Culture and Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution (review)

How did liberty become the central theme and binding metaphor of the new United States after the American Revolution? How could leading Revolutionaries evoke natural rights and universal liberty while personally denying both to their own slaves and deliberately building polities to exclude most other people? Rozbicki builds his unfailingly intelligent meditation on Revolutionary liberty upon a close and deep reading of what such leaders said and wrote, and, to a lesser degree, what others said and wrote about them. At one level, his book is a rich repository of quotations from a wide range of Anglo-American elites and the institutions that they controlled. Yet, although his source base is that of a conventional intellectual history, his approach is a novel blend of cultural analysis and historical theory that gestures toward a longue durée history of liberty in its Western and mostly Anglophone forms.

Rozbicki notes that the Revolutionary elites were deeply committed to a profoundly unequal society in which they would reside at the top—as public-spirited men of state. To establish this point, he uses not only a wide sampling of their public and private writings but also a comparative framework reaching back to early modern and even medieval England. There and thereafter, liberty was “a social relation between unequals,” a “relation of difference,” that was “inherently exclusionary and elitist rather than universal” (2, 11, 51). Liberty, like land, was a zero-sum game. By the mid-eighteenth century, American colonial elites had grown so secure of their own liberty that they were prepared to deploy new, more inclusive forms of the concept to resist imperial impositions and convey their values to the outside world. But as they split into factions during the 1780s and 1790s, such provincial-turned-national elites undermined their own claims to disinterested virtue, “broadening the cultural and social space of liberty” and anticipating their collapse as a cohesive class (174).

At the heart of Rozbicki’s approach is an understanding of language, culture, and power as mutually constitutive elements of experience. In proclaiming their virtue—in other words, their liberty to be disinterested—revolutionary elites were neither concealing their “real” interests nor betraying their “nominal” principles. They were communicating with each other, with European observers, and with more and more nonelite Americans. They were playing a traditionally elite role within a revolutionary drama of their own making and in this way placing claims upon themselves even as they continued to assume their right to rule. Others eventually began to adopt their terms for another purpose, a “democratization” that first unfolded “in the symbolic sphere, where meaning, condensed in signs and words, was easily accessible and immediately usable” (195). Put another way, the talk about liberty during the Revolution subtly changed the ways in which elites had to communicate with everyone else, and the long-term result was the gradual, fitful transformation of freedom construed as elite privilege to freedom construed as universal right.

In his praise of the “nonsystemic nature of the Revolution” (225)—that is, its willingness to let objective reality catch up with the symbolic expressions—Rozbicki harkens to an intellectual tradition best associated with Arendt.¹ The American Revolution in this view did not try to do too much; its originally preservative, fundamentally political goals grew organically into the democratic ferment of later decades. By contrast, the Jacobins and Bolsheviks sought to turn language into practice overnight—and appalling violence ensued.

Because Rozbicki’s grasp of his historical subjects is profound and often brilliant, the debates that such meta-narratives will provoke speak to the overall strength of his book. However, Rozbicki might also have engaged with recent, neo-Progressive treatments of the Revolutionary elite and the world that they tried to make. For scholars like Holton, Bouton, Smith-Rosenberg, and others, some of the same elites found in Rozbicki’s book were not just traditional gentry who had to cope with rude appropriations of...