Rites of Dissent: Literatures of Enthusiasm and the American Revolution

In a recent television appearance on the Fox Business Network’s Follow the Money with Eric Bolling, conservative pundit Ann Coulter compared the slogans of the ongoing Occupy Wall Street protests to “mob” ideas in the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and even Nazi Germany. “It [the protest rhetoric] all comes from the French Revolution,” said Coulter, and thus it represents the “molecular opposite of the beginning of this country, with the American Revolution” (“Coulter”). Coulter testifies to the endurance of a popular historical narrative that juxtaposes the conservative or prudent ideology of the American Revolution and the radical or excessive ideology of the French Revolution. Philosophers and historians, cultural critics and literary scholars, across a wide intellectual spectrum—from Hannah Arendt to Gordon Wood, Antonio Negri to Sacvan Bercovitch—have tended to agree with Coulter on the conservative roots of the American Revolution.¹ However one understands its shaping, whether from the vantage point of republicanism or Puritanism, moneyed interests or Lockean liberalism, or some synthesis thereof, the American Revolution certainly was not a movement tending toward radical “mob” ideas, according to most commentators.²

Two arguments for a conservative American Revolution (and its aftermath) that have been influential on American literary scholarship are the Puritan thesis and the Anglicization thesis. Representative of the former is Sacvan Bercovitch’s classic 1975 text, The Puritan Origins of the American Self, which he recently republished. In his new introduction, Bercovitch continues to assert that the American Revolution was, for its ideologues, the political consummation of a sacred mission rooted in longstanding Puritan theories of America’s divine “federal identity” (89). As Bercovitch concisely puts it in Rites of Assent, “The sacred origin was the Puritan migration; the telos was the Revolution” (38). The false parity between the strict logic of Puritanism and Revolutionary bourgeois society is irrelevant: what matters are “the forms and strategies of cultural continuity” that unify all American political—and literary—projects around the central myth of a “sacred teleology” embodied by the American self (Rites 30; Puritan 136). From Jonathan Edwards to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Paine to Nathaniel Hawthorne, the narrative of a special, cosmic American self survives through various historical and literary mutations, transforming all political dissent into new strains of cultural consensus about the American mission. When pressed as to the deeper point of this mission, Bercovitch tends to accent the conservative, capitalistic economic values of American liberalism: nationalist exceptionalism translates into “middle-class hegemony” in the making, and the “rhetoric of the millennium” into the “spiritual version of free enterprise” (American xiii; Rites 53).³

Recent eighteenth-century scholarship, however, tells a very different story than Bercovitch, but arguably one no less conservative in its understanding of the American Revolution. Edward Larkin has recently called it the “Anglicization thesis” of American independence (“Nation” 501). This thesis states that, in the cultural and economic fruition of the American colonies, an intensifying identification with and consumption of Englishness—a veritable Anglophilia—led to an eventual crisis: the colonies came to see themselves as central, rather than peripheral, actors in the empire, deserving of the same political rights, certainly, but also warring in defense of true Englishness so as to supplant the declining and corrupted British Empire.⁴ In Larkin’s view, the Revolutionary War was fought over the constitution of empire, not a desire for discrete and special American nationhood; in this sense, a move away from the Puritan migration back across the Atlantic so to speak, in a cultural continuity of Englishness, resulted paradoxically in a political collision over the distributive hierarchies of power within the British Empire. As Leonard Tennenhouse argues in The Importance of Feeling English (2007), Americans, especially in their literature from 1750 to 1850, saw Americanness as a distinctive culture of Englishness transplanted in North America, part and parcel of a British diaspora in which English-derived cultures forge their own unique version of the English heritage that they continue to adopt subsequent to political independence. This narrative arguably replaces American with English rites of assent: Americans organize dissent in...