Was the American Revolution a Revolution? Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (ERH)\u00a0concludes it was a \u201chalf-revolution\u201d rather than a total revolution on the scale of the Russian, French, Puritan, Reformation, and Papal revolutions.<\/p>\n
Evaluating the revolutionary character of the American Revolution rests partly on the question of what \u201crevolution\u201d meant to the participants. ERH notes that there were two notions of revolution in play during the 18th<\/sup> century. In the \u201cEnglish\u201d sense, revolution meant a preservation or restoration of an existing order of things: It \u201claid nine tenths of the weight on the maintenance of vested rights and one tenth on the necessary inconvenience of rebellion.\u201d Yet, the American rebels also looked to France for practical help and for ideological support, and in the \u201cFrench\u201d sense, revolution already carried the connotation of the formation of a new governmental system.<\/p>\n The revolutionary character of American independence can also be gauged by the fortunes of the word \u201cequality.\u201d Originally, the Americans used the word as a term of \u201cfaith,\u201d that is, in the hope that the colonies could be treated as equal to the mother country and the other peoples and nations of Europe. Yet, that word also contained an element of \u201chope,\u201d and in the \u201cnon-Whiggist world of French friends of America, of free-thinkers, of negroes, the word \u2018equality\u2019 found an echo which resulted in changing the word itself.\u201d<\/p>\n The \u201cJeffersonian Ordinance of 1784\u201d displays both of these senses. The ordinance declares that the US has power to own territories, to continue the British colonial adventure to the West, to take full responsibility for her future. In all these specifics, it aims only at equality with Britain.<\/p>\n Yet, the document included a paragraph stating that \u201cafter the year 1800 of the Christian Era, there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in any of the said States.\u201d This was rejected at the time, a sign that \u201cequality\u201d had not yet made its transition from a term of faith to a term of hope. In 1787, the ordinance was re-framed for the territories of the then NW America, around Ohio, and in these areas slavery was forbidden.<\/p>\n Hence, at the end of the 18th<\/sup> century, \u201cEquality in the body politic was granted to every colony. Equality of the individual was granted in the northern half only.\u201d It was not until the Civil War that the balance of the word \u201cequality\u201d shifted to one of hope: By 1860, \u201cColonial equality weighed, so to speak, one fourth or one eight in the scale; the equality of the individual overbalanced it.\u201d One might put it this way: The South stood for the \u201cequality\u201d of 1776, the equality of faith; the North for the equality granted the NW in 1787, the equality of hope.<\/p>\n ERH draws a more general conclusion from this, arguing that revolutions always begin from faith, and that hope develops later \u201cIt is only in a later stage of the revolution that Hope replaces Faith. When those who have uttered, stammered, cried out the new word I the dark of despair and revolution, when they have passed away, their grandchildren who have listened to it in the open day of revolution, try to write the next chapter.\u201d<\/p>\n He also comments on the decline of the religious language of the Civil War following the war, when \u201cThe profiteers from the North who abused the South after the War, the carpet-baggers, disorganized and dismantled the American political credo so passionately defended by Lincoln.\u201d<\/p>\n ERH also reflects on the central importance that Nature played in the ideas of the American revolution. The great principle, Governor Morris declared in 1779, was \u201cmen are by nature free.\u201d The \u201caxe felling trees\u201d is the true philosophy of America, and \u201cthe revolution mobilized the inhabitants of thirteen British colonies against the wild Nature of a half-unknown area.\u201d America is neither a state nor a nation, but an empire. But more importantly, American live within nature.<\/p>\n He takes up the question of whether one might consider the American revolution as a \u201cprecursor\u201d to the French. In his study of revolutions, he discovers that most have a precursor, and that these precursor revolutions are failures. The seeds first scattered in a precursor revolution find soil somewhere else, unable to flourish in the original environment.<\/p>\n Precursor revolutions sometimes create historical ironies: \u201cLouis XIV and James I both supported the precursor revolution abroad and by supporting them, became the unconscious instruments of the real and total revolution which went against themselves. The ways of Providence are inscrutable!\u201d<\/p>\n ERH concludes that the American Revolution was a precursor, which was incapable of creating a new language that would have formed a total revolution in the autobiography of Western man. America, he argues, \u201cmust be interpreted as an unfulfilled promise, snuffed out between the two great forms of life and education which were created by England and France respectively.\u201d America \u201clost one political language without finding another.\u201d<\/p>\n It is a half-revolution, partly because it lacked the \u201cfull martyrdom at home\u201d characteristic of total revolutions. Total revolutions achieve an \u201cimmortal soul\u201d through this suffering and martyrdom, which America did not experience.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Was the American Revolution a Revolution? Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (ERH)\u00a0concludes it was a \u201chalf-revolution\u201d rather than a total revolution on the scale of the Russian, French, Puritan, Reformation, and Papal revolutions. Evaluating the revolutionary character of the American Revolution rests partly on the question of what \u201crevolution\u201d meant to the participants. ERH notes that there were […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":19822,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1256,726],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19832","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-american-revolution","category-rosenstock-huessy"],"yoast_head":"\n