jacobson in response to on revolution

Parable and Paradox: In Response to Arendt's On RevolutionAuthor(s): NORMAN JACOBSONSource: Salmagundi, No. 60, On Hannah Arendt (Spring-Summer 1983), pp. 123-139Published by: Skidmore CollegeStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40547755 .Accessed: 25/10/2014 15:37

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Parable and Paradox: In Response to Arendt' s On Revolution

BY NORMAN JACOBSON

THE PARABLE

The history of revolutions . . . which politically spells out the innermost story of the modern age, could be told in parable form as the tale of an age-old treasure which, under the most varied circumstances, appears abruptly, unexpectedly, and disappears again, under different mysterious conditions, as though it was a fata morgana. . . . Unicorns and fairy queens seem to possess more reality than the lost treasure of the revolutions.

- Preface to Between Past and Future

THE PARADOX

Paradoxical as it may sound, it was in fact under the impact of the Revolution that the revolutionary spirit in this country began to wither away, and it was the Constitution itself, this greatest achievement of the American people, which eventually cheated them of their proudest possession.

- On Revolution

I

On Revolution, like The Prince, is at once the simplest and therefore one of the most complex political books imaginable. The work rests upon Hannah Arendt' s customary uncompromising distinction between the public and private realms of human activity, mediated in the modern


124 NORMAN JACOBSON

world by the cruel domination of "society," which has served only to blur the distinction she believes essential to freedom. For many critics, that great blurring, seen as historical necessity flowing from the ever- increasing character of labor as a social activity from the time of the Industrial Revolution, is the overwhelming fact rendering political freedom in its eighteenth-century form if not fanciful, then at best a nostalgia. Moreover, the paradox introduced into the account by Arendt - the contradiction she sees between the spirit infusing the deliberations at Philadelphia in 1787 and the very outcome of those deliberations, that is the U.S. Constitution itself - discourages others from taking her thought with the seriousness it merits. On Revolution has come to be regarded as a powerful critique of "Modernity" resting upon convenient but dubious historical foundations. It is this question of the "historicity" of On Revolution to which my remarks will be addressed. My hope is that I might perhaps abate the historical question sufficiently to permit Arendt's political theory to be tested and contested on its own grounds, rather than dismissed, as some historians are wont to dismiss it, as parable only.

The quotation from Between Past and Future which serves as the first epigram continues this way:

And yet, if we turn our eyes to the beginnings of this era, and especially to the decades preceding it, we may discover to our surprise that the eighteenth century on both sides of the Atlantic possessed a name for this treasure, a name long forgotten and lost - one is tempted to say - even before the treasure itself disappeared. The name in America was "public happiness," which, with its overtones of "virtue" and "glory," we understand hardly better than its French counterpart, "public freedom"; the difficulty for us is that in both instances the emphasis was on "public."

Most of my observations are directed to the decades preceding the ratification of the second Constitution of government in America. Far from being fabulous, the political history of the North American colonials contains much to substantiate Hannah Arendt's thesis. And far from being paradoxical, the document produced at Philadelphia reflects a determination of the drafters, most of them of a later generation than the patriots of '76, to stamp "closed" to the American Revolution and, it was their hope, to the revolutionary spirit itself. What


In Response to Arendt's On Revolution 125

public freedom - "politics" in Arendt's perspective - has remained was the result of a legacy of local and State attachments and institutions as well as a strong tradition of voluntary associations. It was federalism which served to maintain whatever places of freedom exist in the Constitution. Had such attachments and loyalties not acted as a deterrent, it is likely that many more would have been closed by fiat.

It is interesting that no less powerful a political actor than Abraham Lincoln was concerned with the question posed by Hannah Arendt from his earliest entrance upon the political stage. In his famous address before the Springfield, Illinois Young Men's Lyceum in 1838 during his twenty-eighth year Lincoln, who had won his first election to state office five years earlier, remarks that while the experiment of the founders had proven a spectacular success, the experiment itself was now over:

[T]housands have won their deathless names in making it so. But the game is caught; and . . . with the catching, end the pleasures of the chase. This field of glory is harvested, and the crop is already appropriated. . . . The question then, is, can that gratification [sought by men of political ambition and talent] be found in supporting and maintaining an edifice that has been erected by others? Most certainly it cannot. Many great and good men sufficiently qualified for any task they should undertake, may ever be found, whose ambition would aspire to nothing beyond a seat in Congress, a gubernatorial or a presidential chair; but such belong not to the family of the lion, or the tribe of the eagle.

