If, however, the mythic figures sit atop their dueling perches, guarding the entry point to America’s political psyche, inside the sanctum lies the most sacred relic of all: the US Constitution. Yet that relic is not the guarantor of liberties that most Americans imagine. Rather, it’s the legal scaffolding of an elite-led counter-revolution — the same one that today lets tech billionaires drop power-guzzling data centers into communities that never asked for them.

In individualistic terms, America remains the most economically “free” country in the world, but also among the most atomized, alienated and unequal. Most Americans don’t realize, however, that it didn’t have to be this way. After all, how many have ever heard of Shays’s Rebellion — a massive class revolt led by ex-revolutionary soldiers, one that almost toppled the government and could have saved working people from 230-plus years of Constitutional tyranny?

To be clear, 1776 is nothing to be ashamed of. Indeed, the Revolution was arguably the greatest democratic uprising in world history. Much of that national mythos is worth preserving. Three cheers for the war against the Brits. Yet if the struggles from Lexington to Yorktown remain the quintessential Anglo-liberal uprising, a genuine David-and-Goliath triumph, selling that narrative has meant omitting what happened to the common foot soldiers of the Revolution itself.

The glorified writers of the Federalist Papers — John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison — explicitly didn’t want mass democracy. During the Constitutional Convention, launched in spring 1787 and convened meant to hammer out the document’s details, Hamilton pushed for a president serving “during good behaviour”. In other words: an elected king enthroned for life, much like the Supreme Court. Hamilton and his friends also pushed for a congressional veto on all state legislation, in effect allowing for total national and elite-led control of local government. That was shadowed by other elitist institutions, notably the Senate and the Electoral College. Voting, too, was to be the preserve of the propertied few: discounting women, slaves, and poor white men, the franchise in the early US encompassed just 6% of the population.

The true heroes of the early US, then, were the Anti-Federalists. An everyman group of farmers, ex-soldiers, and small property holders — none of them have ever received Broadway hagiographies or had their faces plastered on dollar bills. Yet they were the families who fought and died for the Revolution, risking their lives to overthrow the British and who now expected government both by and for the people.

More from this author

America was never inclusive

By B. Duncan Moench

How did the wealthy merchants and bankers pushing for the Constitution respond? By economically destroying the little guy. Due to governmental dysfunction — and the fact the poor and propertyless were locked out of voting — a large percentage of veterans remained unpaid for years after the redcoats left. Even worse, many had mortgaged their homes and farms to finance the fight for independence, with the government promising repayment that never materialized. Little wonder these men rose up, under the former colonel Daniel Shays, to resist the injustices of debtors’ prisons and restore what they saw as the Revolution’s democratic spirit.

Not that Shays himself was some permanent rabble-rouser. Born not far from Boston, he fought at Lexington, Bunker Hill, and Saratoga, was wounded in action, and handed a ceremonial sword by none other than the Marquis de Lafayette. It’s a sword Shays was later forced to sell to cover his debts. By the autumn of 1786, the veterans and common folk of western Massachusetts had had enough. Armed bands of farmers — mostly veterans — marched on the county courthouses and shut them down by force, reasoning that a court that can’t convene also can’t foreclose on their neighbors and friends.

And so, for a few months, these insurgents effectively governed the western half of Massachusetts. The Commonwealth’s authority simply evaporated under popular pressure. Then, in January 1787, Shays led roughly 1,500 men against the federal arsenal at Springfield, aiming to seize its weapons and turn them against the state governments, which they believed had been captured by wealthy coastal merchants and big farmers. They never reached the gates. A militia — privately financed by a syndicate of Boston merchants, since the bankrupt state couldn’t afford one — met them with literal cannon fire. Four Shaysites fell dead in the snow. Upon seeing the ruthlessness with which these hired guns pursued them, some of the Shaysites are said to have died from fright. The rest scattered, before being hunted across the hills through a brutal winter.

What would Shays have done if he and his rebels had been able to take the arsenal at Springfield? In an interview with the Massachusetts Centinel, the colonel suggested that, once the rebels were armed to the teeth, they planned “to march directly to Boston, plunder it, and then destroy the nest of devils, who by their influence, make the Court enact what they please”. Given the scale of the betrayal of these revolutionary soldiers — and seeing how American business have dominated the country’s government since — it’s hard to argue against him.

