. De Re Publica VI, 12. See also Viktor Poeschl, Rdmischer
Staat und griechisches Staatsden\en bei Cicero, Berlin, 1936.
42. Discourses upon the First Decade of T. Livius ... 1, 9.
43. The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656), quoted from the
Liberal Arts edition, p. 43.
44. ibid., p. no.
45. ibid., p. in. (Incidentally, 'prudence' in seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century political literature does not mean 'caution*
but signifies 'political insight', whereby it depends upon the
author whether this insight indicates also wisdom, or science, or
moderation. The word itself is neutral.) For the influence of
Machiavelli upon Harrington and the influence of the ancients
upon seventeenth-century English thought, see the excellent
study by Zera S. Fink, as quoted in note 39. It is unfortunate
indeed that a similar study 'to evaluate exactly the influence of
the ancient philosophers and historians upon the formulation of
the American system of Government', which Gilbert Chinard
proposed (in 1940 in his essay on 'Polybius and the American
Constitution' in the Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. I), has
never been undertaken. The reason seems to be that nobody is
interested any longer in forms of government - a subject the
Founding Fathers themselves were most passionately concerned
with. Such a study - rather than the impossible attempt at in-
terpreting American early history in terms of European social
and economic experiences - would demonstrate that 'the Ameri-
can experiment had more than local and circumstantial value;
that it was in fact a sort of culmination, and that, to understand
... it, it is necessary to realize that the most modern form of
Chapter Five „_
government is not unconnected with the political thought and
the political experience of ancient times.'
46. Harrington, Oceana, op. cit., p. no.
47. 'Die Romer hielten sich nicht fuer Romuliden, sondern
fuer Aineiaden, ihre Penaten stammten nicht aus Rom, sondern
aus Lavinium.' 'Die romische Politik bediente sich seit dem 3.
Jahrhundert v. Chr. des Hinweises auf die troische Herkunft
der Romer.' For a discussion of this whole question, see St.
Weinstock, 'Penates', in Pauly-Wissowa, Realenzyttfopadie des
1(lassischen Altertums.
48. Virgil, Aeneid, XII, 166, and I, 68. Ovid (in Fasti IV, 251)
speaks about the Trojan origin of Rome in almost identical lan-
guage : Cum Troiam Aeneas Italos portaret in agros - 'Aeneas
carries Troy onto Italic soil'.
49. Aeneid, I, 273; see also I, 206,-and III, 86-7.
50. ibid., IX, 742.
51. ibid., VII, 321-2.
52. ibid., XII, 189. It may be of some importance to note how
far Virgil carries his inversion of Homer's story. There is, for
instance, in the second book of the Aeneid a repetition of the
scene in the Odyssey where Ulysses, unrecognized, listens to the
recital of his own life story and its sufferings and now, for the
first time, bursts into tears. In the Aeneid, it is Aeneas himself
who tells his story; he does not weep but expects his listeners to
shed tears of compassion. Needless to add that this inversion, in
contrast to those we cited in the text, is meaningless; it destroys
the original meaning without setting something else, of equal
weight, in its place. The reversal itself is all the more note-
worthy.
53. The fourth Eclogue has always been understood as the
expression of a widespread religious yearning for salvation. Thus
Eduard Norden, in his classic essay Die Geburt des Kindes, Ge-
schichte einer religiosen Idee, 1924, which offers a line-by-line
interpretation of Virgil's poem, reads into W. Bousset, Kyrios
Christos, Gottingen, 1913, about the expectancy of salvation
through an absolutely new beginning (pp. 228 if.), a kind of
paraphrase of its chief thought (p. 47). I follow Norden's trans-
318 Nqtes
lation and commentary, but I doubt the religious significance of
the poem. For a more recent discussion, see Giinther Jachmann,
'Die Vierte Ekloge Vergils', in Annali della Scuola Normale
Superiore di Pisa, vol. XXI, 1952, and Karl Kerenyi, Vergil und
Holderlin, Zurich, 1957.
54. Georgica II, 323 ff. : prima crescentis origine tnundi.
55. De Civitate, XII, 20.
56. Norden states explicitly: 'Mit der Verbreitung der Isis-
religion iiber grosse Teile der griechisch-romischen Welt wurde
in ihr auch das "Kind" ... so bekannt und beliebt wie kaum
irgend etwas sonst aus einer fremdlandischen Kultur', op. cit.,
P-73-
57. In The Laws, book VI, 775.
58. Polybius V 32.1. 'The beginning is more than half of the
whole* is an ancient proverb, quoted as such by Aristotle,
Nicomachean Ethics, 1198b.
59. W. F. Craven, op. cit., p. 1.
60. Oceana, edition Liljegren, Lund and Heidelberg, 1924, p,
168. Zera Fink, op. cit., p. 63, notices that 'Harrington's pre-
occupation with the perpetual state' often comes close to Platonic
notions, and especially to the Laws, 'the influence of which on
Harrington is indeterminable'.
61. See The Federalist, no. 1.
Chapter Six. The Revolutionary Tradition and
Its Lost Treasure
1. The most convincing evidence for the anti-theoretical bias
in the men of the American Revolution can be found in the not
very frequent but nevertheless very telling outbursts against
philosophy and the philosophers of the past. In addition to Jef-
ferson, who thought he could denounce 'the nonsense of Plato',
there was John Adams, who complained of all the philosophers
since Plato because 'not one of them takes human nature as it is
for his foundation'. (See Zoltan Haraszti, John Adams and the
Prophets of Progress, Cambridge, Mass., 1952, p. 258.) This
bias, as a matter of fact, is neither anti-theoretical as such nor
Chapter Six ^g
specific to an American 'frame of mind'. The hostility between
philosophy and politics, barely covered up by a philosophy of
politics, has been the curse of Western statecraft as well as of
the Western tradition of philosophy ever since the men of action
and the men of thought parted company - that is, ever since
Socrates* death. The ancient conflict is relevant only in the
strictly secular realm and therefore played a minor role during
the long centuries when religion and religious concerns domin-
ated the political sphere; but it was only natural that it should
have assumed renewed importance during the birth or the re-
birth of an authentically political realm, that is, in the course of
modern revolutions.
For Daniel J. Boorstin's thesis, see The Genius of American
Politics, Chicago, 1953, and especially his more recent The
Americans: The Colonial Experiences New York, 1958.
2. William S. Carpenter, The Development of American
Political Thought, Princeton, 1930, noted rightly: 'There is no
distinctively American political theory. . . . The aid of political
theory was most frequently sought in the beginning of our insti-
tutional development' (p. 164).
3. The simplest and perhaps also the most plausible way to
trace the failure to remember would be an analysis of American
post-revolutionary historiography. It is true, 'what occurred after
the Revolution was ... a shift of the focus [from the Puritans]
onto the Pilgrims, with a transfer of all the virtues traditionally
associated with the Puritan fathers to the more acceptable Pil-
grims' (Wesley Frank Craven, The Legend of the Founding
Fathers, New York, 1956, p. 82). However, this shift of focus
was not permanent, and American historiography, unless it was
altogether dominated by European and, especially, Marxist
categories, and denied that a revolution had ever occurred in
America, turned more and more to the pre-revolutionary stress
on Puritanism as the decisive influence in American politics and
morals. Quite apart from the merits of the case, this stubborn
endurance may well be due, at least in part, to the fact that the
Puritans, in contrast to the Pilgrims as well as to the men of the
Revolution, were deeply concerned with their own history; they
believed that, even if they should lose, their spirit would not be
320 Notes
lost so long as they knew how to remember. Thus Cotton
Mather wrote : 'I shall count my Country lost in the loss of the
Primitive Principles, and the Primitive Practices, upon which
it was at first Established : But certainly one good way to save
that Loss would be to do something . . . that the Story of the
Circumstances attending the Foundation and Formation of this
Country, and of its Preservation hitherto, may be impartially
handed unto Posterity' (Magnalia, Book II, 8-9).
