Reflections on the Revolution in America

“It is the strongest weapon in the universe. It will destroy the Tyranni and us alike, but will save the Nebular Kingdoms. Without it, we could perhaps defeat the Tyranni, but we would only have exchanged one feudal despotism for another, and as the Tyranni are plotted against, we would be plotted against. We and they must both be delivered into the ashcan of outmoded political systems. The time for maturity has come as it once came on the planet Earth, and there will be a new kind of government, a kind that has never yet been tried in the Galaxy. There will be no Khans, no Autarchs, Directors, or Ranchers.”

“In the name of Space,” roared Rizzett suddenly, “what will there be?”

“People.”

— The Stars, Like Dust (1951), by Isaac Asimov

I wish that I could have read more before writing this essay, except that I have not and the semiquincentennial of any country is often a once-in-your-lifetime event. I would rather have written something inadequate for the event of 250 years since the adoption of the Declaration of Independence rather than nothing at all, even if this comes down to stubbornness and self-regard. I would have liked to have read more before writing this: in particular J. G. A. Pocock, Quentin Skinner, Eric Nelson, the whole Federalist Papers and some of the academic work on the historiography of the American Revolution. Life, however, gets in the way and the next such anniversary is in the year 2076, and who knows where the United States or I will be at that time. If anything I hope that it exists as a marker or time capsule, at least for myself, as to what I thought about it at this moment in July 2026.

I'm less interested in the common clichés usually invoked and their attendant dualisms: the "good" Revolution vs the "bad" Constitution, the "good" Hamilton vs the "bad" Jefferson (and vice versa), the "good" Anti-Federalists vs the "bad" Federalists and so on. And even more than that the bigger question of whether the Revolution was (in popular culture-war terms) a grand story of liberty, the Greatest Story Ever Told, or a puffed-up reaction of aristocrats who wanted the "freedoms" of slavery and settler colonialism. The reason I'm not touching the last comes down to an honest appraisal of my familiarity with the academic historiography. ¹ The other comes down to a frankly naïve interest in the "ideal" pole of it, which I do not want to so easily give up to a wholly cynical, if direct, analysis. In the hope of not erring like the non-dupes, as Lacan put it. Therefore, here are some brief remarks on the American Revolution, 250 years on, even if exceedingly brief and all of which I hope to flesh out in the future after more reading.

Take as a hypothesis that America is a revolutionary society or that the American Revolution was a revolution (whatever that means). The sense of such a proposition is taking America as being the culmination of what we might call "classical political philosophy", both in thought and action. In "thought" there is what intellectual historians call "the republican synthesis", a long line stretching from the Greco-Roman inheritance through modern figures like Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Locke and others. Entwined with that is the history of Whigs in England, ending up in the "Radical Whiggery" that arose out of the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution. We could call this movement the Enlightenment.

This legitimacy could be said to come from its survival. The American Revolution never ate its children as could be said of the French Revolution, and most of its leaders could end their lives peacefully serving their new nation. It is sobering to consider the abortive failures of many of the subsequent Latin American republican revolutions, which took inspiration from the American Revolution. Most famous is the First Republic of Venezuela, which ended in the fall of the republic and Simón Bolívar in exile. There is also the French Revolution, which (because of the Terror amongst other things) to observers made it no longer legitimate, and in the end the revolution itself cancelled itself in Napoleon and the later restoration of the Bourbons. An American could point out that the United States has existed, in some sense, since 1776; its Constitution has been in operation since 1789. This is a feat which other revolutions have not accomplished.

It is not so easy to directly equate the present state of affairs and legitimacy. An important counter-argument would be Dennis C. Rasmussen's book Fears of a Setting Sun: The Disillusionment of America's Founders (2021), which I understand suggests that, with the exception of James Madison, the Founders were at the end of their lives pessimistic about the new republic. This is striking enough that I think that any hagiography about the Founders or the American Revolution can be immanently critiqued through these debates and misgivings without (initially) needing to bring in hindsight and future moral judgements. The attitude by which the status quo is to be automatically affirmed is often attributed to Hegel's infamous statement from the Philosophy of Right that goes "What is rational is actual, and what is actual is rational." Shlomo Avineri points out just why this epigram has been so often misunderstood.

