Revolutionary-Era Liberty in a Cultural Context: Narrative Theory Versus Conceptual History

In this work of six chapters, introduction, and conclusion, Michal Jan Rozbicki uses the history of liberty to explore America’s War for Independence and the first several decades of the young nation. He does so in provocative and stimulating ways that owe much to the author’s work in cultural history; indeed, he actively distances himself from intellectual and legal history and/or political theory. The work’s shortcomings, though, might be attributed to the author’s insufficient familiarity with conceptual approaches to the study of liberty and to textual ones in understanding the causes of the War for Independence. Still, in spite of this, the author consistently gets much right, challenges received notions long deserving of the same, and produces insights that may lead to changes in our understanding of the period under study.

Consistent with the author’s ambitions, this work defends a large number of bold claims. Most critical is that the symbolic language of eighteenth-century American liberty can only be properly understood in tension with lived cultural institutions, and the latter, at least initially, need to be given privileged standing. Rozbicki further claims that eighteenth-century liberty was necessarily tied to social privilege, in particular that of the gentry elite, and that American liberty was such a scarce good that, if it were to increase among one population, it necessarily must decline in another. For Rozbicki, liberty throughout the period, like political theory more generally, was static in meaning with the only significant changes being those included under its privileged mantle. Still, he holds that the dominant gentry—a population that he argues was in important ways monolithic—never intended that non-elites enjoy the full panoply of political liberty for which together they had fought. Still, the closing two decades of the narrative is one of the gentry losing control of the language of liberty that they thought theirs.

What might be his most significant claim, however, is left not fully developed. That is Rozbicki’s important addition to the perennial debate about why the colonists responded so powerfully to Parliament’s assertion in the 1760s and ‘70s of its right to legislate for, and lightly tax, the colonies. In a manner that could possibly challenge the dominant account offered by Bernard Bailyn, who explains that the colonists reacted as they did due to the dominant influence of British Commonwealth thought,¹ Rozbicki suggests otherwise. He finds that what led colonial gentry to take such umbrage at Parliament’s actions—and wholly in keeping with the textual emphasis in colonial remonstrances on the equality of the colonists living in the king’s dominions with his people living inside his realm—was cultural, and even psychological, in the sense of their suffering something akin to status anxiety. It was one thing to be subordinate to the king, but something entirely different to be placed in a subordinate relationship to another of his people represented in the House of Commons. Rozbicki’s carefully made case—that “the restrictions placed on colonial self-rule by London became such an outrage not just for economic reasons, but because they were imposed in the wake of a long and bitter history of the metropolitan political class looking down on the provincials” (p. 75)—suggests a novel cultural approach to understanding the disproportional response of colonial North Americans to changes in British imperial policy.²

In a systematic approach, though at times with undue repetition, the author presents his case for these numerous claims. He begins in the introduction by noting that, in order to understand how liberty was envisioned in “the minds of the people who experienced it, we need to attend to at least three different dynamics . . . the events themselves; the beliefs used to make sense of them at the time; and intentional manipulations of those assumptions by those with power and a public voice” (p. 5). Of these...