4. How such guideposts for future reference and remembrance
arise out of this incessant talk, not, to be sure, in the form of
concepts but as single brief sentences and condensed aphorisms,
may best be seen in the novels of William Faulkner. Faulkner's
literary procedure, rather than the content of his work, is
highly 'political', and, in spite of many imitations, he has re-
mained, as far as I can see, the only author to use it.
5. Wherever American political thought was committed to
revolutionary ideas and ideals, it either followed in the wake of
European revolutionary trends, springing from experience and
interpretation of the French Revolution; or it succumbed to the
anarchistic tendencies so conspicuous in the early lawlessness of
the pioneers. (We may remind the reader once more of John
Adams's story which we mentioned in note 35 to Chapter
Three.) This lawlessness, as pointed out before, was actually
anti-revolutionary, directed against the men of the Revolution.
In our context, both so-called revolutionary trends can be
neglected.
6. In The Federalist, no. 43.
7. In Democracy in America, vol. II, p. 256.
8. Ever since the Renaissance, Venice had had the honour of
validating the old theory of a mixed form of government, cap-
able of arresting the cycle of change. How great the need for a
belief in a potentially immortal City must have been may, per-
haps, best be gauged by the irony that Venice became a model
of permanence in the very days of her decay.
9. See The Federalist, no. 10.
10. Hamilton in Jonathan Elliot, Debates of State Conventions
on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution, 1861, vol. I, p. 422.
11. The Federalist, no. 50.
Chapter Six 221
12. Of course, this is not to deny that the will occurred in the
speeches and writings of the Founding Fathers. But compared
with reason, passion, and power, the faculty of the will plays a
very minor role in their thought and their terminology. Hamil-
ton, who seems to have used the word more often than the others,
significantly spoke of a permanent will' - actually a contradic-
tion in terms - and meant by it no more than an institution
'capable of resisting popular current'. (See Wor\s, vol. II, p.
415.) Obviously what he was after was permanence, and the
word 'will' is loosely used, since nothing is less permanent, and
less likely to establish permanence, than the will. Reading such
sentences in conjunction with the contemporary French sources,
one will notice that in similar circumstances the French would
have called not upon a 'permanent will' but upon the 'unani-
mous will' of the nation. And theorise of such unanimity was
precisely what the Americans sought to avoid.
13. W. S. Carpenter, op. cit,, p. 84, ascribes this insight to
Madison.
14. The only precedent for the American Senate that comes to
mind is the King's Council, whose function, however, was ad-
vice and not opinion. An institution for advice, on the other
hand, is conspicuously lacking in American government as laid
down by the Constitution. Evidence that advice is needed in
government, in addition to opinion, may be found in Roose-
velt's and Kennedy's 'brain trusts'.
15. For 'multiplicity of interests', see The Federalist, no. 51;
for the importance of 'opinion', ibid., no. 49.
16. This paragraph is mainly based on The Federalist, no. 10.
17. ibid., no. 49.
18. Harrington, Oceana, ed. Liljegren, Heidelberg, 1924, pp.
185^.
19. In De Re Publica, III 23.
20. John Adams in Dissertation on Canon and Feudal law.
21. I am indebted to Zera Fink's important study The Clas-
sical Republicans, Evanston, 1945, for the role the preoccupation
with the permanence of the body politic played in the political
thought of the seventeenth century. The importance of Fink's
study lies in that he shows how this preoccupation transcended
322 . Notes
the care for mere stability, which can be explained by the reli-
gious strife and the civil wars of the century.
22. In Elliot, op. cit., vol. II, p. 364.
23. See The Complete Jefferson, ed, Padover, Modern Lib-
rary edition, pp. 295 ff.
24. Thus Jefferson in a letter to William Hunter, 11 March
1790.
25. In a letter to Samuel Kercheval, 12 July 1816.
26. The two quotations from Paine are from Common Sense
and the Rights of Man, respectively.
27. In the famous letter to Major John Cartwright, 5 June
1824.
28. The much-quoted words occur in a letter from Paris to
Colonel William Stephens Smith, 13 November 1787.
29. In later years, especially after he had adopted the ward
system as 'the article nearest to my heart*, Jefferson was much
more likely to speak of 'the dreadful necessity' of insurrection.
(See especially his letter to Samuel Kercheval, 5 September 1816.)
To blame this shift of emphasis - for it is not much more - on
the changed mood of a much older man seems unjustified in
view of the fact that Jefferson thought of his ward system as
the only possible alternative to what otherwise would be a
necessity, however dreadful.
30. In this and the following paragraph, I am again quoting
from Jefferson's letter to Samuel Kercheval, 12 July 18 16.
31. See Emerson's Journal, 1853.
32. See Lewis Mumford's The City in History, New York,
1961, pp. 328 ff.
33. William S. Carpenter, op. cit., pp. 43-7, notes the diver-
gence between the English and colonial theories of the time
with respect to representation. In England, with Algernon Sid-
ney and Burke, 'the idea was growing that after representatives
have been returned and had taken their seats in the House of
Commons they ought not any longer to have a dependence
upon those they represented*. In America, on the contrary, 'the
right of the people to instruct their representatives [was] a
distinguishing characteristic of the colonial theory of represen-
tation'. In support, Carpenter quotes from a contemporary
Chapter Six -„
Pennsylvanian source: The right of instruction lies with the
constituents and them only, that the representatives are bound
to regard them as the dictates of their masters and are not left at
liberty to comply with them or reject them as they may think
proper'.
34. Quoted from Carpenter, op. cit., pp. 93-4. Present-day
representatives, of course, have not found it any easier to read
the minds and sentiments of those whom they represent. 'The
politician himself never knows what his constituents want him
to do. He cannot take the continuous polls necessary to discover
what they want government to do/ He even has great doubts
that such wants exist at all. For 'in effect, he expects electoral
success from promising to satisfy desires which he himself has
created'. See C. W. Cassinelli, The Politics of Freedom: An
Analysis of the Modern Democratic State, Seattle, 1961, pp.
41 and 45-6.
35. See Carpenter, op. cit., p. 103.
36. This, of course, is Jefferson's opinion of the matter which
he expounded chiefly in letters. See especially the previously
mentioned letter to W. S. Smith, 13 November 1787. About the
'exercise of virtuous dispositions' and of 'moral feelings', he
writes very interestingly in an early letter to Robert Skipwith
on 3 August 1771. It is for him primarily an exercise in imagina-
tion, hence the great taskmasters of such exercises are the poets
rather than the historians, since 'the fictitious murder of Dun-
can by Macbeth in Shakespeare 1 excites in us 'as great a horror of
villainy, as the real one of Henry IV. It is through the poets
that 'the field of human imagination is laid open to our use', a
field that, if confined to real life, would contain too few memor-
able events and acts - history's 'lessons would be too infrequent';
at any event, 'a lively and lasting sense of filial duty is more
effectually impressed on the mind of a son or daughter by read-
ing King Lear, than by all the dry volumes of ethics and divinity
that ever were written'.