Hence in a lengthy footnote in the 1830 edition of his Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences, [Hegel] makes it a point to emphasize that actuality (Wirklichkeit) is not identical with all that exists. Hegel distinguishes here between Dasein (Existence) and Wirklichkeit. Dasein encompasses everything which exists, whereas Wirklichkeit is only that part of Dasein in which essence and existence coincide, and it is because of this that one can say that it is rational. ²

The extent to which the rationality of the American Revolution can be affirmed is to the extent that it has preserved itself in concretizing itself in an actual state, and has made possible a kind of freedom (even if limited, considered only "bourgeois", and limited by race and gender). It is in the question of freedom, however, that we come across the first antinomy that proceeds from the Revolution. The original legitimacy of the American Revolution, to American leaders, came from the original "rights of Englishmen" allegedly applicable to the colonists insofar as they were British subjects. The Magna Carta, the Petition of Right (1628), and the English Bill of Rights (1689) would make the actions of Parliament illegitimate and therefore resistance to Parliament could be considered lawful according to a more primordial English constitution. the failure of reconciliation is what ultimately grounded the argument in natural-law rights and "self-evident truths" which make revolution legitimate insofar as it is grounded in a natural right to revolution as opposed to the positive law of the British sovereign.

Here then is the problem of the passage of the "particular" rights of Englishmen and the "universal" rights of man, and between the "natural" unwritten law of self-evident truths and the "positive" law that has been written in London or Washington. The Constitution itself does not recognize a right to revolution despite its very legitimacy deriving from the assertion of such a right. Of course this is not surprising or a limitation, but perhaps a marker of the relationship between natural and positive law. Broadly speaking we can and should affirm the nature of a universal natural law that applies to all humanity without exception. However, we cannot simply sit with a law that would transcend and float above the world and the state of affairs, since that ultimately ends up in the problem that Hegel identified with the subjective "law of the heart" that would wish to ultimately negate the world completely. It is this Kantian-Fichtean enthusiasm that is critiqued in the Preface to the Philosophy of Right. If justice were to be made actual in the world, it would have to be made actual in some positive institution, insofar as all our action necessarily starts in media res.

The problem we face however is one of logic: how to relate the triad universal-particular-individual. To the extent that Abstract Natural Law was made manifest in the form of English Law—Is it not that the rights of the American Revolution are ultimately grounded in the "rights of Englishmen." To be an American is to be an Englishman. The question comes down to what this involves: does this imply that one has to be adopted into Anglo-Saxonism? Is this inheritance to be thought of in a racial sense? This was the opinion shared by many Americans, ranging up to Theodore Roosevelt. The more we look at the liberalism of the Progressive Era the more we see how entwined it was with a conception of the superiority or the importance of the Anglo-Saxon race, whether as superior or as paternal to the "other races." It cannot simply be declared that then these people were not liberals or that they were hypocritical in their liberalism. It is not only in the United States where pre-1945 liberalism (and genuine at that) could co-exist with anti-feminism, racism and racialist supremacy, anti-semitism and the like. ³

More broadly is the idea that this inheritance is more spiritual, and the idea that to be American is to be (despite whatever race one is) the human of English empiricism and Scottish common sense philosophy. Can someone be adopted into the English fold and therefore become American? This is the unresolved question at the heart of American cosmopolitanism, racism, liberalism, xenophobia, nationalism. Even the question of Englishness cannot simply be put in a progressive/conservative axis: John Bright's defence of the Union during the Civil War came from it being "the American branch of what he declared to be a 'transatlantic English nation'" ⁴ Perhaps until the early 20th century it was possible to be a Radical or a Fabian and believe (even if opposed to racism and imperialism) the progressive nature of an Anglo-American civilization thought to be intimately linked to liberty.