More from this author

War is being hypernormalised

By B. Duncan Moench

In the end, though, the country’s greatest ever class rebellion ended in failure. Shays himself was eventually pardoned, though would later die in drunken poverty. But the fright it put into the propertied classes endured. Word of the uprising reached Mount Vernon, and a rattled George Washington was coaxed into running for the presidency. Meanwhile, the rebellion’s shock directly spurred the wealthy establishment’s drive for the new constitutional order, replacing the radically localist politics of the revolutionary era with a system designed to stabilize property relations and restrain popular democracy.

It worked. All the attention on slavery and race in American history overshadows the essential fact that, in most cases, the poor and propertyless were not allowed to vote until the Jacksonian era, some 40 years after the Constitution’s passage. Nor does the document’s malign influence, or the resonance of Shays’s Rebellion, end there. Far from being a quaint historical curiosity, the revolt’s failure was both the spur for today’s legal order and the decisive turning point in American political development: with the Constitution amounting to, essentially, an elite-led counter-revolution where the democratic energies of 1776 were deliberately caged to protect bankers, creditors, and commercial elites from popular pressure. The Presidency, the Senate, the Supreme Court — all these elements were explicitly designed to curb democratic energies and ensure that property holders were protected from the “factionalism” of the “mob”.

The anti-majoritarian architecture built in 1789 continues to imprison American governance to this day. Beside the absurdity of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision — which allows money to be treated as legally protected “speech” — nothing illustrates this better than the data-center boom. No one except tech billionaires wants these things: certainly not in their own communities. And yet they pop up everywhere, including the now-notorious “Stratos Project” in northern Utah, funded by investor Kevin O’Leary, and which would immediately require more power than the entire state uses in a year. Just like the spread of Walmart in earlier decades, often against the will of the communities the shopping centers invaded, the spread of data centers is enabled by precisely the tyranny of property holders the Constitution was built to make possible.

The shadow of the nation’s Constitutional counter-revolution extends to nearly all the great economic problems of American life. The same logic that crushed the Shaysites — creditor over debtor; centralized elite over localist self-rule; property rights over political rights — runs through American political economy to this day, from the Wall Street bailouts after 2008, to wars fought for corporate interests, to the relentless algorithmic extraction of the gig economy.

If the civics-touting Right remains in hock to the Constitution, the Left’s critique isn’t much better either. For all the supposed radicalism of the 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones’ undertaking was merely a continuation of the trend among elite storytellers and academicians who ignore class entirely, and instead seek to turn the Founding into a different kind of myth useful to their political project. For Hannah-Jones and rich readers of the New York Times, certainly, it’s useful to make race and gender — not class — the Founding’s dominant feature.

How, then, might we build a better tomorrow? In the first place, by recognizing that the Constitution wasn’t totally hopeless. The Bill of Rights, of course not pushed by Hamilton, Madison and the other Federalists, enshrined John Locke’s idea of limited government into law, and opened an eventual pathway for liberal democracy globally. In other words, then, the future rests not on the DSA socialism of Zohran Mamdani, nor on the Sanderistas, but on returning to the localist tradition Shays  tried to defend. It’s a tradition Anti-Federalists sought to preserve as much as possible: hence their insistence on an extensive list of governmental “thou shalt nots” throughout the Bill of Rights. Yet if this exists entirely in the realm of what political theorists call “negative rights” — in other words freedom from rather than freedom to — this is ultimately a mischaracterization of the Anti-Federalists and their politics. Without our Anti-Federalist strand, the fight to end property restrictions on the right to vote, which propelled Andrew Jackson into office, would never have been completed. Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal probably wouldn’t have been possible either.

If, in other words, fighting the Constitution means encouraging “localism”, that’s less abstract than the term implies. For instance, it would mean turning antitrust law, mostly dormant for two generations, against the tech monopolies, just as trustbusters once stymied the railroad barons. It would also mean encouraging right-to-repair laws, letting people own the machines they buy outright, while keeping banks accountable to the towns they lend in — instead of hands-off regulation-haven states like Delaware.