37. In a letter to Colonel Edward Carrington, 16 January 1787.
38. I am quoting from Robespierre's report to the Assembly
on the rights of societies and clubs, 29 September 1791 (in
(Euvres, ed. Lefebvre, Soboul, etc., Paris, 1950, vol. VII, no.
324 Npies
361); for the year 1793, 1 am quoting from Albert Soboul, 'Robes-
pierre und die Volksgesellschaften', in Uaximilien Robespierre,
Beitrdge zu seinem 200. Geburtstag, ed. Walter Markov, Berlin,
1958.
39. See Soboul, op. cit.
40. Quoted from the nth number of Le DSfenseur de la Con-
stitution, 1792. See (Euvres completes, ed. G. Laurent, 1939,
vol. IV, p. 328.
41. The formulation is Leclerc's as quoted in Albert Soboul,
'An den Urspriingen der Volksdemokratie : Politische Aspekte
der Sansculottendemokratie im Jahre IF, in Beitrdge zum
neuen Geschichtsbild: Festschrift fur Alfred Meusel, Berlin,
1956.
42. Quoted from Soboul, 'Robespierre und die Volksgesell-
schaften', op. cit.
43. Die Sans\ulotten von Paris: Do\umente zur Geschichte
der Vol\sbewegung 1793-1794, ed. Walter Markov and Albert
Soboul, Berlin (East), 1957. The edition is bilingual. In the fol-
lowing, I quote chiefly from nos. 19, 28, 29, 31.
44. ibid., nos. 59 and 62.
45. In Esprit de la Revolution et de la Constitution de France,
1791; see (Euvres completes, ed. Ch. Vellay, Paris, 1908, vol. I,
p. 262.
46. During his war commission in Alsace in the fall of 1793,
he seems to have addressed a single letter to a popular society,
to that of Strasbourg. It reads : Treres et amis, Nous vous invi-
tons de nous donner votre opinion sur le patriotisme et les vertus
republicaines de chacun des membres qui composent l*adminis-
tration du departement du Bas-Rhin. Salut et FraterniteV See
(Euvres, vol. II, p. 121.
47. In Fragments sur les institutions rSpublicaines, (Euvres,
vol. II, p. 507,
48. This remark - 'Apres la Bastille vaincue ... on vit que
le peuple n'agissait pour Televation de personne, mais pour
l'abaissement de tous' - surprisingly, is Saint-Just's. See his early
work cited in note 45; vol. I, p. 258.
49. This was the judgement of Collot d'Herbois, quoted from
Soboul, op. cit.
Chapter Six 325
50. The Jacobins and the societies affiliated with them are
those which spread terror among tyrants and aristocrats.' ibid.
51. In the letter to John Cartwright, 5 June 1824.
52. This quotation is from a slightly earlier period when Jef-
ferson proposed to divide the counties 'into hundreds'. (See
letter to John Tyler, 26 May 1810.) Clearly, the wards he had in
mind were to consist of about a hundred men.
53. Letter to Cartwright, quoted previously.
54. ibid.
55. Letter to Samuel Kercheval, 12 July 1816.
56. The citations are drawn from the letters just quoted.
57. Letter to Samuel Kercheval, 5 September 1816.
58. Letter to Thomas Jefferson Smith, 21 February 1825.
59. Letter to Cartwright, quoted previously.
60. Letter to John Tyler, quoted previously.
61. The citations are drawn from the letter to Joseph C. Cabell
of 2 February 181 6, and from the two letters to Samuel Ker-
cheval already quoted.
62. George Soule, The Coming American Revolution, New
York, 1934, p. 53.
63. For Tocqueville, see author's Introduction to Democracy
in America; for Marx, Die K!assen](ampfe in Fran\reich, 1840-
1850 (1850), Berlin, 1951, p. 124.
64. In 1871 Marx called the Commune die endlich entdec\te
politische Form, unter der die b\onomische Befreiung der Arbeit
sich vollziehen \6nnte, and called this its 'true secret'. (See Der
Biirger\rieg in Franhreich (1871), Berlin, 1952, pp. 71 and 76.)
Only two years later, however, he wrote : 'Die Arbeiter miissen
... auf die entschiedenste Zentralisation der Gewalt in die
Hande der Staatsmacht hinwirken. Sie diirfen sich durch das
demokratische Gerede von Freiheit der Gemeinden, von Selbst-
regierung usw. nicht irre machen lassen' (in Enthullungen
iiber den Kommunistenprozess zu Koln [Sozialdemokratische
Bibliothek Bd. IV], Hattingen Zurich, 1885, p. 81). Hence,
Oskar Anweiler, to whose important study of die council system,
Die Ratebewegung in Russland 1905-1921, Leiden, 1958, 1 am
much indebted, is quite right when he maintains : 'Die revolu-
tionaren Gemeinderate sind fur Marx nichts weiter als zeit-
326 Notes
weilige politische Kampforgane, die die Revolution vorwartsrei-
ben sollen, er sieht in ihnen nicht die Keimzellen fur eine
grundlegende Umgestaltung der Gesellschaft, die vielmehr von
oben, durch die proletartische zentralistische Staatsgewalt, erfol-
gen soil' (p. 19).
65. I am following Anweiler, op. cit., p, 101.
66. The enormous popularity of the councils in all twentieth-
century revolutions is sufficiently well known. During the Ger-
man revolution of 1918 and 1919, even the Conservative party
had to come to terms with the Rate in its election campaigns.
6j. In the words of Levine, a prominent professional revolu-
tionist, during the revolution in Bavaria: 'Die Kommunisten
treten nur fur eine Raterepublik ein, in der die Rate eine kom-
munistische Mehrheit haben.' See Helmut Neubauer, 'Munchen
und Moskau 1918-1919: Zur Geschichte der Ratebewegung in
Bayern', fahrbiicher fur Geschichte Osteuropas, Beiheft 4, 1958.
68. See the excellent study of The Paris Commune of i8yi,
London, 1937, by Frank Jellinek, p. 27.
69. See Anweiler, op. cit., p. 45.
70. Maurice Duverger - whose book on Political Parties. Their
Organization and Activity in the Modern State (French edition,
1951), New York, 1961, supersedes and by far excels all former
studies on the subject 7- mentions an interesting example. At
the election to the National Assembly in 1871, the suffrage in
France had become free, but since there existed no parties the
new voters tended to vote for the only candidates they knew at
all, with the result that the new republic had become the
'Republic of Dukes'.
71. The record of the secret police in fostering rather than
preventing revolutionary activities is especially striking in France
during the Second Empire and in Czarist Russia after 1880. It
seems, for example, that there was not a single anti-government
action under Louis Napoleon which had not been inspired by
the police; and the more important terroristic attacks in Russia
prior to war and revolution seem all to have been police jobs.
72. Thus, the conspicuous unrest in the Second Empire, for
instance, was easily contradicted by the overwhelmingly favour-
able outcome of Napoleon Ill's plebiscites, these predecessors of
ChapterSix ~ 2 -
our public-opinion polls. The last of these, in 1869, was again a
great victory for the Emperor; what nobody noticed at the time
and what turned out to be decisive a year later was that nearly
15 per cent of the armed forces had voted against the Emperor.