It could be argued that it was precisely this deracinating (or rather, abstracting) gesture moving from particular to universal that makes America "generic" (which is why the common invocation of the idea of a "creedal nation.") That the essence of being American is premised on the parallax between particular Englishness and universal humanity. Here comes the famous poem that goes, "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free..." From the 19th century onward we see the fact that America became the primary destination for immigrants from all over the world, especially Europe. It was not that all of them immediately set down roots and immediately became Americans: many of them would re-migrate back to their homelands, hold onto their Old World identities all the way down to the 20th century and to the present. The number of Irish bars in Boston is testament to that fact and perhaps would be disconcerting news to the original Puritans of Massachusetts.

Even so it becomes a kind of truth that America is the no-place of the world, where (in theory) the fetters of the Old World can be left behind. Despite the claims of impoverishment of Lockean man there perhaps was something liberating in New World deracination in immigrants then and now (even if it does not apply to all immigrants), that of becoming abstract and so disconnected from an overwhelming ethnic tradition. This however leads to the next antinomy of what the relation between an "Old World" and a "New World" identity is. Here, given the abstract center of the nation, is the impasse between two models of politics: either politics consists of the representatives in the Legislative branch of various pre-political identities who form a procedural coalition redistributing spoils and interests to various pre-partisan communities who are politicized in this way, or the Executive branch grounds itself in a "direct" plebiscitary relation (bypassing mediation) and speaks in the name of the individual posited as citizen (supposed to be shorn of all "particular" determinations but then determined in a particular way) imagined as acting through this center. ⁵

Monarchy and aristocracy are the two ideas that cannot simply be justified in an abstract analysis of the Understanding (Verstand). Žižek reminds us "of the famous Lacanian affirmation that a madman who believes himself to be a king is no more mad than a king who believes himself to be a king - who, that is, identifies immediately with the mandate 'king'" ⁶ One who is recognized as a king, or an aristocrat, is only so because one is recognized as such by others, or because one inherits the position from an ancestor, both cases that end up in an infinite regress. The alternative is to ground the series somewhere in some supposedly indubitable foundation, like the Divine Right of Kings, God, or as was in the classical world, being descended from a god or a demigod. The opposition has been twofold: either then some "higher" and "organic" notion of Reason (Vernunft) is required that would naturally prove that the king and aristocrat are somehow necessarily implied by the social totality. This is the path taken by the ultramontane and counter-Enlightenment side of reaction that often affirmed absolutism in monarchy (incidentally alien to the English conception of kingship and defeated in the Civil War) that can be seen in figures like de Maistre.

The other is the English tendency which accepts constitutional monarchy as a matter of convention, habit: if it ain't broke don't fix it, it might be unjustified but who's responsible for shaking the foundations. Hegel's position is considerably more complex here, since he critiques the Understanding-Reason opposition of the Romantics as itself being a product of Understanding and therefore paradoxically takes up a more positive account of the Understanding. The other is that Hegel affirms constitutional monarchy as do the English but with the difference that Hegel openly affirms the irrational nature of the constitutional monarch even while including him in the state. Hegel famously states that the only power that the monarch has is putting his signature on the decisions made by the legislature and civil servants, the "dotting of the i" as he put it.

Terry Pinkard, however, points out that Hegelianism does not necessarily imply monarchism or an opposition to republicanism. ⁷ He follows the suggestion of Hegel's student Eduard Gans, a Jewish jurist. Gans suggested in the 1830s in his own lectures after Hegel's death that the role of the head of state could easily be replaced by that of an elected president as opposed to a monarch. This allows republicanism to finally negate the final remnants of a positively given tradition like a monarch. The triumph of "classical political philosophy" or "classical republicanism" in the United States is that the revolution could suspend and negate on paper the monarchical and aristocratic privileges that were a given. This is the most direct way that despite their close relation why English and American political life diverged. It is correct that freedom was not simply given to all humans at the end of the Revolution, even though on paper it might have been declared (the discrepancy was well-known enough such that Samuel Johnson could utter his famous quip about the source of the "loudest yelps of liberty")

