Culture and Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution

1. A Critique of Self-Evident Liberty

1 A Critique of Self-Evident Liberty For the liberal humanist’s mistake is not to insist that human beings from very di√erent contexts may share values in common, but to imagine that these values are invariably what is most important in a cultural artefact. It is also to assume that they are always, in however cunningly disguised form, the values of his own civilization. —Terry Eagleton, The Idea of Culture If liberty was the conceptual axis of the ideology of the American Founding, it was also its dominant metaphor. The overlapping of the two has diverted our attention from the fact that both were political and cultural instruments rather than objective descriptions of the essence of the Revolution . Patriot speeches, constitutional debates, and sermons on liberty were more often depictions of ideal models than measured representations of the Revolutionary process, but modern commentators often make no clear distinction between the two. A necessary point of departure in reconstructing the eighteenth-century American sense of liberty must be a realization that freedom ultimately derives from the intricate webs of culture and society in which we are all entangled; people are ‘‘free’’ or ‘‘equal’’ only as members of society, not as people as such.∞ Eighteenth-century formulations of freedom could carry only the meanings allowed by the contemporary social and cultural market. This means that when we hold up such articulations for analysis, they first ought to be placed in the practical context of social and cultural relations of power. In other words, intellectual conceptualizations of liberty are not lib- 18 culture and liberty in the age of the american revolution erty. In 1776, as a few gentlemen were declaring in Philadelphia that all people are by nature created equal and endowed with unalienable rights, slaves, Indians, women, and the propertyless remained, and were long to remain, untouched by the universalism of these formulations. A few years later, heads rolled o√ the Paris guillotine on orders justified by the defense of liberty, fraternity, and equality. It is not the rhetorical or legal elegance of a given formulation of liberty but the uses to which it is put that tangibly a√ect lives, and define its real meaning. The issue before us, therefore, should be less whether liberty was verbally defined in this or that way, or whether it derived from this or that philosopher, but what exactly was being communicated by the language of liberty in the Revolutionary era about actual relations within American society. Such an approach will help avoid a recurrent interpretative problem in studies of freedom in the eighteenth-century Anglo-American world: a uniform , self-evident, and unproblematic concept of equal freedom that has quietly, almost imperceptibly, been adopted as an abstract norm against which all actors and actions are gauged and sweeping classifications of events and individuals are made. Indeed, it is not too much to say that it has made much of American scholarship in this area a history of constraints on liberty, rather than a history of liberty. It is time to reposition the debate and modify this reductionist model, which e√ectively obscures the fundamentally nonegalitarian nature of early modern liberty. This model endows it with an abstract, teleological universalism and produces a propensity to uncover limitations and contradictions, instead of striving to understand what is truly important: how and why certain liberties surfaced at a particular time and place, who was able to claim them and why, and how those who did not hold them before acquired them when they did. As such, it has had a profound e√ect on the overall assessment of the role of the Revolution in American history. Alan Taylor’s impressive survey of early America, a volume intended to cover United States history, may illustrate this e√ect; it has only two out of 480 pages devoted to the American Revolution. As the author explains in the introduction, the Revolution and the Founders’ ideology do not warrant much attention, because they promoted a liberty that was restricted to wello √ Euro-Americans, they encouraged the dispossession of Indians, they did not abolish slavery, and they inspired colonization.≤ In other words, because Revolutionary-era liberty still existed in a restricted form and was not univer- a critique of self-evident liberty 19 sally applied, it does not merit our consideration. It is a view that is not only idealistic, it is...