Suggested Reading

American democracy was born in feudal Europe

By Leighton Woodhouse

More generally, reviving the American Revolution means reducing the power of the national government over the states: both the intention of the 1776 revolution and the only way a true democracy can function. Recall, again, that the revolutionaries were committed to small-“r” republican governance, which meant as many people as possible participating actively and often in the political process. Pretending that the system we have now is a “democracy” in line with the intentions of our 1776 founding is in itself a betrayal.

The time for change, in short, is now. Tech monopolies and their ruthless gaming of the legal system are gutting whatever’s left of the Revolution’s democratic spirit. The trillionaire class that AI’s rise will produce is the final boss stage of the elite-led counter-revolution that began in 1787. As we speak, the elite are exploiting the supremacy of property law provided by the Constitution to ensure technology serves no one but their makers, keeping the few rich and the many surveilled. Technology itself, though, remains neutral. The material conditions of the present — remote work, decentralized production, drone-assisted agriculture — may, practically for the first time since the Revolution itself, revive the localist, democratic spirit the Constitution was designed to suppress.

Whether this happens depends on something the localists have been trying to tell us for 40 years. In his 1985 book Habits of the Heart, Robert Bellah warned that a republic organized around private accumulation forgets the language of the common good — and loses the civic muscles self-government actually runs on. To paraphrase Michael Sandel, we have traded the citizen, who helps govern the forces that rule his life, for the consumer, who is merely ignored by them. That trade, in a sense, is the counter-revolution’s deepest victory: a whole people taught to mistake being unbothered for being “free”. The key question now is whether Americans can recognize their own revolutionary inheritance before the counter-revolution completes itself and all working-class children are illiterate, device-addicted serfs who own nothing and “like it”.

All the same, we continue to build our national identity not atop hard-nosed studies of our past and present — but on stories of America’s exceptionalism, a pathology that affects both ends of the country’s political spectrum. Each side has its heroes and villains. Yet from a higher conceptual standpoint, these dueling narratives function almost identically. Absent a tragic frame, neither flag-waving exceptionalism, nor its identity-obsessed opposite, can admit that America is defined less by some abstract “idea”, whether the utopian pursuit of “liberty for all” for the Right or racial loathing for the Left, and more by the vagaries of its Anglo-Protestant origins.

Nowhere is this obsession with this mythos of America clearer than how the nation’s political elites view the Founding. One side, after all, insists that 1776 was near-divine — even consulting AI versions of George Washington for insight on the country’s contemporary malaise. The other condemns the founding as genocidal, built on the stolen land of indigenous peoples and the mass enslavement of Africans. Yet both center America’s birth as an epochal event, either as the root of all evil or “the most consequential revolution in history” reflecting “the noblest aspirations of humankind”.

Those last quotes come from the first five minutes of Ken Burns’s new PBS series The American Revolution — but don’t let the patriotic cheerleading fool you. For in the end, the show does a remarkable job of blending what political scientist James Ceaser called “exceptionalist” and “anti-exceptionalist” narratives together into a coherent whole, along the way pleasing patriotic Republicans and subversive Democrats alike. Indeed, that’s rather the point. By crafting a documentary where Left and Right can all feel “represented”, Burns deftly avoids dealing with the roots of America’s problems and how they manifest themselves today, good news for our plutocratic rulers, and bad for the rest of us.

Among the dwindling educated cohort that still watches public broadcasters like PBS, Ken Burns is a documentarian of unmatched achievement. And, to be fair, the reputation is well-earned. Starting with his show on the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, he has produced some of the best multimedia historical nonfiction of the last 40 years. He’s proved remarkably popular too. During his watershed 1990 series The Civil War, PBS averaged nearly 14 million viewers per episode, with an unheard-of 39 million tuning in to watch at least one night of the series. As we drift ever closer towards a post-literate society, Burns is now the closest thing the United States has to a national raconteur, pioneering a method of engaging historiographic visual storytelling that’s broadly accurate, frequently engrossing, and capable of bringing both scholars and general audiences to the table.

