The 4th of July
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
On Thursday 04 July 1776–248 years ago today — the Continental Congress of the not-yet-existing United States approved the Declaration of Independence, which had been submitted two days previously, and the fourth of July is the date that appears on the Declaration of Independence.
There is a well-known story that Benjamin Franklin was asked as he left Independence Hall more than ten years later as the deliberations of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 were in their final days, “Well, Doctor, what have we got — a Republic or a Monarchy?” Franklin’s famous response to this was, “A Republic, madam — if you can keep it.” The source of this anecdote is notes of Dr. James McHenry, a Maryland delegate to the Convention, first published in The American Historical Review, vol. 11, 1906. The qualification — if you can keep it — implies the difficulty of the task of keeping a republic together, and keeping it republican in its constitution. If it were easy, Franklin wouldn’t have bothered to note the qualification. That he did note it, and in the spirit of a witticism, reminds me of another witticism from Benjamin Franklin, from ten years earlier when the Declaration of Independence was signed, and which is quite literally an instance of gallows humor: “Gentlemen, we must now all hang together, or we shall most assuredly all hang separately.”
Stories like this remind us that the men who fomented the American Revolution, and who went on to fight in the Revolutionary War and to hold the Constitutional Convention, were no starry-eyed dreamers. They had no illusions about human nature and human society. They knew that force was the writ of Empire and that the British Empire would bring what force to bear against their rebellious colonists that they were able. The Founding Fathers’ decision to break with England, and their later decision to write the Constitution, was a calculated risk. They reasoned their way to revolution, through revolution, and beyond revolution, and they knew that all that all that they had done, and all that they had risked, could come to ruin. In other words, all that they had done was subject to unforeseen historical contingency. And it nearly did come to ruin in the ensuing war.
The armed conflict actually started a little earlier, on 19 April 1775, with the battles of Lexington and Concord. The Declaration of Independence meant that this armed conflict would escalate into a Revolutionary War, and it did. The Revolutionary War was successfully prosecuted, but not finished until five years later, when Lord Cornwallis was surrounded and surrendered at Yorktown in 1781. It was a long, hard slog. The British were the superpower of the Enlightenment, and the Royal Navy could effectively project power across the Atlantic. The nascent colonial forces had no navy, and could do nothing about the effective British blockade of American ports. Until the Battle of Saratoga in 1777, it was a close-run thing that could have gone either way.
In Sir Edward Creasy’s The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo, Creasy identifies the victory of Americans over Burgoyne at Saratoga as one of these fifteen decisive battles of history, the story of which he tells in Chapter XIII. As an epigraph to this chapter Sir Creasy quotes Philip Henry Stanhope, 5th Earl of Stanhope, Lord Mahon, from his History of England: from the Peace of Utrecht to the Peace of Versailles. 1713–1783, in seven volumes:
“Even of those great conflicts, in which hundreds of thousands have been engaged and tens of thousands have fallen, none has been more fruitful of results than this surrender of thirty-five hundred fighting-men at Saratoga. It not merely changed the relations of England and the feelings of Europe towards these insurgent colonies, but it has modified, for all times to come, the connexion between every colony and every parent state.” (Volume VI, 1774–1780, Boston, 1853, Chapter LVI, page 190)
In other words, the outcome of the Battle of Saratoga had revolutionary consequences, and Lord Mahon neatly positioned the Battle of Saratoga as the proof of concept of revolutionary warfare.
The American revolutionaries hadn’t had much international support up to that time, but the colonial’s victory at Saratoga brought the French into the conflict. The French had been circumspect earlier on, but with the Victory at Saratoga they smelled the possibility of British defeat, and helping the American colonials was their way of countering a geopolitical rival. With the French involvement we see that the American Revolutionary War didn’t occur in an historical or a political vacuum. The backdrop of the geopolitical contest of the 18th century — what we could call the “Great Game” of the Enlightenment — was the Seven Years’ War. In the US we sometimes call this “The French and Indian War,” though this term can be reserved to refer exclusively to the North American theater of the Seven Years’ War.
The future first President of the United States, George Washington, fought as a major in the militia of the British Province of Virginia. In a letter to his brother of 31 May 1754 Washington wrote:
“I fortunately escaped without a wound, tho’ the right Wing where I stood was exposed to & received all the Enemy’s fire and was the part where the man was killed & the rest wounded. I can with truth assure you, I heard Bulletts whistle and believe me there was something charming in the sound.”
The Seven Years’ War is sometimes called the first global war, as it was fought between a British-led coalition and a French-led coalition across the known world at the time. The Seven Years’ War was the 18th century culmination of imperial conflict between France and the British Empire, and the defeat of the French ultimately led to the triumph of the British Empire and its worldwide extent and command of the seas in the nineteenth century. But French defeat in the Seven Years’ War didn’t end the rivalry. The French, who were always a land power, came close to conquering the entire European continent in the next century. So the great power rivalry between English sea power and French land power continued until the Europeans destroyed themselves and their will to fight in the two world wars of the 20th century.
