Severalrecentthreads have reminded me to start a topic which has always made me wonder.
If you look around at history since the American Revolution, it is hard to find one as enlightened as ours seemed to be. Now, right off the bat perhaps you can argue that, for most Americans, it was not (selfish self-interest being their main stake in it, not any highfalutin’ ideals). But it is rather striking to me-rarely do you see the new regime come in and sweep away all corruption, cruelty, and oppression-the impression I get from most revolutions is that the new boss is essentially the same as the old boss, even as he spouts rhetoric proclaiming just how different he is.
So, where are all the enlightened revolutionaries? Is that kind of “forward” thinking associated too strongly with the perceived excesses of Western democratic societies, in that the revolutionaries in question see only our decadence and not our progressive attitudes (if they give the latter any credit at all in the first place)? You’d think that a group of progressive thinkers would grab their people’s attention by promising them a future era of peace and prosperity, and not by advocating a return to the rule of the axe and the repression of certain minorities (if not sexes). But you never seem to hear about such groups-so why is that?
You could wax poetic about the nature of power, staring into the abyss, putting down counter-revolutions, etc. I think a lot of is basic psychology.
Just think of your own personal life. Who’s “enlightened?” Some soft, comfortable, middle class professionals? Those guys bug out at the first sign of trouble. Plus they tend to think the system is just peachy keen. Most of the time to win a revolution you need dead eyed killers willing to gun down tens of thousands and cut off heads and blow up churches and police stations. You want gangsters and crazy hill people. You want the most desperate, the ones at the margin of society who want to burn it all down. Not exactly the most progressive types.
I saw a mini-doc on Syrian rebels where these dudes were sitting around in bombed out buildings for 12 hours a day in sweltering heat so they could maybe snipe one guy. Bill from accounting ain’t doing that shit. He’s off to Europe.
It is true that the leaders are often well educated, though that doesn’t preclude them from being crazy mofos. The Unabomber went to Harvard.
I’m not convinced our own revolution was particularly enlightened. We just outright took a huge pile of land, managed entire economies on slave labor, never even imagined giving women the vote, etc. It took a lot of work and a civil war to get where we are now.
The Age of Enlightenment was ending right around the time of the American Revolution. The founding of the United States arguably was the final act of the Enlightenment.
The Age of Romanticism was emerging as a reaction to the Enlightenment. The new ideal was that people were supposed to be moved by passion rather than reason.
The French Revolution occurred only a couple of decades after the American Revolution but it was a Romantic Revolution rather than an Enlightened Revolution.
Sweden (with restrictions) and Corsica had women’s suffrage in the 1700s.
England (but not the British Empire), Russia, China, Portugal proper, and a whole raft of countries with previous bans, from Lithuania to Japan, outlawed or mostly outlawed slavery in that period, and of course it was a hot topic in the US itself. It’s not like it was an outrageous idea at the time.
I don’t know how many countries in the 18th century weren’t starting colonies or going on giant land grabs, but I’m sure it was plenty.
But really, the point is that “good” revolutions aren’t an evolutionary leap from what’s around them (ours wasn’t). The best they can hope for is to set up a system that will help them progress in the long run. And on most recent revolutions, not enough time has passed to really call it.
Considering that the American Revolution saw the abolition of slavery in the northern states, disestablishment of the Anglican churches in the Southern colonies, expansion of voting rights in the direction of universal male suffrage, and so forth, the general consensus of actual historians is that the American Revolution was indeed a massive progressive development.
Considering none of these countries had economies conducive to the form of slavery that existed in the Western Hemisphere, its comparing apples and oranges especially if you account for serfdom and other institutions that was slavery in all but name.
Due to moral scruples or the lack of opportunity? If your country has an expanding population with seemingly vast tracts of virgin lands thinly populated by technologically inferior tribes prone to decimation by disease, the calculus might be different from say Switzerland’s.
The American Revolution certainly was an evolutionary one-it wasn’t wholesale social revolution like say the Bolshevist Revolution in Russia but it wasn’t simply a coup or changing of the actors either.
I think the biggest reason the post revolution era was a success in the USA was Washington. When the time came he left office for his legally elected successor. The revolutions that fail tend to be because the new ruler becomes a dictator. Imagine that instead of Washington we had ended up with a first president like Saddam Hussein, Fidel Castro, Kim Il Sung, or Josef Stalin. I think the United States would have ended up much worse than it actually did. I think it comes down to the fact that we got lucky by having someone like George Washington as the leader of our revolution, rather than someone with the personality or philosophy of some of those other revolutionary leaders I mentioned.