The "Towering genius" of politics "denies that it is glory enough to serve under any chief."

It scorns to tread in the footsteps of any predecessor, however illustrious. It thirsts and burns for distinction; and if possible it will have it, whether at the expense of emancipating slaves, or enslaving freemen.1

Lincoln appears almost to be warning his fellow citizens against his own political ambitions. But in the end he comes out for perpetuation of the handiwork of the Fathers unsullied, that Washington's final 1 "The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions," Jan. 27, 1838, in R.B. Basler, ed.,

The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (1953), I, 113-114; emphasis in original.


126 NORMAN JACOBSON

resting place be not desecrated. All his life Lincoln was conscious of the "paradox" brought explicitly to our attention by Hannah Arendt. That he was unable to resolve it is apparent in his justification of the defense of the Constitution (the Union) by the revolutionary spirit of '76, as in the Gettysburg Address. In my judgment anyone who regards the Constitution as the "natural culmination" of the American Revolution will be forever stuck in that uncomfortable position.

The story of the American Revolution actually begins with the first colonial charters and compacts. For the sake of convenience, I plan to cut into the story in the period of the 1760s, what I refer to as the "recruitment" stage of the Revolution, that period in which the great names identified with the momentous events of the '70s and '80s were not yet so great, when the leading actors were just beginning to move from obscurity to prominence. It is that period above all others which best "fits" Arendt's model of political revolution based upon men acting together by choice, rather than driven to acts of desperation by necessity. As early as 1765, when Royal Governor Bernard of Massachusetts ordered the courts of the Commonwealth closed in response to the refusal of colonial lawyers to submit to payment of a stamp tax, John Adams decided to ground his arguments for reopening the courts in constitutional theory and precedent rather than "in necessity only."2 For Adams regarded the dispute with England above all as a political dispute, involving the very "fundamentals of government."3 It was only later, when what was seen as a threat from "the democracy" dampened his ardor for a political arena open to all ideas, that Adams shifted to the defense of "necessity" which he had earlier disclaimed. By 1777, in the debate over the Confederation, he declared that "Reason, justice, and equity, never had weight enough, on the face of the earth, to govern the councils of men"; it is to "interest alone" that intelligent men must turn when striving to create a stable order.4 And following the Revolution, Adams expressed regret for having contributed to making popular the ideas contained in the Declaration of Independence, for having "hurled my own firebrands into the flames."

But for a while the time was right for such otherwise diverse characters as John Adams and his cousin Samuel, George Washington and Patrick

2 John Adams, Diary, in R.G. Adams, Political Ideas of the American Revolution (1922), 114.

3 CF. Adams, ed., The Works of John Adams, IV, 33. 4 Elliot's Debates, I, 76; emphasis added.


In Response to Arendt 's On Revolution 127

Henry, John Hancock and Robert Morris to cooperate in a political effort, first to seek a redress of grievances against the Crown, then to wrest independence from it. There was a conspicuous absence of a coherent ideology. Poor as well as rich, radical as well as moderate Whigs contributed to the effort.

From the Stamp Act forward private men were entering upon the political stage and being transformed into public personages. Whatever their status as individuals, they were drawn to the town meetings, thence to State legislatures, to Committees of Correspondence, finally to the Continental Congress. It was at the Second Continental Congress at Philadelphia in 1775 that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, known to each other by reputation only, first met. A year later they collaborated in drafting the Declaration. While theories abounded, as in all times of upheaval, there seemed, however self-conscious the revolutionary actors - and few before or since could match that degree of self-consciousness - rather a congeries of ideas than any single dominant ideology. Men were able to work together who from our angle must seem unlikely partners.