73. Quoted from Jellinek, op. cit., p. 194.
74. One of the official pronouncements of the Parisian Com-
mune stressed this relation as follows: 'C'est cette idee com-
munale poursuivie depuis le douzieme siecle, affirmee par la
morale, le droit et la science qui vient de triompher le 18 mars
1871.' See Heinrich Koechlin, Die Pariser Commune von 1871
im Bewusstsein ihrer Anhanger, Basel, 1950, p. 66,
75. Jellinek, op. cit., p. 71.
76. Anweiler, op. cit., p. 127, quotes this sentence by Trotsky.
77. For the latter, see Helmut Neubauer, op. cit.
78. See Oskar Anweiler, 'Die R&e in der ungarischen Revolu-
tion*, in OsteuropUy vol. VIII, 1958.
79. Sigmund Neumann, 'The Structure and Strategy of
Revolution : 1848 and 1948', in The Journal of Politics, August
1949.
80. Anweiler, op. cit., p. 6, enumerates the following general
characteristics: '1. Die Gebundenheit an eine bestimmte ab-
hangige oder unterdruckte soziale Schicht, 2. die radikale Demo-
kratie als Form, 3. die revolutionise Art der Entstehung', and
then comes to the conclusion : 'Die diesen Raten zugrundelieg-
ende Tendenz, die man als "Rategedanken" bezeichnen kann,
ist das Streben nach einer moglichst unmittelbaren, weitgehen-
den und unbeschrankten Teilnahme des Einzelnen am offent-
lichen Leben . . .'
81. In the words of the Austrian socialist Max Adler, in the
pamphlet Democratic und Ratesystem, Vienna, 1919. The book-
let, written in the midst of the revolution, is of some interest
because Adler, although he saw quite clearly why the councils
were so immensely popular, nevertheless immediately went on
to repeat the old Marxist formula according to which the coun-
cils could not be anything more than merely *eine revolutionare
Uebergangsform', at best, 'eine neue Kampfform des sozialist-
xschen Klassenkampfes*.
82. Rosa Luxemburg's pamphlet on The Russian Revolution,
328 Notes
translated by Bertram D. Wolfe, 1940, from which I quote, was
written more than four decades ago. Its criticism of the 'Lenin-
Trotsky theory of dictatorship' has lost nothing of its pertinence
and actuality. To be sure, she could not foresee the horrors of
Stalin's totalitarian regime, but her prophetic words of warning
against the suppression of political freedom and with it of pub-
lic life read today like a realistic description of the Soviet
Union under Khrushchev : 'Without general elections, without
unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free
struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, be-
comes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy
remains the active element. Public life gradually falls asleep, a
few dozen party leaders of inexhaustible energy and boundless
experience direct and rule. Among them, in reality only a dozen
outstanding heads do the leading and an elite of the working
class is invited from time to time to . . . applaud the speeches of
the leaders, and to approve proposed resolutions unanimously -
at bottom, then, a clique affair . . .'
83. See Jellinek, op. cit., pp. 129 ff.
84. See Anweiler, op. cit., p. no.
85. It is quite characteristic that in its justification of the dis-
solution of the workers' councils in December 1956 the Hun-
garian government complained : 'The members of the workers'
council at Budapest wanted to concern themselves exclusively
with political matters,' See Oskar Anweiler's article quoted pre-
viously.
86. Thus Duverger, op. cit., p. 419.
87. Quoted from Heinrich Koechlin, op. cit., p. 224.
88. For details of this process in Russia, see Anweiler's book,
op. cit., pp. 155-8, and also the same author's article on Hungary.
89. Duverger, op. cit., p. 393, remarks rightly : 'Great Britain
and the Dominions, under a two-party system, are profoundly
dissimilar from Continental countries under a multi-party sys-
tem, and . . . much closer to the United States in spite of its
presidential regime. In fact, the distinction between single-party,
two-party, and multi-party systems tends to become the funda-
mental mode of classifying contemporary regimes.' Where, how-
ever, the two-party system is a mere technicality without being
Chapter Six ~ 2 g
accompanied by recognition of the opposition as an instrument
of government, as for instance in present-day Germany, it prob-
ably will turn out to be of no greater stability than the multi-
party system.
90. Duverger, who notices this difference between the Anglo-
Saxon countries and the continental nation states, is, I think,
quite wrong in crediting an 'obsolete' liberalism with the advan-
tages of the two-party system.
91. I am again using Duverger - op. cit., pp. 423 ff. - who,
in these paragraphs, however, is not very original but only ex-
presses a widespread mood in postwar France and Europe.
92. The greatest and somehow inexplicable shortcoming of
Duverger's book is his refusal to distinguish between party and
movement. Surely he must be aware that he would not even be
able to tell the story of the Communist party without noticing
the moment when the party of professional revolutionists turned
into a mass movement. The enormous differences between the
Fascist and Nazi movements and the parties of the democratic
regimes were even more obvious.
93. This was the evaluation of the United Nations' Report on
the Problem of Hungary, 1956. For other examples, pointing in
the same direction, see Anweiler's article, cited earlier.
94. See the interesting study of the party system by C. W.
Cassinelli, op. cit., p. 21. The book is sound as far as American
politics are concerned. It is too technical and somewhat super-
ficial in its discussion of European party systems.
95. Cassinelli, op. cit., p. 77, illustrates with an amusing ex-
ample how small the group of voters is who have a genuine and
disinterested concern for public affairs. Let us assume, he says,
that there has been a major scandal in government, and that as
a result of it the opposition party is being voted into power. 'If,
for example, 70 per cent of the electorate votes both times and
the party receives 55 per cent of the ballots before the scandal
and 45 per cent afterward, primary concern for honesty in gov-
ernment can be attributed to no more than 7 per cent of the elec-
torate, and this calculation ignores all other possible motives
for changes of preference.' This, admittedly, is a mere assump-
tion, but it certainly comes pretty close to reality. The point of
33° "Notes
the matter is not that the electorate obviously is not equipped to
find out corruption in government, but that it cannot be trusted
to vote corruption out of office.
96. With these words, it appears, the Hungarian trade unions
joined the workers' councils in 1956. We know, of course, the
same phenomenon from the Russian Revolution and also from
the Spanish Civil War.
97. These were the reproaches levelled against the Hungarian
Revolution by the Yugoslav Communist party. See Anweiler's
article. These objections are not new; they were raised in much
the same terms over and over again in the Russian Revolution,
98. Duverger, op. cit., p. 425.
99. ibid., p. 426.
100. Rene Char, Feuillets d'Hypnos, Paris, 1946. For the
English translation, see Hypnos Wa\ing: Poems and Prose,
New York, 1956.
