Identities, Politics, and Rights

The Next American Revolution / Bruce Ackerman

The Next American Revolution Bruce Ackerman From Warsaw to Moscow, Johannesburg to Beijing, a specter haunts the world, as if risen from the grave-the return of revolutionary, democratic liberalism. There is, it would appear, only one revolutionfree zone that has gained a remarkable historical exemption: the United States of America. Here all is calm. The United States may welcome the new possibilities opened by world transformation, but it seems curiously untouched . The unmoved mover? The self-satisfied voyeur? Or could this remarkable turn in world history reinvigorate our own sense of identity? Despite our apparent disengagement, is revolutionary renewal more central to United States that most other polities? This will be my thesis. One of Marxism's most consequential acts of appropriation in 1917, if not earlier, was its seizure of the idea of revolution. Of course, there were lots more non-Marxist revolutions than Marxist ones even at the height of Leninism's ascendancy. But the Marxists were remarkably successful in getting nearly everyone to believe that their kind of revolution was the genuine article, and that others were sham or worse. Only Hannah Arendt raised a powerful protest against this usurpation;l and I will be following her in suggesting that we must rethink the very idea of revolution before we can define America's relationship to it. This chapter draws from two sources: the Carl J. Friedrich Lecture presented at Harvard University in October 1990, previously unpublished, and remarks scattered through the first three chapters of The Future of Liberal Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). I am grateful to the questions and comments of participants at the Amherst Conference that allowed me to attempt further clarifications. 1. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1963)' 40 3 IDENTITIES, POLITICS, AND RIGHTS But there is a second stumbling block as well. Modem liberalism has been so traumatized by the struggle with Marxism and Nazism that it has taken a markedly antirevolutionary tum. To reassert the revolutionary promise of human rights, we must rethink liberalism no less than revolution: Should liberal Westerners reserve the idea of revolution to lesser breeds just emerging from tyranny? Are the Marxists right in this at least: that the age of liberal revolution has passed in the capitalist West? Or has it just begun? I am not using the idea of revolution in a metaphorical sense. That would merely confirm the Marxist claim that their revolution is the only real kind. I want to show how the revolutionary tradition serves as the very lifeblood of the American Republic. More than most modem Western nations, ours can flourish only as long as the prospect of liberal revolution remains genuine. New Beginnings Begin with an abstract definition of revolution that can encompass Marxist revolutions in Russia, religious revolutions in Iran, nationalist revolutions in lots of places-as well as liberal revolutions. Only then can we see what, if anything, is distinctive about the last variety. Where, then, to begin? By remarking upon the distinctive revolutionary orientation to time. First and foremost, a revolutionary proposes to cut time in (at least)" two parts: a before and a now. Before, there was something deeply wrong with the way people thought and acted. Now, we have 2. It is very common for revolutionaries to divide time into further segments. For example, many have looked back to the day before yesterday-and have found a golden age that preceded a more recent period of catastrophic decline. This threeperiod schema permits revolutionaries to present themselves as the true conservatives -breaking with the recent past for the purpose of renewing self-conscious commitment to principles and practices of an earlier age. Given the liberal's distrust of total revolutions, this three-part schema has great attractions. By locating at least some elements of the new order in a remoter past, the liberal suggests that he is not demanding an impossible break, but a critical reappropriation of the best of a common cultural achievement. Cf. J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957). While it is silly to glorify the perfection of past ages, I shall not allow such "golden age" exaggerations to prevent me from looking back to the remoter past to grasp the transformative possibilities of the present. See chapters 3 and 7 of Pocock. THE NEXT AMERICAN REVOLUTION a chance to make a "new beginning" by freeing...