Suggested reading

America is turning into revolutionary France

By Malcom Kyeyune

Given his reputation, it’s unsurprising that nearly anything Burns produces now will fund the entire PBS operation for years. That’s especially true since the Reagan administration began slashing funding for public broadcasters in the Eighties — cuts that were accelerated during the Gingrich-led GOP Congress of the Nineties. Now, under Trump and Musk’s DOGE, US public broadcasting is effectively dead. In its place, PBS is funded largely by wealthy corporations and foundations. Yet if that’s meant Burns has had plenty of cash to make dozens of programs, on everything from the Vietnam War to jazz, his glittering career hasn’t been critic-free.

Especially to those working within the often-cloistered world of scholarly American history — a nitpicking discipline filled with poorly-paid but self-important individuals — he remains an unpopular figure, representing a dubious strain of “pop history”. The public is his intended audience, not scholars. The obvious corollary, in the university common room anyway, is that everything about his work is suspect, especially for Leftist academics already skeptical of his patriotic references to the revolution’s inherent nobility.

The Right, for its part, does something similar. Spurred on, perhaps, by a sense that his association with PBS represents progressivism manifest — hardly unreasonable given its patrician fans and complacently liberal funders — conservative critics flooded social media to accuse Burns of capitulating to “wokeness”. Much of their rancor focused on two rhetorical sleights of hand early in The American Revolution. The first comes near the six-minute mark of episode one, which describes the Iroquois Confederacy of Native American tribes as a “democracy”. It’s an odd claim to make without the caveat that the Iroquois system was not a liberal democracy as Americans understand the term. Rather, it was something else entirely, a society based on collective land ownership and indigenous values utterly rejected by the Founders.

Yet that pales compared to Burn’s second example of shallow inclusivity, when he implies that Benjamin Franklin’s first call for independence was somehow inspired by the Iroquois. It’s certainly a bizarre claim — Franklin’s politics were clearly far more shaped by philosophers like John Locke — even if it again speaks to the Right’s tendency to bristle at any suggestion that the United States didn’t emerge as a kind of secular miracle.

Ideological grumbles aside, of course, placing the Iroquois Confederacy front and center surely represents a shrewd career move on the part of Burns and his colleagues. In the liberal public broadcasting world, no one is above cancellation, not even Burns. With millions watching, the filmmaker and his colleagues knew they had to please identitarian obsessives, both inside his PBS team and across the airwaves.

More fundamentally, though, Burns’s focus on the Iroquois speaks again to that sense of exceptionalism: in a way that blends the Right-wing cheerleading with its more skeptical Leftist mirror. After all, foregrounding the Iroquois in this way promotes a multicolored pseudo-inclusive version of American exceptionalism, with Burns succumbing to the mythological deification of the country’s origin story: just now with added diversity. Certainly, turning the Iroquois into the true unrecognized Founders feels better than acknowledging that they — and, by proxy, all the indigenous tribes of what became the United States — were crushed, absorbed, or otherwise expunged en route to the stucco-framed dystopia we inhabit today.

What gets lost here, of course, is Unamuno’s sense of the tragic, the recognition that the Thirteen Colonies’ revolt, like every war and revolution, involved brutal violence and shameless cultural erasure. No less important — and contra the Burns contributor who reifies the standard trope of the US as a nation that coheres “not around ancient history, but ideas” — this glibly inclusive framing also ignores the genuine roots of American society and politics.

The fact is that all the ideas embedded in America’s founding governmental structure did not appear as miracles, but rather emerged from a deep and complex Anglo-liberal heritage. This encompasses everything from the Glorious Revolution to the Puritan exodus to frontier revivalism. Even those that arguably weren’t, notably small‑“r” republicanism, were filtered through the Anglo lens of limited government, free markets, and deep suspicion of taxation. Nearly every signatory to the Declaration of Independence was an Anglo-Protestant. Only one, Charles Carroll, was Catholic. Yes, Jefferson and Franklin were Deists, but even that was a genteel cousin of Anglicanism. No less striking, the new United States was profoundly English in its ethnic makeup: especially once you exclude enslaved Africans and indigenous peoples, neither of which were considered fully human by most Founders.