It is not enough to say today that everything has been solved and that the principles of the revolution was what allowed modern freedom anyway. That is too cavalier of a stance to take. The very nature of this liberty, moreover, was something that had intellectually "passed through" or attempted to sublate monarchism. The revisionist thesis of Eric Nelson in The Royalist Revolution: Monarchy and the American Founding (2014) looks interesting; my understanding is that Nelson argues that the Patriots originally thought that liberty issued from a powerful independent executive (in the office of the British monarch) who could curtail the legislative tyranny of Parliament. The failure of the reconciliation between colony and crown would then come down to the failure of George III to act like a Stuart King insofar as the colonies were dominions of the crown. It is not a stretch to then think of the office of the Presidency as a descendant of the monarchy (as part of the attempts to deal with the weak central power that nearly wrecked the Continental Congress). The Constitution then would be thought of as a mixture of democracy (House), aristocracy (Senate) and monarchy (President). Or in a more Hegelian cast, universal-particular-individual. ⁸

The fact of this being designed after debate, drawing from readings and misreadings of Polybius, Cicero and Montesquieu gives America a peculiar character as a nation. America is a "philosophical" nation then, unlike France and Germany. This is because the form and nature of the nation in thought was in a sense decided beforehand, while religion, metaphysics and political form were contested on the Continent (such that even "Germany" is only a later formation). This has the paradoxical effect that philosophy has been much less important in America: if philosophy exists, even political philosophy, it is not as metaphysics but as sociology and pragmatism. The greatest American thought, from independence to the present consists of social thinking and the best examples of it in each age are suffused with it. France instead had rationalism and fideism, and Germany had positivism and speculation. (I imagine England was instead a country of placid peaceful contemplation, since it would have been mostly carried out by vicars and the like.)

Hegel makes the astonishing claim (and Shlomo Avineri surprisingly agrees) that America is not a state and that it is only on the level of what he calls civil society (bürgerliche Gesellschaft). It strikes me as unfair, though the reader is welcome to look at their justification. ⁹ We can nevertheless try to reconstruct some of the intuition as to why Hegel might think so. Civil society is the realm of private need and competition, as well as the market as analyzed by Adam Smith. Civil society for Hegel is a genuine advance over family life insofar as we develop our sense of self through economic activity and (ideally, at least) freely enter into relations with other rational agents. The problem that civil society faces, broadly speaking, is that market relations lead to poverty inevitably for some portion of the population and so here is the duty of the state to step in. Should we consider the US to be simply civil society?

It perhaps would make more sense to state that the discourse that legitimates American institutions and formed them is that of bourgeois civil society. Madison's understanding is that it is ambition (i.e. self-interest) that keeps the ambition of others in check in both government and in society, hence the importance of the separation of powers given the premise of the lack of a prior unity. The difference of the United States compared to Germany, France or even England is perhaps then that here, institutions themselves were founded on such principles of natural law (for example in the Federalist Papers) and directly legitimated by recourse to them. It is this that Hegel criticizes in his essay on natural law, wherein he states that both "empirical" natural law (of empiricists such as those who would have influenced the Founders) and idealist natural law (that of Kant and Fichte), both of which he thinks start from the same premises. Gillian Rose has an excellent overview of Hegel's argument in Hegel Contra Sociology:

This theory [i.e. natural law as we might see in Locke] is ‘empirical’ in a sense which it does not acknowledge. It has taken a posteriori a specific sphere from existing society and made it into the a priori, the condition, of the limited, external, political cohesion which results from the conflicting interests of the members of that sphere. This sphere is the ‘sphere of needs’ organized by the private property relations of the entrepreneurial class. Instead of deriving the political unity of society from an imagined state of nature as it claims, empirical natural law ‘derives’ the real, observed, superficial lack of unity in bourgeois society from an observation of particular fragments of social life which are analysed as if they constituted the fundamental elements of the whole. ¹⁰

The understanding of society by big-L libertarians (not surprisingly, common in America) derives essentially from a civil-society conception from which the state is simply (or should be) a voluntary coalition of individuals (assuming that the "social contract" is more literal than it is) which means that someone should be able to enter and exit freely. This is also perhaps the reason that Socialism historically was not able to make a mark in the United States. It is instructive to make a comparison with Europe. Here is an argument I think that could be used to explain why Hegel might have come to the line of argument that he does when it comes to the United States. This is not actually Hegel's own argument but a reconstruction of a more Romantic line of argumentation that might not be strange in his age, and in general could yield an explanation of this peculiar difference. However, I have to be exceedingly careful as I continue below.

