An Infatuation with Titles: Hereditary Privilege and Liberty in the Ear of the American Revolution

Michal Jan Rozbicki's exploration of the meanings of liberty in 18th-century British North America is a major achievement. His assertion that we need to look at how Americans understood liberty as relational, with one person's liberty making sense as a privilege extended to them and not to others, is an important challenge to existing readings of the American Revolution. It most notably challenges the influential theses of Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood that see the American Revolution as a transformative event, with American understandings of liberty undergoing a sharp break as a result of a revolutionary explosion dominated by politically reformist, egalitarian ideals.¹ Wood's interpretation of the American Revolution is usually attacked from the Left, as being overly genteel and insufficiently appreciative of the views of anyone outside the ranks of the northeastern elite.² Rozbicki challenges Wood and Bailyn from the other direction. Using theoretical insights from European scholarship, especially Reinhard Kosselleck's understanding of conceptual history, Pierre Bourdieu's work on how social and economic capital are acquired through symbolic practice, and historians of science's understanding of how Kuhnian paradigm shifts occur, Rozbicki suggests that American understandings of liberty evolved in the late 18th century; they were not, in his view, transformed. The concept of liberty remained less a concept with one core meaning than a multivalent idea, liberty being a "metaphor for a cluster of specific immunities and entitlements existing along a continuum, with different portions of this spectrum available to different social ranks, and with their fullest enjoyment exclusive to members of the uppermost elites" (11).

It is an immensely helpful definition. It helps us see the continuities in thought about the meanings of liberty between colonial and Revolutionary America; provides a useful conceptual tool for understanding how Americans could insist on their own egalitarianism while being deeply committed to various forms of racial, gendered, and class inequalities; and explains contemporary American fascination with royalty and inherited status, especially in politics, where office sometimes seems inherited rather than earned. Because the United States has preserved its Constitution in aspic, it continues to run its politics based on assumptions current in the 18th century rather than the 21st century, with rank and privilege continuing to be politically very important.³

A detail from a 1905 photograph of Thomas Jefferson's Virginia home, Monticello. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-D4-18443].

I think, however, that Rozbicki could make an even stronger case if he reconsidered the social position of the group that he credits with the most agency in expanding the cultural space for liberty in the Revolutionary era, a space that later got taken up by ordinary Americans clamoring for an extension of privilege to themselves. Rozbicki believes that by the mid-18th century colonial America had a "genuine, creole upper class confidently claiming to be free and independent" (54). Bitter about how their claims to colonial self-rule were rejected by a British metropolitan class who saw this upper class or gentry (Rozbicki uses these terms interchangeably) as provincial upstarts, they broke away from Britain in order that they might create a new society in which they formed the apex with all the privileges of liberty that could only go to the "uppermost elites" (75).

Another way of putting this, in terms that people in the 18th century might recognize, is that the colonial American gentry became, through the magic of revolutionary war, an American aristocracy. The leaders of the new American nation raised themselves one rank in the social hierarchy, with United States senators being analogous to British peers. John Adams was explicit in his belief that a hierarchy of distinctions and separate orders of monarchy, aristocracy, and commoners were essential for any functioning society. Hereditary monarchy and aristocracy, Adams argued, were both "institutions of admirable wisdom and exemplary virtue in a certain stage of society in a great nation." Eventually, he believed, the United States would be mature enough to have both institutions, which was reason to invent...