Conceptual Bridges and Antibodies: A Response

In writing Culture and Liberty I hoped to generate a new discussion—centered on the crossroads of culture and power—about the nature of liberty as the principal concept of the Revolutionary era and the axis of its political and constitutional ideology. I am enormously grateful to Peter Onuf, Alan Tully, and Trevor Burnard for contributing to this conversation through their discerning and generous comments and, above all, for being receptive to new ideas. I am honored by the consummate precision and clarity with which they have distilled my arguments, extracted their methodological and conceptual essence, and illuminated their potential applications for the study of the Revolution. There are few things more gratifying to an author proposing an interpretation that differs from the dominant historiographical paradigms than encountering open-minded reviewers, high in the professional firmament, who are willing to listen and comment.

The town of Falmouth, burnt, by Captain Moet, October 18, 1775. From a 1782 print. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-USZ62-45238].

Peter Onuf 's acceptance of my premise that Revolutionary liberty was a social relation between unequals, distributed according to rank, and that the patriot elite had a deep investment in preserving it that way, is especially appreciated because Onuf has been a pioneer in arguing that current conservative and progressive interpretations of the Revolution are often presentist and exceptionalist. They tend to assume that a predictable caesura divides the new nation from the Old World model that characterized the colonial period, and they overemphasize the modernity of the Revolutionary leaders.¹ In my discussion of Revolutionary liberty, I note that taking such a caesura as the point of departure for its examination—especially when combined with a predilection for concentrating on the ethereal "idea of liberty"—leads to an explanatory dead end, where the lofty notion hits the wall of practice. Liberty can, of course, be studied as the nucleus of the Revolution's "internal" political and constitutional history. But liberty had an equally important "external" history that only surfaces when we focus on the dissemination of this concept—its targeted articulations, its cultural connotations, its diverse consumers, and its instrumentality as an apparatus for constructing and reproducing political power.

Onuf agrees here that assuming that the abstract idea of liberty contains power in itself is less productive than a culture-based examination of what diverse actors did with this concept and what meanings they injected into it. I chose the latter approach over a strictly ideational one because it allows us to better see the course of change in the meanings and social extent of liberty. This change was neither a trickle-down feed from Monticello nor a grassroots upsurge, but an intricate process involving both elites and common people caught in a web of new symbolic representations, legal transformations, and evolving cultural norms. In this sense, I do not so much seek to "refute" Gordon Wood's kind of history, as Onuf suggests, but to look at what his idea-centered narrative of "radical" change leaves out: the long and tangled process of creating new cultural space for liberty, and the ensuing competition among various groups to occupy it once it was made available and legitimate.

Alan Tully and Trevor Burnard note that I do not devote much space to the "monarchical model" that is so central for political and legal historians who claim discontinuity at the point of the Revolution, nor do I spend time on constitutional structures such as federalism, checks and balances, and natural rights. My answer would be that my book was specifically intended as an examination of Revolutionary liberty through the lens of culture, and not political, legal, or philosophical theory. The latter subjects already have an enormous and exhaustive literature. By contrast, analyses using the tools of cultural anthropology, sociology, semiotics, and hermeneutics have been at best sporadic. Both authors have very generously acknowledged the value of such insights in my study, which I take as some vindication of its conceptual structure.

However, Tully's suggestion that I seem to portray the Revolutionary...