When ideology emerged, as it did in 1777-1778, erstwhile political partners were driven apart, old friendships cooled, and victory for a single fraction became more important than preserving freedom of action for all. It marked the beginning of the end for the revolutionary spirit. The final stroke was administered at Philadelphia in 1787. As Hannah Arendt remarked elsewhere, "When an association is no longer capable or willing to unite 'into one channel the efforts of divergent minds' (Tocqueville), it has lost the gift for action."5

The gentlemen who met at Philadelphia were largely in agreement upon one, crucial, objective: a strong central government to provide security to the people of the States against external threat, and to provide as well a check against what they saw as an internal threat from incipient democracy. There was too much freedom abroad in the land which had to be arrested before it surpassed the bounds of order. Patrick Henry was elected a delegate but refused to attend the Constitutional Convention. When asked why not, he replied: "I smelt a Rat."6

II

On the night of December 16, 1773, 110 members of the Sons of Liberty disguised behind warpaint of American Indians boarded a ship 5 "Civil Disobedience," in Crises of the Republic (1972), 98; emphasis in original. 6 In M. Farrand, The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 (1937), III, 558.


128 NORMAN JACOBSON

of the British East India Company and dumped its cargo of tea into Boston Harbor. The operation was carried out with utmost precision: no one was injured, none caught, no other property damaged. Of the 1 10 participants, 35 lacked sufficient wealth to be taxed, and 75 percent owned property valued at less than 60 pounds, compared with a population in which only 22 percent owned less than that amount. But their number included men of substance and wealth as well - the merchant William Molineux, the silversmith Paul Revere, and Thomas Young, physician to John and Abigail Adams. "All had the same purpose," and the scholar who only recently unearthed the evidence concluded that that purpose probably was "political" rather than "economic" or "social." In fact, one of the party was later flogged by his own comrades for having tried to keep some of the tea for himself.7

The operation had been orchestrated by Samuel Adams and his colleagues in the Boston Town Meeting. Even before the tea reached Boston, a plan was gotten up and a meeting called to which citizens from nearby towns were invited. The Committee of Correspondence, under the chairmanship of Adams, was placed in charge of the whole affair, and it decided to reject any compromise with Great Britain. Further meetings were called to apprise the colony of the crisis, and as head of the Committee, Adams circulated a letter arguing that there were but two choices open to the citizens of Massachusetts: submit like slaves or take action worthy of free men. The first Committee of Correspondence in America had been the invention of Samuel Adams.8

Samuel was a member of the wealthier branch of the Adams family; John, thirteen years his junior, the poor country cousin persuaded by Samuel to move to Boston better to join with him in political action against the British. Samuel Adams was a Lockean natural rights thinker whose greatest debt to Locke, whom he had read as a Harvard undergraduate, was the theory of consent. Almost thirty years before the Revolution, in 1743, he had written a discourse titled "Whether It Be Lawful to Resist the Supreme Magistrate If the Commonwealth Cannot Otherwise Be Preserved." He publicly argued the affirmative in a Master of Arts thesis presented at Harvard in the presence of Royal Governor Shirley, who was compelled to hear him out on Commencement Day. By 1768, Adams was persuaded that the only promising course was that favoring independence. 7 T. Martin, "Facts on Tea Party Rebels," University of California Bulletin, 1979. 8 E.N. Kearny, Mavericks in American Politics (1967), 20-21.


In Response io Arendt 's On Revolution 129

John Adams was the premier constitutional thinker of the Revolution and, as such, became the indispensable ally of his cousin. Until the mid-70s they collaborated mostly on petitions and rejoinders to Royal Governor Hutchinson of Massachusetts. The Adamses made common cause with men of such diverse opinions as Hancock, Revere, and Josiah Quincy, President of Harvard. When, in January 1776, Thomas Paine's great pamphlet appeared, many in the Continental Congress, to which John Adams was a delegate, attributed "Common Sense" to him. Although he was to attack Paine's "silly projects" after the Revolution, and to contend in a letter to Benjamin Rush that Paine had composed from "a malignant heart . . . virulent declamations, which the enthusiastic fury of the times intimidated all men, even Mr. Burke, from answering as he ought," in 1776 Adams had seemed pleased to be identified as the probable author of such "declamations."

The point is first, that until the mid-70s Revolutionary thought was not ideology but displayed a remarkable diversity; and second, that when it did become ideological as the Revolution moved into the '80s, it became inevitable that some would "win" for their ideology and others "lose."