We can say perhaps that in Europe it is easier to have a conception of a "people" that precedes a political identity. I say this in the sense that it is possible to think of the English, or the French, or the Irish, before we talk about their modern states. For the English or French or what have you I suppose that they would have found it difficult to trace back where exactly their history started from, with their earliest attestations being brief mentions in some Roman writer. It is perhaps why it was not at all impossible for the English to have their own belief in their "ancient constitution" until this myth was refuted. I mean this in the sense that you could probably talk about such an "ethnos" in terms of language, a set of inhabited spaces, a shared set of folkways and so on. This is not yet the modern sense of nation that Benedict Anderson dissects. Perhaps linguistics is an easier model here (and not for nothing was language intensely important for the Romantics and 19th century anthropologists) insofar as we can say that "English" as a language preceded the Kingdom of England.

We see a new sense of the "nation" once we come to the French Revolution. What led to the execution of Louis XVI? It was not simply out of an abstract principle of republicanism that did this. The early stages of the French Revolution for instance wanted to preserve the monarchy, except under a constitutional form. The reason for his trial was however that the revolutionaries believed that he was betraying the French nation and the revolution to Austria and Prussia. Revolutionary France was of course at that time at war with both countries. He was not immediately deposed after 1789. The trust in him was lost after his Flight to Varennes in June 1791 but it did not lead to a trial there and then. It was only after the Brunswick Manifesto that he was finally overthrown and put on trial as Louis Capet. Here I think that we come to the idea that there is such a thing as the French as a people with a territory and a set of interests (the revolutionary wars, the revolution itself), which could be used to judge the monarch himself. ¹¹

It is the French Revolution of course that is the birth of modern nationalism; the world of the ancien régime aristocrats is paradoxically more cosmopolitan, since the world of the European aristocrats includes the aristocrats of other nations whom one might marry, inherit from and so on. Now, the French Revolution itself was more civil and political than ethnic, compared to the later nineteenth-century nationalisms; though perhaps it becomes more understandable why the French State from then on till now has had an interest in standardization in language and culture. To put it in "metaphysical" terms, perhaps nationalism marks the point where the "ethnos" would take itself to be its own object and becomes awake to itself, where it becomes conscious to itself.

The French Revolution is the matrix from which so much future ideology has been produced, with not only liberalism, which preceded it (the constitutional revolutionaries like Lafayette and Mirabeau) but also communism (Gracchus Babeuf and the Conjuration des Égaux) and ultimately, fascism (Louis-Auguste Blanqui, leading to the followers of General Georges Boulanger and finally in figures like Maurice Barrès). Meanwhile we see in Germany liberals like Jakob Friedrich Fries who for instance bitterly attacked Hegel for his supposed State-worship, defence of the establishment and support of Prussianism, all while he was a virulent antisemite who attacked Judaism from a völkisch point of view. ¹²

How I would state it is that there is a difference between a conception of "We the people" or "Power to the people" depending on whether the "people" are posited as unitary or multiple, and the history of liberalism and republicanism itself has been mixed on this issue. Or rather, it is not that the French Revolution was simply an ethnocentric self-assertion or that the principles were hogwash; rather that the relation between universal principle and particular self-assertion itself is tangled logically. The French Revolution itself has to face its inner limit between its particular manifestation and its universal impulse and the problem is about affirming both the universalism while not shaking off the limitation of this universalism as just another pitstop on the grand journey of Liberty. ¹³

As to America—perhaps the biggest difference that separates America from Europe is the lack of a pre-existing pre-political ethnos, in that to the extent that we can speak of American ethnogenesis, this happened after the introduction of political institutions. We would predict, for instance, that white Americans are culturally distinct from first- or even second-generation European-Americans, even those from England. This goes doubly so for Black people in America, especially those who are descendants of slavery. The horror of the Middle Passage, the practice of mass slavery in the South and the continued domination all led to a much more violent deracination of Black people from their origins, after separation from families, the imposition of Christian slave names and the trade in people. I am not qualified enough to speak on this in detail and my description here is likely to be inadequate. The one remark that I can mention in this vein is that we see Malcolm X exemplifying this, in replacing his slaveowner-given surname with "X" standing for the lost original surname, and therefore giving a paradoxical universality of the Black struggle and the Civil Rights movement in America and worldwide.

