21 - The American Revolution

Summary

The American Revolution transformed thinking about politics. Its significance goes beyond the creation of the United States of America. ‘The independence of America, considered merely as a separation from England, would have been a matter of little importance’, wrote Thomas Paine in 1791, ‘had it not been accompanied by a revolution in the principles and practice of government’ (Paine 1989, p. 152). The era of the Revolution was undoubtedly momentously creative in its political thought, but the contributions were collective, not individual; they were the products not of closet philosophising but of contentious political debate. The Revolution spawned no great theorists of the stature of Hobbes, Locke, or Montesquieu; no Rousseau, not even a Burlamaqui or a Pufendorf. The revolutionary leaders were widely read and thoughtful men, but they were not philosophers, and they did not work out their theories in the quiet of a study (though some like James Madison tried to do so). They were experienced, pragmatic political leaders who competed for power, lost and won elections, served in colonial and state legislatures and in the national congress, became governors, judges, even presidents. Yet they were also intensely interested in ideas and concerned with making theoretical sense of what they were doing. Because they were so intimately involved in politics, much of their thinking was polemical and of the moment. They usually had to extemporise in the heat and urgency of debate. Most of their many political writings took the form of pamphlets and newspaper essays, and only occasionally large treatises, such as John Adams’s sprawling Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States (1787–8).