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'.$<
Index
Absolutism, 24, 26, 39, 91, 122, 124,
146, 148, 155-60, 171, 179, 18&-9,
190, 194-7, 218, 311
Absolute monarchy, see Absolutism
Abundance, 22, 64, 70, 139, 166
Achilles, 209
Action, 173, 212-13, 234, 273, 281;
and power, 175
Acton, Lord, 104, 109, 112, 244,
289, 292-4
Adams, John, 23, 34, 39, 46, 67, 69-
7°» 77» 84, 118-21, 129, 136, 140,
141-2, 146, 152, 175, 181, 185-6,
190-91, 195-6, 203, 207, 230-31,
2 37. 2 75. 296* 3?3-4» 3™» 3*4J ° n
power, 152; on happiness, 296-7;
on lawlessness, 298; on philoso-
phy, 315
Adams, John Quincy, 198
Adams, Samuel, 178, 297, 311
Adler, Max, 263, 327
Administration, 91, 273-4; rod
parties, 272
Aeneas, 187, 205, 209, 317
Africa, 73
Afterlife, 131-2, 230
Alcibiades, 35
Alexandria, 69
America, 121, 132; and Europe, 24-
5, 68, 71-2, 92, 138, 195, 215, 220,
222, 235; and social contract, 171;
and Russia, 217-18; see also North
America, United States of
America, Colonial America
American colonists, 173, 177^8
American Dream, 139
American foreign policy, 217
American frontier, 93
American primaries, 276
Ancien rigime, 50, 109, 117, 259
Antiquity, 21-2, 27, 34, 123, 186,
197, 223, 230; Greek, 12, 19, 30-
31, 101-2, 129, 186-7, 1961 3 J 3;
Roman, 12-13, 37» 39. 45"6» 74»
107, 117-18, 187-8, 196, 202, 206-7
Aquinas, Thomas, 131
Arbeiter- und Soldatenrate, 262
Argenson, Marquis de, 78
Aristocracy, 223, 226, 279
Aristocrats, 122
Aristotle, 16, 19, 22* 34, 36, 150
Aron, Raymond, 16, 283
Articles of Confederacy, 145
Asia, 73
Atheism, 191
Athens, 196-7, 281, 285
Atlantic Civilization, 121-2, 195, 3x1
Augustine, 27, 124, 211, 213
Augustus, 210
Aulard, Alphonse, 98, 284
Authoritarian government, 278
Authority, 37, " Z17-18, . 195, 199;
American concept of, 200; Roman
concept of, 179-202; loss of, 260,
265; and religion, 159-60; and
revolution, 116; and power, 155-6,
178-9, 200
Bacon, Francis, 112
Bagehot, Walter, 162, 198
34^
Index
Bakunin, 261
Balance of power, 303-4
Barker, Ernest, 107, 293
Barrot, Odysse, 266
Bastille, 47-50, 99, 215
Bavarian Rdterepttbli\ t 262
Beard, Charles, ^
Becker, Carl L., 129
Beginning, 20, 21, 198, 204-6; and
birth, 211-12; Latin word for,
201; Greek word for, 213; Roman
concept of, 213; Hebrew concept
of, 206
Being and appearance, 101-2
Berlin, 262
Bible, 190, 205, 315
Bill of Rights, 32, 108, 143, 147,
152, 194, 250, 252
Blackstone, William, 32, 162, 185,
2 95
Blanc, Louis, 98
Bodin, Jean, 24, 36, 156, 287
Bolshevik party, 66, 99-100, 247,
258, 265, 305
Bolshevik purges, 100
Boorstin, Daniel, 219, 319
Bourbons, 51
Bousset, W.,317
Bracton, 154, 190-91
Brain trust, 321
British Commonwealth, 268
British constitution, 145, 156, 177-8,
301, 3"
British government, 226, 277
British history, 147
British monarchy, 162
Brown, R. E., 292
Bryce, James, 307, 309
Budapest, 262, 267, 328
Bureaucracy, 91
Burke, Edmund, 45, 108, no, 117-
18, 148, 322
Burnaby, Andrew, 68
Cain and Abel, 20, 38, 87-8
Cambridge Agreement, 107, 309
Capitalism, 217
Capponi, Gino, 285-6
Carpenter, William S., 301, 319,
322-3
Cassinclli, C. W., 323, 332
Catiline, 35
Cato, 201, 248-9
Char, Rcne\ 215, 280
Checks and balances, 151, 152, 238,
251, 302
China, 216, 287
Chinard, Gilbert, 301, 316
Chinese Revolution, 144
Christ, 190, 194
Christianity, 25-7, 33, 36, 45, 70,
83, 95, xox, 104, 161, 194, an,
230, 280
Cicero, 36, 202, 207, 230, 314
Civil rights and liberties, 32, 34,
115, 126-7, 133-5* M3» 221
Civil war, 17, 34
Class consciousness, 63
Classless society, 272
Class society, 163
Cohn, Norman, 284
Coke, Sir Edward, 285
Collot d'Hcrbois, 324
Colonial America, 174, 180, 268,
315-16
Colonization, 92-3
Commager, Henry S. , 306, 310 >
Commandments, the Ten, 189
Commune, see Parisian Commune
Communism, 218, 258, 329-30
Compact, 181, 307; see also Cov-
enant
Compassion, 71, 72, 75, 79-90,
94-5, 222, 246; and violence,
86-7
Condorcct, 18, 29, 31, 183, 215,
283
Confederacy, 153
Congress, 131, 276
Connecticut, 167-8
Conscience, 102-3
Consent, 76, 171-2, 177, 181
Index
343
Conservatism, 41, 44, 162, 197,
223, 283, 326
Conspiracy, 182
Constituent Assembly, see National
Assembly
Constitutional government, 132-3,
137, 143, 145-6, 151, 158-9
Constitutional monarchy, 134
Constitution, American, 68, 95, 115,
136, 142, 145-6, 150, 153-8, 165,
183-4, 191, 193, 197-8, 200, 203-
4. 234-5, 239, 250-51, 252-3,
298, 301, 304-5, 313; and its
amendments, 202; and religion,
198
Constitution-making, 126, 141-4,
166 , 235, 307
Constitutions, 121, 125-6, 132, 158,
164, 166; European, 144-6, 164;
French, 75; written, 157, 164,
307
Constitution-worship, 198, 203-4
Constitution, word for, 145, 203
Cooper, James Fcnimore, 136, 143,
298, 299
Copernicus, 42
Cornford, F. M., 186-7, 3*3
Corruption, 67, 80, 98, 104-7, 251-
2, 273; and poverty, 67
Cor win, Edward S., 136, 162, 285,
289, 298, 305
Cotton, John, 171, 309
Council system, 247-55, 256, 261-3,
325; and party system, 258, 265-6,
273; and workers' councils, 274-
5; in Hungary, 266; see also
Soviets
Counter-revolution, 18, 45, 49, 54,
100, 183, 265, 283
Coup d'etat, 34
Court society, 104-5, 122
Couthon, 241
Covenant, 167-71, 175, 309; colon-
ial, 168; of Israel, 172; see also
Compact
Craven, W. F., 213, 308, 318, 319
Crevccoeur, Hector St John de, 24,
46, 92, 135, 140, 284, 292
Cromwell, Oliver, 43, 196, 208,
261
Danton, 58.