If we come back to Hegel's and Avineri's discussion of America as a civil society, it is perhaps that there has been no positive unity that would have been given and would anchor the country as a State from a shared point of interest. The only unity that is present is that of a negative unity. Even the attempt to assert an originary American ethnos is likely to end up in a rather stupid recursive firing squad leaving behind the only twenty inbred descendants of the Mayflower. During the French Revolution, Maximilien Robespierre could talk about the French "People" as such a pre-given unity that was non-numerical, and therefore could speak for it. As he said in a speech on 27 April 1792, “I am neither the courtier, nor the moderator, nor the tribune, nor the defender of the people; I am of the people myself.” In the French: Je suis peuple moi-même. America on the other hand would appear to have been a huge outgrowth of civil society itself. It is in this sense that we can speak of the American Revolution as being a "bourgeois revolution" in the strong (and literal!) sense, in that the abolition of aristocratic and monarchical office led to the lack of a unitary people and at the same time the formation of the government on the self-interest principles (given Madison's involvement in the Constitution) of civil society. After all, the bürgerlich in civil society (bürgerliche Gesellschaft) refers to the bourgeois.

We can distinguish two differing conceptions of the people based on logical form as analyzed by Hegel. In one case, the "people" is multiple, as a set of individuals indifferent to each other that are subsumed under the category of "the people". In the other, "the people" is itself a property of individuals that precedes them, and individuals can be more-or-less part of the people. In the former we have subjects for whom peoplehood and citizenship are predicates which inhere in them. The alternative is that the social substance, the People, is itself posited as a substance for which people are its accidents that are subsumed within the universal. Hegel's solution in the Science of Logic, as Paul Redding puts forth in Conceptual Harmonies: The Origins and Relevance of Hegel’s Logic (2021), is that there is a reciprocal relation between inherence and subsumption. As Hegel puts it in his social account of logic, we can say that while a citizen is subsumed under the social substance of the polis, the universal is nevertheless only real insofar as it is expressed in the actions of the free individual who is a member. ¹⁴ From the Hegelian point of view we could say that the American understanding of itself is too one-sided, but that nevertheless that there has to be at least minimally some sort of nation or People that emerges from this logical reversibility: this is where I think that Avineri is wrong, since the Civil Rights movement and other social movements ultimately come from some sense of state-hood that Avineri denies in making America wholly a realm of private need.

The paradox is that a democratic people has to be both plural and one; plural such that they do not fall under the spell of a plebiscitary autocrat claiming to speak for the people and calling on a Terror and the expulsion of the foreigner, one such that it cannot simply be the short-sighted clash of private needs that lacks a common good. The relationship between the universal of the community and the individual of the citizen is reciprocal and necessarily mediated through particular institutions. It is this problem that is faced in the aftermath of revolutions, whether French or American, and the concrete realization of identity-in-difference.

Even if the Hegelianism appears like too much of a diversion, we could perhaps make better sense of it by fast-forwarding in time. The problem perhaps could be said as to how to reconcile the particular exigencies of life with the abstract nature of the Constitution. Or in another way, how to resolve the antinomy of Civil Society with the Nation or the State. Here we see the roots of the "romance for Hegel" that was consummated in the person and presidency of Woodrow Wilson. While France might have been the leading light for the US in the 18th century, it was Germany for the 19th century. At a very minimum the US was where scores of 1848ers settled in, and it's not impossible to imagine that America would appear to them as the concrete realization of the goals of the Frankfurt Parliament. Some of them were radicals taking up the cause of Young Hegelianism. They would end up filling the ranks of the Radical Republicans and the Union Army during the Civil War. If there was an American metaphysics, it is Hegelianism: consider Charles Sanders Peirce and Josiah Royce, both influenced by and reacting to it. Transcendentalism too was inspired by this German Idealist current even if not Hegelian in the particular. We also see that a surprising amount of non-analytic American thought in the 20th century has been influenced by Hegel, as with John Dewey and W. E. B. Du Bois. We could also speak in this vein of Martin Luther King and in another vein, the more ambivalent Wilfrid Sellars (who as Rorty said, bound Hegel in the fetters of Carnap).