Samuel Adams lost. After the Constitution is ratified he writes John Adams that the whole revolutionary enterprise had eventuated in failure, and worse. What had occurred was "the substitution of one set of tyrants for another, and now our own, against whom we have no recourse." As before ratification he had lamented the wholesale scrapping of the Articles of Confederation in a famous letter to Richard Henry Lee of Virginia. Under a true confederation "the People would govern themselves more easily . . . and the Liberties of the United States would be more secure than they can be ... under the proposed new Constitution ... So great is the Wickedness of some Men, and the ... Servility of others, that one would be almost inclined to conclude that Communities cannot be free." What is more, he reminds Lee that the seeds of tyranny, "like a Canker Worm," had begun to "spring even before the Conclusion of our Struggle for the natural Rights of Men. . . ."9

The dream of Samuel Adams had been that of small free Republics long before Jefferson ruefully turned his thoughs to Wards and Hundreds. Now that dream had been dashed, equally by stupid servility as by pride of power. In 1775 when Adams and Hancock had arrived 9 Samuel Adams to Richard Henry Lee, Dec. 3, 1787, in H.A. Cushing, ed., The Writings

of Samuel Adams, IV, 324.


130 NORMAN JACOBSON

by carriage at Philadelphia for the meeting of the Continental Congress, the company was escorted into the city by mounted officers with drawn swords, and the populace out of gratitude to these famous Revolutionary heroes tried to unhitch the horses so that they might pull the carriage themselves. John Hancock, he of the extravagant signature and flourish, appeared delighted but Adams was appalled. "I will get out and walk/' he told Hancock, "for I will not countenance an act by which my fellow citizens shall degrade themselves into beasts."10 It is crucial to note that to Adams, Pennsylvanians as well as Commonwealth men were fellow citizens, lest the spirit of Confederation he visualized be thought hostile to a general "American" citizenship.

Samuel Adams turned his back on the new governmental order, writing to his cousin in 1790 that he had no longer any interest in government. Instead he would engage himself with spiritual and pedagogical matters, in the hope that by "impressing the minds of men with the importance of educating the little boys and girls" and instilling in them the love of virtue, some small progress towards freedom might yet be made. John Adams responded that Samuel was far too much the idealist and counseled reconsideration. Samuel ought to join with him in attending to the task of helping to construct sound governmental institutions.11 John Adams simply could not comprehend such an attitude on the part of the older man. "I know not how it is that mankind has an aversion to the study of the science of government. . . . To me no romance is more entertaining."12 With his hopes for what he considered true freedom disappointed and the zest for the quality of political action experienced during the early stages of the Revolution now hopeless of rekindling within the new structure of government, Samuel Adams was no longer entertained, as he had been ever since his college days fifty years before.

Ill

In 1842 an American historian discovered what he took to be "the ultimate philosophy of the American Revolution." It was then that he interviewed one Captain Levi Preston, a 90-year-old veteran of the Battle of Lexington. The old soldier testified that he had experienced

10 Kearny, 26. 11 J. Adams, Works, VI, 405, 414-416. 12 In R.G. Adams, 110.



no oppression personally, had never drunk tea, nor even so much as seen a tax stamp. Moreover, he had not ever heard of Harrington, Locke, or Sidney. Then why had he fought? " Young man, what we meant in going for those red-coats was this: we had always governed ourselves, and we always meant to. They didn't mean we should!"13

The Revolutionary expression of self-government is to be found in the Articles of Confederation drafted by the Continental Congress and unanimously ratified by the State delegations. The first Article proclaims: "The style of this Confederacy shall be The United States of America.' " The second reserves "sovereignty, freedom and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right" to each State unless "expressly delegated to the United States in Congress assembled." The third declares that the "States hereby severally enter into a firm league of friendship with each other. ..." And the concluding Article, symbolically the thirteenth, contains a pledge reminiscent of the language of the Declaration of Independence: "We further solemnly plight and engage the faith of our respective constituents that they shall abide by the determinations of the United States in Congress assembled . . . and the Union shall be perpetual." The faith of their constituents, not their interests.

The Articles of Confederation are among the best kept secrets of American history, especially since the Civil War. Though they were the first Constitution of government of the United States, most of us think of the present Constitution as the only one America has ever been given. As such, it must obviously be the culmination of the Revolution and repository of the revolutionary spirit. In my judgment the political tragedy of which Arendt writes lay in this: that instead of being permitted to evolve, the first Constitution was scrapped in a single stroke. During the late nineteenth century John Fiske coined the term "The Critical Period" to describe that time which witnessed the many "failures" of the Articles and the desperate need for a new constitution of government. In this light, the destruction of the Articles and the drafting and ratification of a new instrument may be seen as one of the earliest examples of "crisis management" in American history.

