Rethinking the American Revolution: Politics and the Symbolic Foundations of Reality

Last year, the University of Virginia Press published Michal Jan Rozbicki's Culture and Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution. Focusing on the concept of liberty, he offers an approach to understanding the American Revolution that attempts to bring together the political and cultural histories of that pivotal era. In our forum, Rozbicki introduces his overall argument. A group of distinguished historians—Trevor Burnard, Peter Onuf, and Alan Tully—responds, and we conclude with Rozbicki's rejoinder. All references to Culture and Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution will be cited with page numbers in parentheses.

The American Revolution has generated a body of scholarship so remarkable for its depth, scope, and sophistication that many a doctoral student must break out in a cold sweat at the very prospect of devising a new research project in this field. And yet, this imposing edifice is haunted by a long-lasting and unresolved dilemma that echoes across all schools of historiography: what to do with the intimate alliance between freedom and inequality at the birth of the nation? How could the political class that devised an enduring lexicon of universal rights, liberty, equality, and the sovereignty of the people consent to the preservation of so many unfreedoms, including slavery, well beyond 1776 and 1787?

The persistent separation between the cultural and the political histories of the era has certainly not helped here. Both fields have been impressively productive but they do not often talk to each other, and attempts to reconcile their perspectives have been rare. Another obstacle lies in American culture itself: we tend to assume that people in history were driven by free will rather than by norms and group interests, and so we often view freedom as self-evident, and prohibitions as anomalies. Furthermore, our ritualized reverence for the founding documents—manifest both in scholarship and popular culture—has shrouded them in a timelessness that effectively cloaks the changes in their meanings over time and suggests that they have remained the same as when they were being written. Legal debates over the "originalist" readings of these texts only add to this belief. Finally, current political rhetoric that looks to the founders for legitimation not infrequently implies that they simply would have shared our values.

To begin to resolve these problems we must hold a magnifying glass over liberty as the central concept of the era. Only then can we hope to reconstruct what might be called its cultural ontology—what it meant to different classes of people, how they experienced it, how it was symbolically employed to exercise and reproduce power, and how it was used to obtain new rights by those who never held them before.

A 1780s engraving by Daniel Berger of the Continental Congress. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-USZ62-26670].

Proceeding along this path effectively, however, requires surmounting two rather ubiquitous methodological barriers that have long stood in the way. The first is a deficit of historicism, most likely a consequence of a long tradition of looking at the subject in terms of philosophical and constitutional ideas, at the expense of less abstract spheres of reality. Liberty today has become such a universal term that it has lost the social specificity that characterized it in the 18th century, and particular attention to this problem is acutely needed. The second obstacle is a chronic blurring of distinctions between words and reality, as well as between cultural fictions and their real-life applications. Speeches, sermons, proclamations, and debates in the Continental Congress were symbolic representations intended for specific uses (fighting a revolution and legitimating a new polity being some of them) and were, as a rule, hybrids of fiction and fact. Equal liberty was the core concept of the Revolutionary creed but it was also its central metaphor. The distinction between the two is surprisingly often missing in historiography.

Two broad models of defining the substance of Revolutionary liberty may be distinguished in current writing. One (let us call it neo-consensus) assumes that its meaning...