None of this history — ugly, contingent, grounded not in grand principles but in the gloomy depths of the past — is exactly inspiring: and it partly explains why Americans might prefer to wallow in exceptionalism instead. Yet if it’s explicable, it’s also a problem, and not just for the historical record. For in his inability to genuinely analyze our past, Burns is equally unable to reflect on the present, and how the republic founded in 1776 reached the ludicrously dysfunctional spot it now occupies. Forget petty arguments over income tax; this is especially pertinent given our current governing structure, with all its flaws, is basically the same one established way back at the tail end of the 18th century. But because, we are told, it appeared as a kind of immaculate conception, it can never, ever change.

And here, again, we must return to one of the fundamental problems in all American discourse — the one no foundation, documentary series, or identitarian gesture dares grasp. Left or Right, America has no true tragic sensibility. Tragedy requires acknowledging limits, accepting inescapable loss, and admitting that some conflicts cannot be reconciled through uplift or philanthropy. But America’s elite culture, from Burns’ refashioned Founder worship to the donor class’s racial‑and-gender therapeutics, refuses to sit with this truth.

Suggested reading

The last days of American power

By Jonathan Kirshner

There are several ways of understanding this. Joseph Campbell, the eminent scholar of comparative mythology, argued that once a culture’s great myths unravel, its leadership soon collapses. With this in mind, it’s easy to see that a mythical founding is deeply valuable to America’s plutocratic elites — ensuring citizens remain loyal, whether loyalty is deserved or not. It follows, meanwhile, that more challenging reinterpretations, ones embracing historical nuance and the sense that one’s gain is another’s loss, are never rewarded by the country’s rich and powerful. That’s hardly surprising — America’s elite has thrived off precisely this status quo. Such connections are implied right at the start of all Burns’s shows. For this most recent one, the list of centimillionaire estates underwriting the project takes nearly two full minutes to recite.

That hints at another, less grandiose reason, why progressive donors might fund cozily exceptionalist documentaries like The American Revolution. At bottom, after all, they endanger nothing of the economic system that allows elites to extract their wealth and accrue their outsized civic influence. It’s an irony compounded by the fact that Burns’s progressivism, if cringeworthy to the Right, is actually not much of a threat to anything that concerns the economic interests of their donor class. The whole fight, like most of the culture war, is one safely contained with the unconscious limits of exceptionalism. One side laments that the Revolution didn’t include women and minorities; the other not so much. “Was the American Founding great — or only great for its time?” That’s the full scope of the debate allowed about our national origin.

There’s a cultural element here too. For one thing, and notwithstanding the sniffiness of progressive academics, shows like The American Revolution allow funders to pose as fighting for “social justice” and righting the wrongs of US history by teaching the viewing public not to be “racist”, “sexist”, or “heteronormative”. It is a posture that flatters them, insulates them, and publicly distances them from the social conservatism most common among the poor and working classes.

By leaning into this cultural distance, meanwhile, the wealthy donor class believe they are properly socializing the Great Unwashed. Funding public programs that foreground “minority” voices allows establishment types to cleanse the reputational sins of family estates. Consider, here, a man like Alfred P. Sloan: a major and consistent funder of PBS programs, and someone who, as the long‑time head of General Motors, tirelessly worked to kill public transit systems all across the United States. Sloan’s cold-blooded campaign to uproot trolley and train systems helped destroy any shot at walkable communities or sane urban planning across most of Middle America. But now that his descendants fund documentaries on the Native American roots of the Bill of Rights, they can believe that the ledger is somehow cleared.

Taken together, anyway, these varied justifications for exceptionalist storytelling all serve the same purpose — helping us avoid seeing the nation as it actually is. A tragic place, pretending to be hopeful. A wounded empire, forcing a smile, performing optimism. A people desperate for meaning in a sea of digital emptiness, which still insists nothing truly irreversible has ever happened. Until we reclaim some ability to face our past without immediately laundering it into a dopey lesson or a posture, America will remain what it is now. A society that cannot tell its own story honestly, because it cannot bear to confront the cost of being itself.