I am not advancing the silly argument that the Articles were sufficient to the requirements of the time. But I am not prepared to accept the obverse, namely, that the second Constitution was the only feasible response. The historical evidence is against such a conclusion. But I have a theoretical argument to advance as well: Had the Articles been 13 Mellin Chamberlain, in W. Brown, The Good Americans (1969), 16.


132 NORMAN JACOBSON

strengthened in accordance with unfolding events, the political education of American citizens might conceivably have been tilted towards the maintenance of attachment to small political and governmental units and away from the distant colossus at the center. With the injection of Nationalism during and after the Civil War that colossus has seemed to American political common sense the appropriate manager of the affairs of the Union. The "New Federalism" of the current Administration, based as it is upon economic rather than political considerations, is scarcely likely to change things. Local loyalties and attachments have been continuously eroded from 1788 onward, and the smaller formal political stages, where the lights have not been turned out, present a fare made up mostly of farces.

There is another reason to turn our attention once again on the first, true, Confederation. During the interview conducted by Adelbert Reif with Hannah Arendt in 1970, a version of which appears in Crises of the Republic as "Thoughts on Politics and Revolution: A Commentary," Arendt addresses the possibility of international government:

Between sovereign states there can be no last resort except war; if war no longer serves that purpose, that fact alone proves that we must have a new concept of the state.

The mere rudiments I see for a new state concept can be found in the federal system, whose advantage it is that power moves neither from above nor from below, but is horizontally directed, so that the federated units mutually check and control their powers. For the real difficulty in speculating on these matters is that the final resort should not be sw/?ernational but international. A supernational authority would either be ineffective or be monopolized by the nation that happens to be the strongest, and so would lead to world government, which could easily become the most frightful tyranny conceivable, since from its global police force there would be no escape - until it finally fell apart.

One may construe the term "supernational authority" to apply to the internal tyranny experienced by so many American citizens in recent times. Although there is no evidence that Hannah Arendt, in the passage under discussion, had any such application in mind, elsewhere she does treat the government of the United States in this fashion. In her essays on "Civil Disobedience" and on "Lying in Politics," both of which


In Response to Arendt *s On Revolution 133

also appear in Crises of the Republic, Arendt depicts all too chillingly the resort by those in power to tyrannical measures in the pursuit of extra-Constitutional ends of their own choosing. The apparatus used by the central government against its own citizens "fell apart" only with Watergate and the publication of the Pentagon Papers. Yet the dreadful potential for the government to employ its police forces, including the "intelligence community," to manipulate, to quiet, even to remove those engaged in dissent, still remains. Arendt continues:

Where do we find models that could help us in construing, at least theoretically, an /rtternational authority as the highest control agency? This sounds like a paradox, since what is highest cannot well be in between, but it is nevertheless the real question. When I said that none of the revolutions, each of which overthrew one form of government and replaced it with another, had been able to shake the state concept and its sovereignty, I had in mind something that I tried to elaborate a bit in my book On Revolution. Since the revolutions of the eighteenth century, every large upheaval has actually developed the rudiments of an entirely new form of government, which emerged independent of all preceding revolutionary theories, directly out of the course of the revolution itself, that is, out of the experiences of action and out of the resulting will of the actors to participate in the further development of public affairs.14

The model Arendt was seeking is to be found in the Articles of Confederation. True, that Constitution was in its wording congenial to "the state concept and its sovereignty," but who is to say that were it permitted to stand for a while that sovereignty might not have been eroded by the "will of the actors to participate in the further development of public affairs"? It is crucial then to point out how anxious the members of one faction, the Federalists, were to prevent such further participation, and how they went about the task of confining the political stage to duly elected officers at the central government.

John Adams had early expressed a fear that "the power of the country" might fall to the "debtors." "If the power of the country should get into such hands, and there is great danger that it will, to what purpose have we sacrificed our time, health, and everything 14 Crises of the Republic, 230-231; emphasis in original.