It is at the same time interesting if we consider this German, as well as this Hegelian influence, in the concrete matter of things. The "need for Germany" could perhaps be posed in the sense of the problem of how to resolve the position of "the institution". If we consider the syllogism Universal-Particular-Individual, with the universal State or Nation on one pole and the individual citizen on the other pole, we come to the middle term, which is split insofar as it has to be both unity and multiplicity at the same time. Hence here we see the taking-up of the German Historical School of economics, which had a strongly institutional flavor and was a huge influence on luminaries like Thorstein Veblen. The research university that is taken as a model is Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Prussian university model. William Torrey Harris was a St. Louis Hegelian who became the United States Commissioner of Education and ended up integrating the German-influenced Kindergarten movement directly into the St. Louis public school system.

Wilson stands at the end of this insofar as the German Historical School he was drawing on through figures like Gustav von Schmoller was itself influenced by Hegelian historicism (and he would himself write on Hegel) and so was supposed to be the core of a Liberal Progressive administrative state packed with institutions. Of course, how Liberal and Progressive a state could be if only for one racial group is another question entirely that Wilson perhaps did not wish to consider. This is of course the main paradox of the Progressive Era more broadly such that recent literature on the Progressive Era seems to use the name only since it seems too late to change the name. It was regardless these forms that would find themselves inherited by a particular "liberal" political orientation as it emancipated itself and reached toward universalism, which was not merely a minimal faith in the abstract Lockean picture of the Constitution but the richer administrative aspect of the new federal government. This brings up another antinomy, namely how to deal with the abstract sparseness of the Founders' government and the concrete actuality of the current administrative government.

Whatever we might say about the American Revolution, we can say that for one thing, it opened up a spectacular burst of optimism, even if it was only on paper. Jefferson for instance famously declares that American religious freedom is open to "the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and Infidel of every denomination." It is on one hand a very easy declaration to make since there was no large population of "the Hindoo" or "the Mahometan" who would be given religious freedom, and we have seen that there has been a long history of anxiety and repression of various non-Christian people. However all the same we could perhaps argue that this is what opens up the space of reasons such that we could judge this in hindsight. It is nevertheless true that we see something of a grand levelling in the form of an enthusiasm, and with it a hope or dream for a universal republicanism. The hope would therefore be that if this levelling could last then this could indeed become a land of liberty for all.

This is the reason that for instance its legitimacy has been called into question in the first place; I don't think I've heard anyone use the imperialism and the Circassian genocide for instance to consider Russia inherently illegitimate. We could say that the problem that has required working-through is the question of how to reconcile the spirit of an original liberalism and its manifestation in actuality. There are three points in particular that we could gesture at: for one, the abolishing of aristocratic and monarchic privilege and a government rooted in the "people" might have been said to then abolish economic privilege as such. Shays' Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion were the initial symptom of this divergence and today perhaps so much antagonism comes from the relation between a unitary "levelled" picture of everyone under civil society and actually-existent inequality. The Consensus historians tend to misrecognize the antagonism within civil society itself. The other is that the very deracination of settlers means that there is in a sense not a "natural" territory. Consider how the French nation was posited as having some "natural" bounds such that the loss of land, such that the loss of Alsace–Lorraine was such a huge national grief. The inverted situation in the American situation was that precisely the lack of a posited "natural" territory, through mutual recognition and mutual respect with other nations, means that it makes quite natural the sense of Westward expansion (insofar as it becomes a bad infinity of movement and can decide to disregard the question of land ownership). The principal contradiction, of course, is slavery; even if we accept the argument that it was thought that it would die out in a generation, the fact of history is that it was nevertheless an intolerable contradiction at the very start and recognized as such.