Our Founding Fuckups were a bunch of hypocrites. However, we should remember that the ideals they were hypocritical about were an advance over the ideals that previous generations were hypocritical about.
Bullshit about “all mean are created equal” was a major advance over that “divine right of kings” crapola.
I also wonder about the Tories, or Loyalists, who fled to Canada. Who’d they sell their stuff to? How many of the Sons of Liberty ended the Revolution with more property and wealth that when it began? Revolution as entrepreneurship: now that’s an American Revolution!
America, just not the bits taken over by Europeans ?
The Iroquois Confederacy for example had representative intertribal democracy and direct democracy within each tribe, no slaves that I’m aware of and was by and large a matriarchal culture. As I understand it the genders were still segregated in what they were supposed to be doing ; but seeing as they weren’t built on Abrahamic concepts women were not deemed to essentially be garbage wastes of skin when not preggers.
[QUOTE=Qin Shi Huangdi]
Considering that the American Revolution saw the abolition of slavery in the northern states, disestablishment of the Anglican churches in the Southern colonies, expansion of voting rights in the direction of universal male suffrage, and so forth, the general consensus of actual historians is that the American Revolution was indeed a massive progressive development.
[/QUOTE]
The French Revolution abolished slavery, disestablished the Catholic Church something fierce (to this day, the lack of interest of the French for religion is typically attributed to those thirty odd years when there were simply no religious ceremonies performed anywhere and people figuring out that maybe they weren’t all that important), implemented actual voting rights… yet few people would dub it “enlightened”. Possibly because of the guillotine and Terror and things.
I sometimes wonder why and wherefore the US didn’t have its own post-Revolutionary War wave of repression, i.e. the more radical among the victorious separatists rooting out thems as fought for or supported the Brits and putting 'em all up against the wall. Or maybe it did happen and I don’t know about it ?
I think the US was helped a lot in that it had no neighbours to speak of (no existentially threatening ones anyhow) and, following its founding as a republic, did not immediately have to defend its very existence from neighbours angsty about this newfangled social system spilling over as was the case for the Netherlands, the French, for Makhno, for Viet-Nam… Wars and foreign interference have a way of hardening a society.
That, and the fact that the Loyalists simply left, or were “encouraged” to go, to Canada or the West Indies or back to England. The model would have been the English Civil Wars, where leading royalists took to the Continent and had their properties dispossessed orwere fined and excluded from the vote and so on.
Let’s not go too far in romanticizing the Iroquois. The reason they were able to build such a prosperous and harmonious society was because they had conquered and killed all of the other local tribes.
But, by the same token, the French revolution was a massive progressive development. Arguably, much more massive than the American revolution.
Little Nemo suggests that the French Revolution wasn’t an Enlightened revolution because it was a Romantic Revolution, since by 1789 the Age of Enlightment was being superseded by the Age of Romanticism. Applying that logic, the American revolution was definitely the last Enlightened Revolution, and can never be superseded. But if you look at the two revolutions in terms of the political ideals that they sought to realise, the French revolution was plainly an Enlightened revolution. It covered the same bases that you mention above - abolition of slavery, disestablishment of churches, expansion of voting rights, and more besides.
Enlightenment figures would say the best course was to be rational. They would sit down in a meeting and work out the reasons why they needed to sever the social contract which had bound them to the existing regime. Having done so, they would send a letter to the head of that regime, explaining why they were acting, and then take the appropriate steps to resolve the situation.
Romantic figures would say that you must act on your passions. They’d be out in the streets, summoning the masses, and telling them, “Can’t you feel it in your blood? It’s the spirit of freedom calling out to you. Rise up and answer her!”
This difference in philosophies explains why when America succeeded in its revolution it sat down and wrote a Constitution and when France succeeded in its revolution it got out the guillotine and had a reign of terror.
What? But the USA’s post-revolution order substantially wasn’t that different.
The judiciary in the USA maintained the constitutional tradition of English common law. (This is much to the confusion of those both within and without the country who assume our written constitution was the beginning of something like a civil law system.)
The US President’s powers are (note present tense) somewhat the same as those of the Crown in the 1770’s.
One place we did notoriously change things was in how debate is conducted in the Senate. And that was a mistake. IIRC, someone’s copy of the Rules of Order was missing a clarifying sentence somewhere–and the early Senators were not that clear on the concept to begin with–otherwise the Senate filibuster rule would never have happened.
Now, you want an enlightened Revolution, maybe one of France’s revolutions would fit the bill. Sure, chopping off bourgeois heads may look savage, but was it really better to inflict our exiles on poor, beleaguered, previously Francophone, Canada? If it meant no Toronto, maybe a bit of the Terror would have been worth it.