134 NORMAN JACOBSON

else? " ' 5 In order to keep necessity, that is, economic and social questions, from invading the political sphere, that sphere will be shrunk and hedged until the capacity for action developed by so many during the earlier stages of the Revolution will be but a memory trace. Political freedom is to be sacrificed to ideology.

The movement to "de-Bostonize" America, as it was called - that is, to deprive local voluntary associations the opportunity for continued political action - begins picking up steam at about the time of Valley Forge. Although by temperament and conviction sympathetic with the idea of strengthening the central government and checking "popular enthusiasm," Washington was alarmed. He feared that such an "impertinence" by the nationalist faction at the Continental Congress would sap the determination of his men to continue the fight. Washington threatened Congress with military disobedience were any group of gentlemen there to attempt change before peace had been concluded. His action carried the day, officially. But the faction in favor of change, soon to be calling themselves Federalists, persisted in organizing and in stimulating anxieties over "democracy" among themselves as well as among any others willing to listen.

When a Revolutionary Constitution was proposed for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in June 1777, a group of powerful men, under the leadership of Judge Theophilus Parsons, met at Ipswich in Essex County in the spring of 1778 to plan its defeat. According to his son, Parsons "was eminently and thoroughly conservative. He was so by natural tendency, and by education and habit; the longer he lived the more conservative" he grew.16 The group became known as the Essex Junto, and Ipswich recognized as the birthplace of the Federalist party. A proclamation was drafted, the "Essex Result," attacking the proposed Constitution as too democratic, poll-watchers were appointed to make themselves conspicuous to debtors and other dependents of the wealth of Massachusetts at the central polling places (the secret ballot lay decades in the future), and the Revolutionary Constitution went down to defeat 9,900 to 2,000. 17 John Adams was then "induced," so he said, to prepare a new Constitution, which was ratified in 1780. Adams later observed that the part he played in the Constitutional drama had hurt him with the common people of Massachusetts. "A foundation was here laid for much jealousy and unpopularity, against me, among the democratical people in this State."18 15 J. Adams, Works, II, 421. 16 T. Parsons, Jr., Memoir of Theophilus Parsons (1859), 36. 17 S.E. Morison, A History of the Constitution of Massachusetts (1917), 14-15. 18 J. Adams, Works, IX, 618.


In Response to Arendt 's On Revolution 135 Rufus King of Massachusetts wrote to James Madison that the efforts

of men like those comprising the Junto, as well as John Adams, Madison, and King himself to strengthen the central government were creating an "apprehension that the liberties of the people are in danger. . . .'"9 It was "no wonder at all," John Quincy Adams confided to his Diary, that such an apprehension should exist, for the proposed U.S. Constitution was obviously "calculated to increase the influence, power and wealth of those who have any influence. If the Constitution be adopted it will be a grand point in favor of the aristocratic party."20 This despite the fact that his father - by his example in constitution making in 1780; by his great Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, the first volume of which was available at Philadelphia in 1787; and by virtue of his enormous prestige as a constitutional thinker - had to be counted as one of the prime shapers of the new federal Constitution.

Still, the votes in the State ratifying conventions were close - in fact, so close in the major states of New York, Massachusetts, and Virginia that a shift of opinion on the part of but a handful of delegates would have been sufficient to defeat the proposed Constitution. It won in Massachusetts by 187 to 168, in Virginia by 89 to 79, and in New York by 30 to 27. Of 582 votes cast in those three State conventions, the Constitution won a plurality of just 32. That it won at all may be credited to one of those practical jokes of world history, in this case Shays' Rebellion.

In their protest against severe taxation (around four times as high as that levied upon their counterparts in neighboring States), against imprisonment for debt and exorbitant lawyers' fees, and against being denied genuine access to the political arena, a number of farmers in western Massachusetts began meeting in county conventions to draw up lists of grievances against the legislature. Shades of the early stages of the American Revolution! They too were labelled traitors, only this time by the government run by their fellow citizens in Boston. During late 1786 and early 1787, the protestors led by Daniel Shays, a former captain in the Continental Army, disrupted court actions and briefly seized the arsenal at Springfield before being subdued. But the damage had been done. No more explicit action could have supported the cause of Federalism. And, as is usually the case, the terror of rebellion was

19 C.R. King, The Life and Correspondence of Rufus King (1900), I, 314. 20 J.Q. Adams, in A.E. Morse, The Federalist Party in Massachusetts to the Year 1800

(1909), 49-50.


