Abstract
In the last quarter of the eighteenth century two mighty revolutions shook the supposedly solid foundations of the European anciens régimes. In 1776 the thirteen American colonies opted out of the British Empire by asserting their independence. Thirteen years later the French overthrew the Bourbon monarchy and attempted to establish government on the basis of liberty and rationality. The latter upheaval has left a deeper imprint upon the historical memory. Its excesses, as much as its successes, have been a constant source of fascination. The French overthrew an indigenous ruling class. Theirs was truly a social revolution. The Americans, in contrast, despatched their external rulers from whence they came. Theirs was the first major colonial independence movement. Though no great internal social revolution took place, we may say that theirs was also the first modern political revolution. The constitution of 1787 outlined a form of government that claimed no ecclesiastical basis and was without hereditary offices. Furthermore, in contrast to the various constitutions of the French Revolution, the United States Constitution remains the sole survivor of such early attempts at the rational construction of governmental systems.
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Notes
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S.M. Lipset, The First New Nation. The United States in Historical and Comparative Perspective (New York, London, 1979), pp. 2, 21.
‘The Founding Fathers had not yet abandoned the classical tradition of civic humanism-the host of values transmitted from antiquity that dominated the thinking of nearly all eenthcentury Anglo-American world.... They still saw themselves ideally as a leisured, cosmopolitan, liberally educated gentry bound by a classical patrician code of disinterested public leadership... they were not modem men... many of them were bewildered, frightened, and awed by the emerging democratic world they had created.’ Gordon S. Wood, ‘The Fundamentalists and the Constitution’, The New York Review of Books, 18 February 1988, p. 38.
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Delaware, 1792; Kentucky, 1799; Maryland, 1809; Connecticut, 1818; New Jersey, 1820; Pennsylvania, 1838.
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© 1992 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Levin, M. (1992). The Legislative Background. In: The Spectre of Democracy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-12547-0_1
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