Declaration of Independence, 24,
95, 126-32, 141, 148, 149, 157,
166, 177, 183, 185, 191-3, 199,
234-5. 3o8
Declaration of the Rights of Man,
45, 148, 183
Democracy, 22, 30, 36, 140, 15*,
223, 269, 306, 308; word, 120;
and public opinion, 225; and
party system, 277; and republic,
164, 224, 226, 236
Descartes, 46, 97
Dcsmoulins, 48, 292
Deterrent, 15-16
Dickinson, John, 128, 142, 169, 176,
296, 299
Dictatorship, 158-9, 163; Roman
concept of, 207, 208; revolution-
ary, 121, 158; see also One-party
dictatorship
Dictatorship of the proletariat, 257
Division of power, see Separation
of powers
Dostoevski, Fcodor, 82-8, 96
Duvcrgcr, Maurice, 266, 268, 270,
277» 328-30
Economics, 62-3
Education, 72-3
Egalitarian society, 113, 277, 279
Elite, 275-80
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 235
Engels, Friedrich, y^ 7 272
England, 43, 127, 134, 148, 168,
180, 268, 301, 310, 315, 322, 328
English civil wars, 43, 158
Enlightened absolutism, see Abso-
lutism
Enlightenment, 51, 80, 95, 124, 174,
185, 191-2, 197, 219, 227
344
Index
Equality, 25, 30-31, 40, 45, 72, 108,
1 35 r 164, 166, 170, 172-3, 193,
248, 278; and authority, 279
Euclid, 192
Europe, 23-4, 53, 55, 66, 71, 94,
116-17, 138-9, 145-6, 266, 277;
and America, 138, 216, 311
European governments, 265
Evil, 81-2, 174
Executive branch of government,
199
Exploitation, 62
Faction, 93
Fascism, 329
Faulkner, William, 320
Federal Convention, 165
Federal government, 251
Federalism, 150, 166, 169, 171, 245,
267, 278-9, 303; in Europe, 246;
and republics, 168
Feudalism, 312
Fink, Zera S., 316, 318, 321
First World War, 13, 14-15, 18,
144, 146, 271
Florence, 286
Forms of government, 56, 91, 316
Forster, Georg, 49
Foundation, 38, 41, 92, 160-61; see
also Constitution; act of, 175,
195-6, 199, 202-5, 222-3; process
of, 175; legends of, 204-7; Roman
concept of, 198, 203, 207-8; and
fabrication, 208
Founding Fathers, 24, 55, 68, 70,
73» 93. "I, 129, 137, 139, 147,
199, 203, 225, 228-31, 316; and
democracy, 226; and philosophy,
219; realism of, 73, 174; agree-
ment between, 297
France, 48, 52, 67, 74, 104, no,
117, 1 18-19, I2 5> 132-3, 146, 216,
266, 270-71,, 287; Constitutional
history of, 163
Franco-Prussian War, 15
Franklin, Benjamin, 44, 6y t 310
Freedom, and abundance, 137, 138-
9; and equality, 31, 275; and
foundation, 232-4; and happiness,
113; and liberation, 29-33, 234;
and necessity, 54, 59-60 63-4;
and power, 137, 150-51, 301-2;
foundation of, in, 125, 142;
from politics, 280; passion for,
125; public, 118, 123-5; and vio-
lence, 114, 116-17
Free enterprise, 217
Friedrich, Carl J., 143, 299
Fundamental Orders of Connecti-
cut, 167-8, 266, 309
Galileo, 46
General will, 60, 76-9, 97, 156, 183,
291
German Idealism, 52
German Revolution of 1918, 326
Germany, 52, 262, 271, 329; and
France, 146
Gironde, 49, 75
Gladstone, William E., 144
Goodness, 81-2, 98, in
Glorious Revolution, 43, 136
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 54
Great Awakening, 309
Grene, David, 285
Griewank, Karl, 287, 288
Grotius, Hugo, 192
Guicciardini, Francesco, 288
Hamilton, Alexander, 49, 153, 200,
214, 225, 231, 304; on democracy,
306
Happiness, 61, 75, 115-40, 246; pub-
lic and private, 128; new word in
Europe, 75, 245; see also Public
happiness
Haraszti, Zoltan, 291, 318
Harrington, James, 22, 119, 164,
171, 196, 202, 207-8, 213, 224,
230-31,302-3,318,321
Hebert, 58, no
Hector, 209
Index
345
Hegel, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm,
51-2, 54, 64, 113, 228
Henry IV of France, 287-8
Herodotus, 30, 31, 285
Higher Law, 161-3, 182-4, 188-90,
194
Hiroshima, 17
Historiography, American, 99, 219-
20, 316, 319; Florentine, 288;
French, 98
History, concept of, 27, 51, 55;
philosophy of, 52, 113
Hitchborn, Benjamin, 157, 305
Hitler, Adolf, 65, 265
Hobbes, Thomas, 46, 171, 302
Holy Roman Empire, 117
Homer, 209, 317
House of Commons, 322
House of Lords, 226
Hume, David, 202
Hungarian Revolution, 112, 271,
Hungarian Revolution, 112, 271,
330
Hungary, 267
Hypocrisy, 81 , 96-106
Ideologies, 11,57,223
Immigrants, 136, 138-9, 148, 168
Immortality, 286
Industrial Revolution, 63, 259
Interest, 22, 135-6; and opinion,
226-7; an( * representation, 269
Intimacy, 88
Isis cult, 211
Isonomy, 30, 285
Italy, 36, 266, 271, 286
Italian city-states, 40, 159
Jacobin club, 245, 247
Jacobin government, 243, 245
Jacobins, 75, 241, 325
James, Henry, 124
Jaspers, Karl, 283
Jay, John, 33
Jefferson, Thomas, 25, 33, 67-8, 71,
72, 93> "6-31, 136, *39» 176.
191-4, 231-9, 244, 249-55, 279.
