Tom Paine's America: The Rise and Fall of Transatlantic Radicalism in the Early Republic

5. “The General Will Is Always Good . . . But by What Sign Shall We Know It?”: Debating the Role of the Public in a Representative Democracy

161 5 ߬ “The General Will Is Always Good . . . But by What Sign Shall We Know It?” Debating the Role of the Public in a Representative Democracy T HE general will is always good . . . but by what sign shall we know it?”¹ This question’s radical Enlightenment utopianism rings rather hollow for contemporary observers. Since 1797, the year in which the man who referred to himself as Citizen Richard Lee, first asked this question in his Philadelphia magazine, such appeals to the general will have rarely evoked visions of a more democratic future. Dictators from Napoleon to Pinochet have claimed to act on behalf of the general will, just as less insidious but equally cynical modern politicians have defended their every decision as the will of the people. Such facile and blatantly strategic appeals to public opinion have their roots in the late-eighteenth-century world that Citizen Richard Lee inhabited, but one key element of Lee’s question has largely disappeared from mainstream American discourse. While many subsequent political actors have echoed Lee’s opening declaration about the omnipotence of the general will, few have seriously engaged with his open-ended question about how that will can be known. In this chapter, I seek to reconstruct the largely forgotten conversation that 1790’s democrats like Citizen Richard Lee tried to initiate about the difficult process of constructing and sustaining an incessantly deliberative, politically efficacious, and professedly inclusive mechanism for forming and discerning the general will—a mechanism that contemporary political theorists would identify as the political public sphere. In numerous pamphlets and newspaper essays, 1790’s democrats advocated for a thickly institutionalized public that could mediate between the government and the private realm, thus influencing the process of law and 162 tom paine’s america policy formation by drawing non-elected citizens into discussions of political issues. These new, utopian theories about the egalitarian, integrative potential of public opinion had emerged in response to a question that had rarely been asked before the French Revolution: how should the private deliberations of the sovereign people influence the political bodies that supposedly represented them? In advocating a more substantive role for non-elected citizens, the Atlantic world’s growing number of self-described democrats explicitly rejected the long-standing notion that after the people “had made their election, they were nothing.”² Although they never reached a workable consensus on how to make “the Citizen an integral part of the State, to make him a joint sovereign, and not a subject,”³ groups of political activists around the Atlantic world—such as the French Jacobins, the United Irishmen, the London Corresponding Society, and the American Democratic-Republican Societies—took this issue to be one of the key problems of their day. In their attempts to construct a more participatory and more inclusive political system, these groups formulated a set of innovative arguments and practices that can collectively be identified as a theory of radical publicity. Radical publicity manifested itself in many different forms in the early 1790s. French Jacobins, for example, experimented with a system of small primary assemblies where all citizens could consent to laws and suggest new ones. In Ireland, the United Irishmen sought to bring Catholics and Protestants into dialogue with each other in small societies that could serve as the sites where an authentic vision of Irish, as opposed to British, interests could be articulated. Meanwhile, British laborers created scores of political associations (most prominently, the London Corresponding Society) that provided forums in which people who had been excluded from the formal channels of power could educate themselves on political theory and history. These societies regularly corresponded with each other, and printed their resolutions and essays in scores of newly founded oppositional newspapers, in the hopes of making British and Irish politics more open to the interests and opinions of middling and laboring subjects. Similar groups formed in approximately forty localities across the United States between 1793 and 1797, and their cosmopolitan resolutions rang with the same themes as those expressed by their British, Irish, and French compatriots. All of these organizations held public meetings and disseminated reams of cheap (and sometimes free) pamphlets encouraging their fellow citizens to become politically engaged. The political activists who organized the societies were often printers and/or booksellers. They were thus well-positioned to transform their “the general will is always good” 163 existing market...