If we call upon the hypothesis we began with, we could identify (as some have done) the Civil War as a Second Revolution, and perhaps even the New Deal as a Third. There is a sense in which we could see American history as a history of this self-revolutionizing, though we have to pose this in terms of the internal limit that both "revolutions" ultimately have to come up against. We see the conclusion of the revolutionary character of the Civil War in the conclusion of Reconstruction and Rutherford B. Hayes' Compromise of 1877 giving Home Rule to the South, and the same goes for the New Deal insofar as it ends in Cold War anticommunism and the use of the new administrative state for covert operations. In both cases we have what we saw with Jefferson, as in the rhetorical opening for a new levelling, a new sense of universalism, and the apotheosis of a new national unity in the form of the State, that is nevertheless bound up with a rejuvenated cosmopolitanism. The New Deal is not (merely) the fact that a large number of progressive laws were passed but that through the new medium of radio we see a new kind of mass mobilization, the formation of corps of people and their movement. Both culminate in, or involve, war (the Civil War and the Second World War), which are then supposed to resolve these abstract situations directly on the battlefield. ¹⁵ We could also associate one with the formation of a powerful executive, the other with the creation of a vast administrative state, held together by a powerful legislative coalition that held for decades.

One wonders what the average politician or educated American in 1925 or 1920 would think if shown the activities, responsibilities and capacities of the federal government by 1950 (scarcely a generation away) and perhaps it makes sense why the Old Right was so terrified and confused by the New Deal. More than that is the surprising alignment between a vanguard of progress on the (geo)political front and a kind of mass military conscription, an alignment that has been scarcely remarked on. In 1941 too we see the idealism of the Atlantic Charter. We see in the last years of the 1940s a serious and even popular sentiment for a World State of some form, as the last grasp of Wellsian politics and the first movement of Atlanticism. ¹⁶ Perhaps the last sucker to be taken in by it who had some prominence was Henry Wallace and his campaign under the Progressive Party ticket in 1948.

Regardless of Wallace and his failed presidential run, there are much worse things to be taken in as a sucker by. America then and now has somehow been a nation of scams and get-rich-quick schemes and too-good-to-be-true investment opportunities, a fact that might initially seem to be out of step with the original grand Lockean design but perhaps is consistent with it. It seems appropriate that the most famously American forms and genres are Hollywood, superheroes, and science fiction. Science fiction in its various forms predates the other two, of course, and in a sense I would argue that it has played the role in America that philosophy would have done in the Old World. Nobody can forget the Bellamy Clubs inspired by Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, or the reputed inspiration taken from the Lensman novels for the modern US Navy Combat Information Center (CIC).

This essay begins from a long quotation from the last page or so of Isaac Asimov's The Stars, Like Dust (1951). If one is willing to take spoilers from a 75-year-old mediocre book, here it is. (It was even Isaac Asimov's least favourite novel!) The Director of Rhodia tells our plucky hero that there is indeed one weapon that can be used against the Tyranni (what a name!) We and they must both be delivered into the ashcan of outmoded political systems. The time for maturity has come as it once came on the planet Earth, and there will be a new kind of government, a kind that has never yet been tried in the Galaxy. There will be no Khans, no Autarchs, Directors, or Ranchers. Who rules? The People. There is a way. The blueprint I have, dealt with a small section of one planet, but it can be adapted to all the Galaxy. The "new kind of government", the weapon against the tyrannical Tyranny, the Director reveals to be nothing other than the Constitution of the United States. Asimov himself would admit in his memoirs that his editor H. L. Gold had forced this subplot on him and that he found it plainly improbable.

But perhaps Asimov himself had his last laugh, since he did integrate this novel into his future history, the Robot-Empire-Foundation novels, and therefore The Stars, Like Dust does not end up in a grand United States of Space but rather the rather despotic Galactic Empire of the Foundation novels that ends up sclerotic and collapsing. Perhaps it was Gold who was the sucker in this case. As for all that I have written, all it can be is simply a preliminary. 250 years is a long time, and what I have attempted here is a series of impressionistic reflections that does not affirm or negate in a direct sense but hopefully would gather up and recollect and therefore draw out the stakes of what reconciliation means (the recognition of the rose in the cross of the present).