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  • Democratic Alienation
  • Jeremy Engels (bio)

. . . every language and every society are constituted as a repression of the consciousness of the impossibility that penetrates them.

Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe1

Breathing in the boasts of new beginnings filling the air, John Adams thought big thoughts in his popular 1776 pamphlet Thoughts on Government. He asked his readers: “When! Before the present epocha, had three millions of people full power and a fair opportunity to form and establish the wisest and happiest government that human wisdom can contrive?”2 Though victory in the internecine conflict with the mighty British juggernaut was no sure thing, Adams was already pondering the postwar architecture of a new government. Adams’s leap beyond the present to a future “election of government” was a common move in the heady days preceding the Revolutionary War, for Adams and other colonists believed they could begin the world anew. Thomas Paine asked his readers in the Pennsylvania Journal if America could be happy outside of the British umbrella and answered in the affirmative: “As happy as she please; she hath a blank sheet to write upon.”3 America could indeed be happy, for as Paine wrote in Common Sense: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now.”4 Thomas Jefferson echoed Paine by invoking the philosophical doctrine of the tabula rasa to explain not the mind but society itself.5 This was thus one of those rare historical moments of rupture when the world was turned upside down (to use a popular phrase from the time), and when dreams became almost tangible.

A pressing question, then, was what would the movers and shakers of the American Revolution invent? Though there was heated debate, there was little question in elite circles that there would be no postwar democracy, a synonym at the time for popular anarchy and political suicide.6 The antidemocratic bent of the power elite clashed with popular sentiment, however, meaning that there was a basic tension at the heart of life in the United States. The Revolutionary War was waged in the name of “the people,” creating the expectation for some that the new nation would be a democracy. With a motley crew of sailors, slaves, free blacks, artisans, merchants, farmers, and elites shooting, hollering, and dying together to achieve independence, the Revolutionary War was an intimately democratic event.7 One of the Revolutionary War’s first historians, [End Page 471] Mercy Otis Warren, reported in her 1805 History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution that the war represented an “experiment of leveling of all ranks and destroying all subordination.”8 Democratic topoi were as integral to the revolutionary effort as democratic practice. The revolutionaries leaned heavily on the words of the Levellers of the 1640s and the “Country” polemicists of the 1720s.9 The Declaration of Independence claimed that “all men are created equal,” and to ensure that monarchy would never again rear its ugly head in America, Paine told his readers to smash the King’s crown and distribute the pieces among themselves.10 Complaints about taxation without representation implied that citizens should have a direct voice in government, and during the ratification debates of the 1780s, claims about the sovereignty of “the people” were commonplace. The Revolutionary War gave democracy a popular legitimacy; when they looked in the mirror and saw their self-image, many Americans saw a democratic people.

Americans found persuasive arguments for democracy not only in England’s history but also in their own. “Proper Democracy is where the people have all the power in themselves, who choose whom they please for their head for a time, and dismiss him when they please; make their own laws, chose all their own officers, and replace them at pleasure.”11 Thus declared the essayist “Spartanus” in the first of three articles published in the New-York Journal in May and June 1776. As the movement for independence gained speed in Philadelphia, and as the soon-to-be revolutionaries were drafting and debating the Declaration of Independence, Spartanus defended democracy...

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