136 NORMAN JACOBSON

greater in proportion to one's distance from the scene. The customarily staid Washington poured out his heart in a letter to former aide-de- camp, General Humphreys, his words reminiscent almost of a Shakespeare soliloquy: "What, gracious God, is man, that there should be such inconsistency and perfidiousness in his conduct? It was but the other day that we were shedding our blood to obtain the constitutions under which we now live - constitutions of our own choice and making - and now we are unsheathing the sword to overturn them." A few months later, Washington accepted the presidency of the Constitutional Convention, whose purpose it was to overturn the Articles of Confederation. In his letter accompanying the transmittal of the new Constitution to the Congress, Washington was frank to concede that a measure of freedom was to be exacted in return for increased security. "Individuals entering into society, must give up a share of liberty to preserve the rest," he wrote.

The magnitude of the sacrifice must depend as well on situation and circumstance, as on the object to be obtained. It is at all times difficult to draw with precision the line between those rights which must be surrendered, and those which may be reserved; on the present occasion the difficulty was encreased by a difference among the several States as to their situation, extent, habits, and particular interests.21

Something was indeed "sacrificed," when not "surrendered" outright. That something was the revolutionary spirit.

IV

In On Revolution, Hannah Arendt refers to. the "vicious circle" entered by those attempting to lay down a new constitution following a modern revolution: "Those who get together to constitute a new government are themselves unconstitutional, that is, they have no authority to do what they have set out to achieve."22 The American, no less than the French Revolutionaries, were beset by this difficulty. The Americans solved the problem, according to Arendt, by locating the ultimate authority in "nature" and "nature's God," supported by "mutual pledgings" and the existence of State polities extending back 21 In Farrand, II, 666-667. 22 On Revolution, 184.



in time beyond the Revolution itself. There is much to be said for this view of the matter, and Arendt herself says much, much more for it. And she also places emphasis upon the conserving authority of the Supreme Court. In the American Republic, "the function of authority is legal, and it consists in interpretation."23 But nothing can eradicate the historical fact that the second Constitution of the United States stemmed from a usurpation of authority: it was itself clearly unconstitutional. How is that possible?

The authority to amend the Articles of Confederation was grounded in the more general authority established in that agreement of government. And the Articles required that no "alteration at any time hereafter be made in any of them, unless such alteration be agreed to in a Congress of the United States, and be afterwards confirmed by the legislatures of every State."2* But the delegates to the Convention at Philadelphia, there officially to "amend" the Articles, required that "The ratification of the conventions of nine States shall be sufficient for the establishment of this Constitution between the States so ratifying the same."25 This is no mere quibble but, from my perspective as well as from that of the opponents of the new Constitution, the difference between a government based on consent and one based on power, to be invested with the sanctity of authority after the fact through a procedure made to resemble the earlier one of ratification by the States.

The charge was significant enough for James Madison to have devoted a number of The Federalist to attempt, not to answer it, but to justify the usurpation of authority. "But that the objectors may be disarmed of every pretext," he wrote,

it shall be granted for a moment that the convention were neither authorized by their commission, nor justified by circumstances in proposing a Constitution of their country: does it follow that the Constitution ought, for that reason alone, to be rejected? If, according to the noble precept, it be lawful to accept good advice even from an enemy, shall we set the ignoble example of refusing such advice even when it is offered by our friends? The prudent enquiry, in all cases, ought surely to be not so much from whom the advice comes, as whether the advice be good.26

23 Ibid., 201. 24 Articles, III; emphasis added. 25 Constitution, VII; emphasis added. 26 Carl Van Doren, ed., The Federalist (1945), No. 40, 276; emphasis in original.


138 NORMAN JACOBSON

No "mutual pledging" there, of the "Lives," "Fortunes," and "sacred Honor," as in the example of the Revolutionaries of 1776, or solemn "plight[ing] and engaging] of the faith of [their] respective constituents," as in that of the men who drafted the Articles of Confederation. What does the Revolution actually "end" in then, at least in the light of the political morality conjured up by terms such as Honor and Mutual Pledging, of Plighting and Engaging Faith? The answer can only be sophistry.