But what makes America an old country is not just institutional continuity, but a politics shaped by a fixation with its own evermore distant moment of creation. For all the rhetoric of being a “new nation”, a tiny number of bewigged, silk-stockinged, well-fed gentlemen — many of them slaveholders and all of them dead — still have a powerful political voice. In America, we are so used to every political issue becoming a constitutional question, and to the sterile self-referential debates about the “original construction” of 18th-century documents, that we can easily forget how weird it all is. In Britain, debates about gun control or abortion never, so far as I know, centre on the views of the Second Marquess of Rockingham or William Pitt the Younger. To appropriate a famous metaphor, US political history sometimes seems like a boat beating against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

For the sons and grandsons of the founding generation, the defining fact of public life was the precious burden they had inherited. An example was Abraham Lincoln, who was born on the frontier of European settlement in 1809 and grew up with the stories of old men who had fought in the Revolutionary War, or who claimed to have done. In one of his first public lectures, given in 1838 at a “young men’s lyceum” in Springfield, Illinois, the future president laid out the intimidatingly high stakes for his generation. “We find ourselves,” he told the young men, “under the government of a system of political institutions, conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty, than any of which the history of former times tells us.” They could take no credit for this; it was no more than good fortune. “We toiled not in the acquirement or establishment” of these blessings, he pointed out, “they are a legacy bequeathed us, by a once hardy, brave, and patriotic, but now lamented and departed race of ancestors.” Americans — of course, he meant white, male Americans — had inherited the earth and therefore it was theirs to lose.

Very few people in American history have done anything other than venerate the constitutional settlement of 1787. And the few dissenters — such as the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, who branded the constitution a “covenant with death and an agreement with hell” because of its protection of slaveholders — have been regarded as shocking iconoclasts.

Suggested reading

The battle to control America's mind

By David Samuels

This underlying conservatism, the pose of moving forward while looking back, is characteristic of nations founded in revolution. You see similar traits in the political culture of Cuba or the old Soviet Union. After all, if you believe your revolution inaugurated a new order in which despotism had been banished by the bright light of freedom, then any further revolution would be revanchism of the most insidious kind. As the novelist James Fenimore Cooper explained in the early 19th century: “Here [in America], the democrat is the conservative, and thank God he has something worth preserving.”

Yet, at key moments in its history, the fixation on its founding moment has paradoxically enabled creative transformation. This was even true of the nation’s only true existential crisis to date, the slaveholders’ rebellion of the 1860s, which subsequently became known as the Civil War.

William Lloyd Garrison rejected the constitutional settlement, but Lincoln, who also hated slavery, saw the matter differently. Even as a young man in 1838, when he urged his generation to let “support of the Constitution and Laws” become the “political religion of the nation”, Lincoln had understood the danger to the revolutionary settlement as coming more from enslavers than from radical abolitionists. The example uppermost in his mind was the recent murder in Alton, Illinois, of an abolitionist newspaper editor, Elijah P. Lovejoy, by a mob backed by the city’s mayor. A quarter of a century later, President Lincoln led an administration that raised mass armies, waged industrial-scale war, and emancipated four million enslaved people, all in the name of preserving the founders’ legacy.

The outcome of the Civil War, with the breaking of the power of the slaveholding class, the formal commitment to equal rights, and the strengthening of the potential power of the federal government, is sometimes referred to as America’s “Second Founding”. This is a helpful formulation in many ways, and yet at the time what seemed more important was not the replacement but the preservation of the founders’ legacy. The 13th, 14th and 15th amendments, passed in the wake of the Civil War, fundamentally re-cast the relationship between the national government and its citizens. The 14th amendment defined citizenship for the first time — in a way that included black people — and other subsequent transformations in American government such as the growth of the welfare state and the enforcement of civil rights in the 20th century depended upon it.

Suggested reading

The corruption of California

By Matthew B Crawford

Had America been more like France, the post-Civil War constitutional settlement might have been called the “Second American Republic”. But America is not France, as Americans never ceased to point out — fear of swivel-eyed, guillotine-wielding Jacobinism was the 19th-century equivalent of 20th-century America’s obsession with communists. No one of any significance in the post-Civil War United States called for an entirely new constitution. Having just waged an unimaginably bloody war to preserve the constitution, the last thing they were going to do was discard it. And so, the constitutional innovations of the post-Civil War years were achieved not in spite of the fundamentally conservative nature of American political culture, but because of it. Only by presenting transformation as a validation of the founding could real change happen.

