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Conclusion: Liberty and the Web of Culture
- University of Virginia Press
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Conclusion Liberty and the Web of Culture The power to impose recognition depends on the capacity to mobilize around a name. —Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction There is a distinct strain of wishful thinking that haunts the historiography on Revolutionary liberty. Its presence is noticeable in studies of all methodological and ideological orientations. We, as the investigating culture, largely select the questions we ask of the past from our own lists of what is ‘‘natural,’’ ‘‘just,’’ and ‘‘up to standard.’’ For many, it is already intellectually discomforting to realize that the eighteenth-century men and women involved in the struggle for liberty had lists of priorities dramatically di√erent from ours. But it is almost painful to discover that inequality was often desirable and carried a positive value, even for those who rose, or aspired to rise, from the ranks of the underprivileged.∞ It has the ring of an anomaly. We are ill at ease accepting that the restricted, metropolitan meaning of freedom transmitted to the British colonies persisted throughout the eighteenth century and, consequently, that much of modern American liberty had its source in exclusion and hierarchy. Only when we recognize that in the Revolutionary era the meaning of freedom was synonymous with privilege, and therefore made full sense only within the context of an unequal social order, can we appreciate the fact that a response to oppression was not the only driving force behind the term’s evolution toward its modern meaning. The pursuit of advantage over others and the aspiration to move up the social rungs were equally weighty catalysts. They were particularly important in a fluid and mobile society that associated such goals with improvement and advancement and not with inherited en- 224 culture and liberty in the age of the american revolution titlements ‘‘owned’’ by select groups. Furthermore, to understand the process of admitting new residents into the realm of liberty, we need to acknowledge that such progress involved an inversely proportional relationship between those who were already the most free and those who were at a given point able to raise claims to certain freedoms. Every successful new claim implied the loss of a certain fraction in the spectrum of liberties thus far exclusively controlled by those making the concession. This is important because today we often view rights and liberties as inexhaustible commodities that can be o√ered to all, without cost to any. This cost did exist and was the reason why there was so much resistance in history to the expansion of liberties. One of the best-known examples of such a reaction in American history was the case of poor whites in the South who, after the abolition of slavery, lost their privileges—their race-exclusive voting rights and their place on the social ladder above the African Americans. Their defense of segregation was a defense of the former scope of their exclusively held liberties, a scope that would shrink once these liberties were extended to new groups of people. We should also be more sensitive to the fact that the emergence of any specific liberty was grounded in circumstances unique to a particular history of a particular people at a particular time, and therefore deeply rooted in the culture produced by those experiences. This liberty could neither be easily reproduced in another society, with another history behind it, nor could it be plausibly viewed as some deep structure of universal nature. Societies and their organizations (such as the United Nations today) may, and should, attempt to make some of these liberties universally honored, but success in this endeavor will depend on our awareness that such liberties would still contain traces of the unique, time- and place-specific historical experiences of those who created them in the first place. This awareness should at least give pause to those who presume that one people’s norms of liberty (usually those of the presumers) can be mechanically inserted into other cultures that are the products of other historical experiences. Only when all of this is taken into account can we fully appreciate the striking uniqueness of the American Revolution. One does not have to subscribe to the now outdated theories of American exceptionalism to do so. Unlike many other revolutions, it did not develop out of internal tensions in society, but in opposition to outside pressure that threatened the relative independence of local political and economic elites. Its success did not pro- [44.197.113.64] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 10...