303» 3™> 3 2 3> 3 2 5'» °a Constitu-
tion, 233, 235; on democracy, 306;
on philosophy, 318; on republics,
232
Jellinek, Frank, 259
Jensen, Merrill, 157-8, 177, 305, 311
Jesus of Nazareth, 82, 85
Joachim di Fiore, 26
Jones, Howard Mumford, 128, 295-
6
Judgement, 229
Judicial control, 200, 226
Judiciary, 199-200
Kant, Im.nanuel, 54, 229
Kantorowicz, Ernst, 155-6
Khrushchev, Nikita, 218, 328
Kingship, see Monarchy
Kierkegaard, Soeren, 96
Lamartine, Alphonsc, 260
La Rochefoucauld, 104-5
Latin America, 73
Law, 84, 90; American concept of,
314-15; Greek concept of, 186;
Hebrew concept of, 189-90;
Roman concept of, 186-8, 210;
traditional concept of, 195; source
of 157, 161; mathematical, 193;
and power, 151, 156, 159, 163,
166, 183, 305
Lawmaking, 161, 183-4; sec a ^ SQ
Legislation
Law of Suspects, 96
Leclerc, 241, 324
Legislation, in antiquity, 187, 313
Legislators, 39, 207; ancient concept
of, 186-7
Legislative branch of government,
199
Leisure, 123
Le Mercier de la Riviere, 192
Lenin, 11, 65, 79, 100, 218, 250,
256, 259, 328; and the soviets %
257. 265
346
Index
Levellers, 43
Levine, Eugcn, 258, 326
Liancourt, Due de La Rochefou-
cauld, 47-8, 104, 288
Liberalism, 72, 140, 221
Liberation and freedom, 40-41,
74-5, 142, 299
Livingstone, William, 161
Livy, 13, 313
Locke, John, 23, ^, 169, 171, 185,
224, 300
Louis XIV, 105
Louis XVI, 47-8, 91, 105, no
Luther, Martin, 26, 184
Luxemburg, Rosa, 264, 327-8
Lycurgus, 312
Lyons, 292
McDonald, Forrest, 292, 300
Machiavelli, Niccolo, 36-9, 101-4,
197, 202, 207-8, 286-7, 288
Madison, James, 93, 127-8, 136-8,
152-3, 165, 168-9, 199-200, 203,
222, 226, 236, 304, 306, 312; on
government, 296; on state govern-
ment, 152-3
Magna Charta, 143, 299
Maistrc, Joseph de, 18, 283
Maitland,F. W., 155
Majority rule, 164-5
Markov, Walter, 289, 290
Marx, Karl, 22, 25, 50, 54, 61-6,
69, 73, 106, 113, 250, 255-7, 2 58,
288, 327
Marxism, 61, 65, 261
Mason, George, 296
Massachusetts, 149, 167, 306, 311,
314
Massachusetts Bay Company, 309
Mass movement, 270, 279, 329
Mass society, 139, 270, 279
Mather, Cotton, 320
Mathiez, Albert, 98
Mayflower Compact, 167, 173, 308
Melville, Herman, 80-88, 101
Men of letters, 120-32, 219, 259,
Michelet, Jules, 98
Middle Ages, 26, 40, 197, 255
Mill, John Stuart, 140
Milton, John, 196, 208, 315
Mirabcau, Comte de, 116, 246
Misfortune, 94-5, 109-14
Mixed form of government, 150-1,
231, 320
Monarchy, 30, 33, 36, 49-50, 136,
178; and happiness, 295; versus
republic, 91, 129-30, 134, 219,
238, 297, 310
Monroe, James, 66-^ t 289
Montaigne, Michel de, 96, 122
Montesquieu, 24, 90, 116-18, 122,
150-52, 156, 169, 185, 196, 224,
301-4; on Law, 188-9, 3 02 ; oa
republics, 153; on power, 301-3
Morgan, Edmund S., 145, 300-301
Multi-party system, 266, 328-9
Mumford, Lewis, 235, 286
Munich, 262
Mutatio rerunty 21, 36
Napoleon Bonaparte, 50, 52, 73,
163, 254
Napoleon III, 326-7
National Assembly (French), 109-
10, 163, 187, 222-3, 241-2, 246-7,
254
Nationalism, 77, 158
Nation-state, 24, 53, 77, 156, 158-9,
160, 166, 171, 174, 195, 197, 245,
247, 257, 287; and party system,
265
Natural Law, 129, 185-6, 189-90
Necessity, 13, 132; biological, 59,
64-5, no, 114; and freedom, 112;
doctrine of, 113; historical, 48,
5 J -3» 5 6 » 59» I0 °; and liberation,
39-4°» 74» 14273. 299; and
violence, 63-4, 115
Negro slavery, 71-2
Neumann, Sigmund, 262, 327
New England, 67, 168, 306-7;
townships, 251
Index
347
New Hampshire, 306
Newton, Isaac, 150, 302
Nietzsche, Friedrich, $6
Norden, Eduard, 317
North America, 23, 55, 118, 127,
135-6, 168, 177-8, 268; colonial
history of, 267
Novelty, 34, 41, 46-8, 212
Novas or do saeclorum, 26, 46, 68,
172, 210-12
Nuclear warfare, 13, 15-16
Oath of the Tennis Court, 120, 125
Obedience, 228
October Revolution, see Russian
Revolution
Old Testament, 172, 190, 205, 315
Oligarchy, 21,30, 36
Ollivier, Albert, 289, 291
One-party dictatorship, 247-8, 258,
263, 266, 268, 273, 305
Opinion, 268-9; and authority,
227-8; in government, 226; and
truth, 229; see also Public opin-
ion
Original sin, 87
Otis, James, 301
Ovid, 317
Oxford, 107
Paine, Thomas, 45, 68, 145, 196,
203, 233, 289
Palmer, Robert R., 97, 138, 181,
292, 298, 312
Paris, 48, 6y, y$, 113,259
Parisian Commune, 89, 239, 242,
246; sections of, in, 292; of 1871,
64,250, 256-7, 261,266, 327
Parliament, 148, 236, 247-8, 271,
276; in Europe, 186; in England,
310
Parmenides, 229
Parrington, Vernon L., 140, 298
Party, 94, 270-71; and Councils,
257-8, 265-6, 271, 273; and demo-
cracy, 277; and movement, 329;
and parliament, 247-8; see also
Multi-party system, One-party
dictatorship, Two-party system
Pascal, Blaise, 96, 122
Pasternak, Boris, 17
Paul, Saint, 230
Pendleton, Edmund, 138
Pcnn, William, 71
Pennsylvania, 200, 301, 322-3
People, deification of, 182; Amer-
ican concept of, 93-4; French con-
cept of, 74-8, 93-4, 106-7, *57>
179, 290; and masses, 270; Roman
concept of, 166, 178, 188
Peoples' democracies, 305
Pericles, 177
Permanent revolution, 51, 133-4*
•144
Persona, 106-8, 293
Philosophes, 124, 216; see also Men
of letters
Philosophy, and French Revolu-
tion, 53; and American Revolu-
tion, 219, 229
Pilgrim Fathers, 167, 230, 319
Pity, 85, 94; and compassion, 89
Plato, 21-2, 102, 129, 131, 187, 192,
213,229,313,318
Plebiscite, 228, 326-7
Plutarch, 312
Political science, 52, 121, 149, 177,
231,238,255
Polybius, 21, 42, 150-51, 284, 312
Popular societies, 239-44, 254, 324
Poverty, 23, 60, 66, 74, 91, 94, 108,
112, 114, 123, 137, 221; in Amer-
ica, 67-70
Power, 91, 150, 170-71; American
concept of, 166-7; and authority,
155-7, W* 20 °; anc * freedom,
150; French concept of, 181-2;
constitution of, 150; and law, 159,
163; mistrust in, 146-7; and
strength, 166, 175; see also
Balance of power, Separation of
powers
34 8
Index
Professional revolutionists, see Revo-
lutionists
Promise, 170-71, 175-7, 214
Property, 60, 180, 252
Protestantism, 190
Proudhon, Pierre- Joseph, 51, 261
Prudence, 219, 315
Public happiness, 72, 119, 126-35,
141, 234, 235, 255, 269, 279
Public opinion, 76, 93, 221-8, 245
Purges, 99-100