The same was true in the US’s other revolutionary decade, the Thirties, when, in the face of terrifying levels of mass unemployment, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration massively expanded the federal government’s role in national life in order, once again, to keep the revolutionary settlement intact. The imagined approval of the bewigged gentlemen of the founding era was as important to Roosevelt as it had been to Lincoln, but, lo and behold, they turned out to be surprisingly sympathetic to change, so long as it was in the interests of preservation.

Today, however, such flexibility seems hard to imagine. The Declaration of Independence was signed 12 score and seven years ago. That’s at least eight generations of political leaders. But curiously, the more the founding moment recedes in time, the greater its ossifying grip on American politics seems to be. If America is an old country, it is showing its age: it’s crotchety, stuck in its ways, telling endless stories about the past. Institutional arthritis prevents the natural flexing that’s needed to deal with a rapidly changing society.

Suggested reading

Maus and the repressive power of Jewish trauma

By David Samuels

It is now more than half a century since a significant constitutional amendment was passed (the 26th amendment allowing the reduction of the voting age to 18 was ratified in 1971, although there was also an uncontroversial amendment ratified in 1992 which delayed raises in congressional salaries until after the next election). With politics so polarised, and the parties so evenly balanced, any fundamental institutional reform now seems impossible.

In the Nineties, no one could imagine it being acceptable in the modern age for a president to be elected with only a minority of the popular vote because of the workings of the Electoral College. But then it happened in 2000, and again in 2016, and, after each, calls for an amendment to abolish the Electoral College went nowhere. The Senate ensures that voters in rural, sparsely populated states such as Wyoming are vastly more powerful in Washington than the voters of, say, California. And whatever the defence of this constitutional curiosity might be, the point is that it is practically impossible to change. With a majority on the Supreme Court now committed to the eccentric doctrine of judicial originalism, the ghostly chaps in silk stockings seem more than ever the pale-faced opponents of institutional innovation.

Obviously, the US is, despite its growing inequality, a remarkably successful, wealthy society. It is still capable of policy innovation, and even (contrary to what you might think if you don’t have a sense of historical and comparative perspective) one of the more successful multi-racial societies in human history. But at the same time, it is, to put it mildly, difficult to address issues of structural inequality when meaningful reform of the institutional structure is effectively off the table. How many presidents can be elected with fewer votes than their opponents before the system cracks? For how long can the Supreme Court retain authority if the perception continues that it makes hugely consequential decisions while being unrepresentative and unaccountable?

But the founding fathers have been flexible fellows in the past, and with their imagined blessing huge changes have been wrought. Perhaps even the oldest and crankiest country can rediscover its youthful capacity for reform, especially if it does so while insisting that it is doing so in order that the important things remain the same.

This poetic episode from Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture, Sudhir Hazareesingh’s voluminous yet gripping biography, is a small demonstration of the historical magnificence of that revolution. The slaves not only appropriated the Historie philosophique, but as Hazareesingh writes: “brought the text to life in a glorious display of erudition, swagger and wit”. The life of the Haitian slave leader, published in September this year, could not been more timely, as the historical legacy of slavery and racism came to dominate debate in the United States and beyond.

Most Westerners will be familiar with the importance of the years 1776 and 1789. The American and French revolutions were the two defining moments of modern history, events that overthrew monarchy and feudal absolutism with new Enlightenment ideas of liberty, equality and republicanism, thus sparking “The Age of Revolution”.

The Haitian Revolution of 1791 might be included into this same bracket. A revolution as monumental as events in the United States and France, it erupted just two years after the fall of the Bastille on a small Caribbean island, organised and executed by African slaves fighting for their liberation against French slave masters.

It should be regarded as one of the great events of world history, being the first rebellion in which slaves overthrew their masters, abolished slavery, beat off multiple imperial powers and managed to set up their own nation and constitution. It was, in Aime Cesaire’s words, when “black men stood up in order to affirm, for the first time, their determination to create a new world, a free world.”

It is mainly because of CLR James’ indispensable masterpiece, Black Jacobins, which artfully retells its triumphs and tragedies, that the Haitian revolution has attracted any awareness, let alone esteem in our culture at all. Otherwise it has been a revolution largely relegated to obscurity.

