CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

What Kind of Revolution?

Surrender of Lord Cornwallis by John Trumbull – Public Domain

The American Revolution was undoubtedly revolutionary, but what exactly does this imply about our world today? To be sure, the Declaration of Independence articulated a universal idealism that helped establish the modern era and put a major nail in the coffin of the ancient regime. Applying Locke’s defense of the Glorious Revolution (e.g., the establishment of government based on consent with the threat of withdrawal, natural rights, and the invocation of universal — male and otherwise exclusionary — liberty and equality), 1776 was revolutionary insofar as it would have been unthinkable, and likely considered blasphemous, for someone like Jefferson to assert in the Middle Ages that he was the equal of a king. More concretely, after 1776 revolutionary ideas were exported, often via French officers who had aided the Revolution, back to Europe where they ultimately helped produce the French Revolution, which in turn helped inspire among other events the Haitian Revolution, the Revolutions of 1848, and the Egyptian and Ottoman reforms, which is not to mention the numerous U.S. reform movements that succeeded in part by calling the Declaration’s various bluffs.

How then are we to make sense of a revolution that invoked universal Enlightenment ideals yet whose foundational document excludes the majority of humanity and was authored by a slaveholder? The prevailing narrative is that the Declaration and the Constitution, in particular its Bill of Rights, planted seeds of universal equality and liberty whose growth was simply a matter of........

© CounterPunch