Amos Singletary, a Shaysite and delegate to the Massachusetts ratifying convention, was not far off the mark when he warned his colleagues that the "lawyers and men of learning, and moneyed men, that talk so finely, and gloss over matters so smoothly, to make us poor illiterate people swallow down the pill, expect to get into Congress themselves; they expect to be the managers of this Constitution, and get all the power and all the money into their own hands, and then they will swallow up all us little folks, like the great Leviathan"21 That the little folks were not utterly swallowed up, but stuck in the craw of their managers, had more to do, as I suggested earlier, with the strength of local attachments and the habit of voluntary association than with the generosity of their benefactors.

The American Revolution begins in confusion but tremendous energy, rises to the heights of political glory, is distorted by the politics of faction, and arrives ultimately at legal sophistry, saved wherever it is saved by a federal structure and a Bill of Rights. Abraham Lincoln divined as much, but recoiled from the insight. Or, from another perspective already mentioned, he tried to wed the Constitution to the revolutionary spirit to justify the defense of the Union by recourse to the principles of '76. Hannah Arendt has told us much about the political spontaneity which flourished during certain stages of practically all modern revolutions. I believe that her thinking was evolving somewhat in the direction I am suggesting here, for example in the discussion of Calhoun's "concurrent majority" and of the interdependence of "co/isent" and "//ssent" in her essay on "Civil Disobedience."28

It is my view that the revolutionary spirit, not as ideology but as a yearning for "public happiness," never wholly died in America. However tinged by nostalgia for the politics of the American Enlightenment, the political writings of Hannah Arendt speak equally 27 Elliot's Debates, II, 102. 28 Crises of the Republic, 76, 88-96.



to "the new ones" as to their forebears. From Shays' Rebellion and the thriving existence in the 1790s of Democratic-Republican Societies until destroyed in the reaction of the French Terror, to the thousands of circuit-riding political * 'educators' ' at the height of Populism to the Student and Antiwar Movements of the 1960's, the taste for freedom and political action shone through clearly enough. If the observations set down in this essay are worthy of any attention at all, then far from a Fable or a simplistic Critique of Modernity, On Revolution, as it was to a whole generation of students in the 1960's, is an indispensable Handbook for Revolutionaries. And the Articles of Confederation are the missing link, the fleeting repository of the Lost Treasure of the Revolutionary spirit.


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Issue Table of ContentsSalmagundi, No. 60, On Hannah Arendt (Spring-Summer 1983), pp. i-xvi, 3-213Front MatterOn Hannah ArendtPreface [pp. i-iii]Introduction [pp. iv-xvi]Hannah Arendt: Democracy and The Political [pp. 3-19]Arendt and Representative Democracy [pp. 20-59]Action, Story and History: On Re-reading The Human Condition [pp. 60-72]Liberating The Pariah: Politics, The Jews, and Hannah Arendt [pp. 73-106]The Destinies of Totalitarianism [pp. 107-122]Parable and Paradox: In Response to Arendt's On Revolution [pp. 123-139]

New PoemsSeven PoemsThe Marrano [pp. 141-141]The Kabalist [pp. 142-142]LOVE AND WORK: Apple Picking [pp. 143-143]Simon's Dream [pp. 144-144]Time-Binding [pp. 145-145]The Dream As Calculation [pp. 146-146]The Religion Of Art (1 Feb '58) [pp. 146-147]

Four PoemsThe Vegetable Gourmet [pp. 148-148]So Soon Goodbye [pp. 149-149]Here and There [pp. 150-150]Seeing my Breath on the Air at Summer's End [pp. 151-151]

Four PoemsA Field of Snow on the Palatine [pp. 152-153]Inni Popolari [pp. 154-155]Anacreontic [pp. 155-155]Assisi [pp. 156-156]

Two PoemsVows [pp. 157-157]Harvests [pp. 158-158]

In The Garden [pp. 159-160]In The Rough [pp. 161-164]

BOOKS IN REVIEWPostmodern Fictions [pp. 165-169]Henry Pachter And Weimar [pp. 170-175]Intelligence and Invention [pp. 176-185]Irving Howe, In Retrospect [pp. 186-194]Follies On The Left [pp. 195-206]

Snippets and Seeds. Twelfth Instalment [pp. 207-213]Back Matter

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