But the Seven Years War was, in a sense, the beginning of the end of this great power rivalry, since it marked the effective end of France as a colonial power in the New World. After their success in helping the American colonials, the French were dealt a blow by the Haitian Revolution in 1791. Eventually, they sold off their possessions in North America to the United States as the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, and Napoleon used the money to fund his land war on the European continent.
The French overseas empire in the New World was in a long and slow decline, and the Seven Years War, the American Revolutionary War, the Haitian Revolution, and the Napoleonic Wars were punctuations in that decline. As an interesting counterfactual, we might consider a world in which the French decline occurred sooner, and the British had established unquestioned supremacy in North America by the time of the American Revolution. Under these changed circumstances, it would have been even more difficult than it was for the American colonists to defeat the British in the Revolutionary War. As it was, the colonial forces only won because they fought an ongoing guerrilla campaign against a distant power, which had to project force across the Atlantic Ocean in order to engage with the colonials.
Even with the disadvantage of having to send its soldiers overseas, the British won most of the battles of the Revolutionary War, and the colonials triumphed in the end because they wore down British willingness to invest blood and treasure in their erstwhile colony. When the colonials did win a major battle, as with the Battle of Yorktown, the British made a political decision to cut their losses and focus on other lands of their global empire. From the British perspective, the loss of their American colonies was the price to be paid for empire — an empire must choose its battles, and not allow itself to get tied down in a quagmire among hostile natives — and it was the right decision at the time, as the British Empire was to continue to expand for another hundred years or more. With the French out of the way, defeated by the British in the Seven Years’ War, and then further crippled by the Haitian Revolution, and the American colonies abandoned, the British could move on to the real prizes, which were China and India.
So I say that the Seven Years’ War was the “big picture” geopolitical context of the American Revolution, and the American Revolution itself in turn triggered the next “big picture” political context for what was to follow, which was the existence of revolutionary republics, and panic on the part of the ruling class of Europe that the revolutionary fervor would spread among their own peoples in a kind of revolutionary contagion.
We can’t overemphasize the impact of the revolutionary spirit, which struck visceral fear into the hearts of Enlightenment-era regimes. And the concern was legitimate. All the royal houses that were spooked by the revolutions in the British colonies, France, and Haiti were eventually either themselves deposed or eased into a graceful retirement as powerless constitutional monarchs who reigned but did not rule. So they were right to be spooked, but the mechanisms by which their countries were transformed into republics constituted on the principle of popular sovereignty were many and various, so it was not revolution per se that these regimes needed to fear, but the implacable progress of an idea whose time had come.
The idea whose time had come was the Enlightenment, which was really a cluster of tightly-coupled ideas about humanity and society — a new reactionary ideology that rejected tradition on principle. This was part, but not all, of the origin of the modern world. The three revolutions that made the modern world were the scientific, political, and industrial revolutions. The scientific revolution had been flourishing for two hundred years, during a period of unprecedented royal absolutism in Europe. The industrial revolution hadn’t yet begun. The political revolution was the Enlightenment, and this was in full swing in the latter half of the 18th century, but up until the American Revolutionary War, the Enlightenment had been something that intellectuals discussed at recently opened coffee houses. The American Revolutionary War made the Enlightenment real.
The political principles of the revolutionary republics founded in the wake of the Enlightenment, of which America was the first, came to represent the next great political paradigm, which is today the unquestioned legitimacy of popular sovereignty. The Americans codified the ideals of the Enlightenment like popular sovereignty in their founding documents. The centerpiece of the Declaration of Independence was a ringing affirmation of what would later, during the French Revolution, be called “The Rights of Man,” and how and why a people with “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind” should go about securing these rights:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”
The famous litany of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness names certain specific instances among the unalienable rights of human beings (a partial, and not an exhaustive list of such rights), and in the very same paragraph the founders have mentioned the Right of the People to alter or to abolish any form of government that becomes destructive to these ends. This is important, and we should give it its full due. The right of the people to alter or abolish a government that is destructive of unalienable rights is itself an unalienable right, though qualified by the condition that established governments should not be lightly overthrown. The Founding Fathers didn’t say that long established governments should never be overthrown, since they were in the process of overthrowing the government of one of the oldest kingdoms in Europe, but that such an action should not be undertaken lightly.
In keeping with the a prioristic language of self-evident truths, the Founders have formulated the right to alter or to abolish in terms of forms of government. In other words, the right to alter or abolish is framed not in terms of particular tyrannical or corrupt regimes, but on the form of the regime. This we could call political Platonism. The Founders were here recognizing that there are a few distinct forms of government, just as there are a few distinct unalienable rights. For the political Platonism of the Anglophone Enlightenment, forms of government and unalienable rights are part of the furniture of the universe.