Puritanism, 308-9
Puritans, 139, 172, 230, 308, 319
Radicals, 162
Raison d'&at, 77
Raynal, Abb6, 23, 284
Realpoliti\, 105
Reason and passion, 95, 225, 229
Rebellion, 39-40, 47-8; and revolu-
tion, 142
Reformation, 26
Reign of Terror, 99, 105, 108
Religion, 161, 286; Roman con-
cept of, 198, 201; and govern-
ment, 162
Religious sanction, 171, 185-6, 189-
91,196
Renaissance, 36-8, 43, 196, 286,
320
Representation, 69, 143, 226, 236,
237, 240, 268, 272-3, 291, 309;
versus action, 273; in the colonies,
236, 322; and democracy, 166;
and party system, 270
Representative government, 226,
251-2, 263, 269; and ward system,
254-5
Republic, 33, 91, 121, 129, 134,
169, 171, 182-4, 219; versus
aristocracy, 226; and corruption,
251; and democracy, 164, 166,
223, 236; versus monarchy, 297,
310
Resistance movement, French, 280
Restoration, 37, 43-5, 154-5
Revolution, history of, 50-51, 61,
70, 255-6; spectacle of, 51, 288;
word, 35, 41-3, 47, 48-9, 55;
revolutions, European, 222; twen-
tieth-century, 115
Revolution of 1848, 260-62
Revolutionary calendar, 29, 36
Revolutionary government, 60,
i33-4> *37i M 1 * x 44> 233, 242,
292; and communal movement,
244
Revolutionary law, 183
Revolutionary parties, 248-9, 257,
259, 264-5, 274; and councils,
273
Revolutionary spirit, 46, 126, 132-3,
142, 174, 221-2, 231, 239; and
federalism, 266; and foundation,
222-3, 231-2; and ward system,
232
Revolutionary tradition, 79, 90, 95,
105, 216, 221, 249, 258
Revolutionary wars, 258
Revolutionists, 24, 54, 57, 59, 79,
90, in, 115, 134, 221, 257-60,
262, 265, 273, 329
Rights of Man, 32, 53, 61, 84, 108-
9, 148-9, 233; see also Declaration
of the Rights of Man
Robertson, William, 308
Robespierre, Maximilien, 29, 37,
39. 4 6 > 49~5°» 57-9» 65, 74~5. 82,
85, 89-90, 93-6, no, 120-21,
132-4, 137, 141, 158, 182-7,
190-1, 207, 208, 231-3, 241-7,
288, 291-2, 314; and popular
societies, 240-41; and Rousseau,
97; and virtue, 97
Roman Empire, 117, 155, 161, 194,
201
Roman Republic, 117, 188, 197
Romans, origin of, 317
Romanticism, 80, 197
Rome, 38, 201, 208, 315; founda-
tion of, 210
Romulus and Remus, 20, 38, 209
Index
349
Rossiter, Clinton, 128, 169, 172,
287, 302, 308-9; on John Adams,
302
Rotation in office, 238
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 71, 76-81,
94, 97, 106, 109, 150, 156, 183-4,
224, 241, 291-2
Rousscauism, 120
Rousselin, Alexandre, no
Royal Charters, 167-8, 177, 307,
310
Royalists, 49
Rush, Benjamin, 141, 149, 236, 301
Russia, 52, 216, 266, 287, 328
Russian Revolution, 52, 58, 65, 99,
144, 155, 158, 247, 257, 262,
265-6, 330
Russian Revolution of 1905, 15, 250,
256, 257, 259, 262, 264
Russo-Japanese War, 15
Saint-Just, Louis de, 49-50, 56, 58,
75» 77* 8 o» 9 1 * " 2 » l 9 6 > 2 43~4»
269-70, 324
Saint-Simon, Louis de Rouvroy, due
de, 104
Sans-culottes, 61, 243, 245, 289
Scandinavia, 146
Schieder, Theodor, 51
Scipio, 207
Second Empire (French), 15, 326
Second World War, 17, 144, 146,
215,271, 280
Secret police, 260, 326
Secularization, 26, 36, 159-61, 230
Selden, John, 236
Self-government, 41
Senate, 224; American, 200, 226-8,
231, 321; Roman, 178, 199-200
Separation of powers, 150-52, 156,
238,251,267,302-3,307-8
September Massacres, 99
Shakespeare, William, 323
Shay's Rebellion, 233
Sieyes, Abbd, 75, 156, 158, 161-4,
183
Slavery, 63, 71, 114
Smith, Adam, 23
Social contract, 169-73, 308
Social question, 22-4, 56, 59-114,
221 ; see also Poverty
Socialism, 65
Socrates, 101-3, 132, 319
Sol berg, Winton U., 306 , 1 1 ,j
Solon, 312 — > Sal ti* r . ^ ^
Sophocles, 281
Soule, George, 325
Sovereignty, 24, 153, 156, 160, 168,
185
Soviet Parliament, 265
Soviet Republic, 265, 273
Soviet Russia, 217, 258, 328
Soviets, 65-6, 247, 249, 257-8,
.364-5
Spanish Civil War, 330
Sparta, 224, 315
Spurlin, P. M.,301
Stalin, Joseph, 65, 79, 218
State, 39
State constitutions, 149, 165, 19I1
295, 300
State governments, 153, 165-6, 251,
300, 306
State of nature, 19, 21, 45, 165-6,
180-81, 185, 188
Strasbourg, 243, 324
Stuarts, 43
Supreme Being, cult of, 184, 190
Supreme Court, 200, 228, 231
Suspicion, 96-7
Switzerland, 146
Taylor, John, 303-4 '
Technology, 65, 114
Terror, 57, 60, 99-100, no, 112,
221, 243, 247, 291; and corrup-
tion, 106; of virtue, 100; see also
Reign of Terror
Theocracy, 308
Theseus, 281
Third Estate, 108, 125
Third Republic (French) 15, 146
350
Index
Thompson, J. M., 120, 190, 289-50,
2 93-4» 312
Thucydidcs, 12, 285
Tocqucville, Alexis de, 30, 45, 52,
57, 61, 113, 118, 125, 132, 137,
166, 177, 220, 222, 245, 255, 260,
294, 310
Totalitarianism, 18, 283
Townships, 38, 166, 236, 239, 250-
51, 261, 286, 306, 310-11
Tradition, Hebrew-Christian, 206;
Roman concept of, 201; Western,
162, 195, 197
Trojan war, 209
Trotsky, Leon, 262, 327
Troy, 187, 205, 208-9, 2I2
Turgot, Robert Jacques, 24, 284
Twelve Table Law, 188
Two-party system, 267-8, 328
Tyranny, 33, 45, 73-4, 91-2, 119-
20, 130, 133, 143, 151, 225-6;
ancient concept of, 186
United States of America, 55, 6y,
125, 134, 168, 181, 216, 235, 238,
267-8, 270, 328; and revolution,
216
Utopian Socialists, 261
Venice, 199, 224, 320
Vergniaud, 49, 58
Vcrri, Pietro, 179, 311
Versailles, 68, 99
Vice, 81-2
Vico, Giovanni, 55
Violence, 18-20, 35, 37-9, 64-5,
83-4, 87-8, 91, 115, 151, 208-9,
221-2; and American Revolution,
213; and freedom, 114; and neces-
sity, 1 13-15; and power, 91
Virgil, 187, 205-12, 317
Virginia, 250, 303, 310
Virginia Company, 167
Virginian Declaration of Rights,
296
Virtue, 81, 290; and Robespierre,
90; and compassion, 85-6
Vocgclin, Eric, 284
War, 11-20, 283; Roman concept of,
210
War of Independence, 67, 141, 176
Ward system, 248-55, 322
Warden, Joseph, 123
Washington, George, 56, 67
Webster, Daniel, 73
Whitfield, J. H„ 286
Will, y6, 225, 321; and interest, 78,
163
William and Mary, King and Queen
of England, 43
Williams, Roger, 308
Wilson, James, 154, 196, 236, 304,
308
Wilson, Woodrow, 198, 200; on
power, 299
Winthrop, John, 309
Women's march to Versailles, 112
Working class, 274
Workers' Councils, 274-5
World history, 53
Wright, Benjamin F., 306
Young, Arthur, 144