It has always been the work of revolutions to alter or to abolish forms of government, and this is still true today, although we are much less likely to think in these platonistic terms about the forms of governments and unalienable rights. The idea of rights has become absolutized to a certain extent in the contemporary world, but it is a conflicted absolute idea, because it is an absolute idea stranded in a society that no longer believes in absolute ideas. In just the same way, the governmental tradition of the US is a “stranded asset” of history — an anachronistic relic of the Enlightenment that has survived through several post-Enlightenment periods of history and still survives today.
The language of the Enlightenment can still speak to us today — it has a perennial resonance with human nature — but if you can get a typical representative of our age to engage in a detailed conversation about political ideals, you may or may not find proponents of Enlightenment ideals, such as the perfectibility of man, the throwing off of past superstitions, the belief in progress, the dawning of a new world, and a universalist conception of human nature. These are, now, by-and-large, defunct ideas. But not entirely. In many cases we find these ideas still with us, but in a greatly modified form. If you do find Enlightenment ideals invoked today, you will find them in a very different form than the form that they took among the Enlightenment Founders of the American republic. Note here my use of “form” and again the Platonism that implies. New forms have been added to history since the founding of the republic.
Those today who most passionately believe in the Enlightenment ideals of progress, perfectibility, and a new world on the horizon are, by and large, futurists and transhumanists. They believe, often enthusiastically, sometimes zealously, in an optimistic vision of a better future, although the future they envision would be, for some among us, not optimism but a paradigm of a moral horror — human beings altered beyond all recognition and leading lives that have little or no relationship to human lives as they have been lived since the beginning of civilization. Transhumanists also believe in the right of the people to alter or to abolish institutions that they believe have become destructive of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — but the institutions they seek to alter or abolish are none other than the institutions of the human body and the human mind. Platonistically speaking, the transhumanists want to overthrow the form of the human body and the form of the human mind, both far older than any form of government, and presumably not to be lightly altered or abolished. Here Enlightenment ideals have miscagenated with technological progress and their lovechild is a disembodied mind uploaded into a computer. This is the post-industrial revolution Enlightenment.
The American Revolution gave us an enduring vision of freedom, but this vision has mutated repeatedly as new forms have entered into history, as we have seen with transhumanism. This kind of conceptual mutation is a consequence of the narrative structure of history, since old and established ideas are modified in light of new ideas and later developments. During the 18th century, old and established ideas of political legitimacy were being modified by forms of thought introduced by the Enlightenment. Now it is the Enlightenment that is the old and established idea, and it is being modified in light of new forms being introduced into history, and the past quarter of the millennium has introduced many new forms into the historical process, changing how we understand the Enlightenment. Inevitably, this means that how we understand a nation-state explicitly founded on Enlightenment principles has changed, and will continue to change, as novel forms enter into the historical process.
Our conception of freedom, which has, on the one hand, become absolutized much like our conception of rights, has, on the other hand, changed significantly. It was changed by John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, published in 1859; it was changed by the industrial revolution; it was changed by the growth of cities and the advent of mass society; it was changed by planetary-scale industrialized warfare; It was changed by consumerism; and it’s been changed, and continues to be changed, by the growth of scientific knowledge and the technologies this knowledge enables. No one voted for any of these things. They occurred as part of the historical process. So we see that even in a world in which popular sovereignty is the unquestioned source of political legitimacy, it is powerless to shape the most consequential historical developments.
The great historical developments since the founding of the republic are the expression of the indeterminism of history, which is itself a function of human freedom, which we would like to believe is codified in popular sovereignty. But the historical process demonstrates to us that human freedom limits human freedom. If human freedom were something ideal and absolute, it wouldn’t be subject to revision as a consequence of technological change, or any change in contingent circumstances. While we often think of freedom as an ideal, it is rather grounded in pragmatic realities of action. If a lever or an inclined plane make it possible for you to do something that it was impossible to do without them, then these machines have expanded the scope of human agency; more choices are available as a result, and the degrees of human freedom are multiplied. The same can be said of the social technologies of government: if you can do something with them that you cannot do without them, you have expanded the scope of human freedom. But you have also expanded the possibilities for dysfunctional and tyrannical political regimes.
The hard-headed attitude of the founders of the republic understood that freedom is grounded in the pragmatic realities of action. It isn’t enough merely to keep the republic, as though preserved under glass. It isn’t a museum piece, though I implied it resembles a museum piece when I said that it is a stranded asset of history. The trajectory of its evolution must be managed, so that it continues to facilitate freedom under the changing conditions to which it is subject. Freedom is subject to contingencies as the fate of the republic is subject to contingencies. The challenge remains the same challenge Franklin threw back at his questioner: “If you can keep it.”
Video Presentation
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