Thankfully, Black Spartacus is a valuable gem for readers eager to enlighten themselves about the revolution and especially for the man who lead it. Toussaint Louverture’s life can rightfully be described as “epic”; born a slave in the 1740s on the Breda plantation in Saint Domingue, France’s most valuable colony, his existence was defined by oppression and cruelty.

After helping to organise the most successful slave rebellion in history, and later becoming its leader and general, he turned his fellow emancipated slaves into a formidable fighting force, outsmarting his enemies, and authoring a constitution in 1801. This abolished slavery once and for all, included a non-racial definition of citizenship — and brought Haiti on the brink of independence. In response Napoleon sent an expedition to crush the revolution and re-install slavery. It failed as Haiti became independent in 1804 — though by then Louverture had been captured and had died in the grim, snowy Fort de Joux in France the previous year.

More from this series

The technocratic tedium of modern politics

By Dan Hitchens

While Louverture’s life is extraordinary, much of it has been the subject of mystery and legend. We don’t know precisely what year he was born, what year he was legally emancipated, or when he learned how to read. No official portraits of him exist, so we don’t even have an accurate depiction of what he looked like. Moreover, there are certain aspects of Louverture’s life we simple will never know. For example, the letters he wrote to his various mistresses (many of them white) were torched by Napoleon’s army in 1802. Moreover, Toussaint had as much interest as anyone else in creating the mysterious aura around his name.

However, Black Spartacus is rooted in an impressive depth of research. Hazareesingh dived straight into the various, and often untouched archives in France, Spain, Britain and America (unfortunately not Haiti itself as not much material has survived) to “find our way back to Toussaint: to return as far as possible to the primary sources, to try to see the world through his eyes, and to recapture the boldness of his thinking and the individuality of his voice.”

According to his own claim, Hazareesingh has succeeded in arguably painting the richest portrait of Louverture’s life to date in biographical form, one that captures the “boldness of his thinking” and “his voice”, as well as the complexities and nuances of his political life.

One way he does this is torpedoing a common misconception about Louverture, that he had little affinity or attachment to his Caribbean and African heritage. Loverture wasn’t ashamed of his African origins, or sought to distance himself from it — he embraced it. He was raised in the Allada culture by his parents, where he learned their native Fon language, which he was known to frequently use when conversing with his soldiers (often to their delight). He was knowledgeable in African herbal medicine. While he didn’t personally adhere to Vodou, he was intimate with it and used it as a repository to inspire his people. And his military prowess was in some sense influenced by the martial cultures of the various African peoples on Saint Domingue, as much as studying the writings of Julius Caesar.

Louverture’s genius also comes from how he was able to appropriate the ideals of the Enlightenment and use them against the European powers enslaving his people. Hazareesingh points out, as other have before him, that Louverture eventually became familiar with the writings of Raynal, Diderot and Rousseau, and saw that the French revolution had betrayed its own stated ideals when it “manifestly sided with the slave-owners” in Saint Domingue. If Liberté, égalité and fraternité are universal and have any concrete meaning, then surely they apply to enslaved blacks as much as to white bourgeois men? Louverture’s vision, in contrast, was more faithful to republican ideals, especially in his non-racial idea of fraternité, in which liberated black slaves, white colonists and mixed-race peoples would live together as “a single family of friends and brothers”.

More from this series

How random are your politics?

By Louise Perry

In Louverture one finds a distinction between the evil of European colonialism and the good that flowed out of many of the ideas of the European Enlightenment. As Hazareesingh writes: “The Haitian revolution generated its own set of emancipatory principles, making it the most masterful political improvisation of the Radical Enlightenment.”

What the author does marvellously is show the multiple streams that formed Louverture’s political views; not just African mysticism and Enlightenment philosophy, but also his visceral Catholic humanism, which taught that all of God’s children are equal no matter their colour. This last idea Louverture probably got from radical Jesuit priests he knew on the Breda Plantation, and who likely taught him how to read. This syncretic ideology formed what Hazareesingh describes as “creole republicanism”, inspiring a ferocious opposition to slavery and inspired social solidarity among the former enslaved.

But Louverture was no simple-minded idealist. He describes Louverture as a foxy, “revolutionary political operator” who knew the importance of Machiavellian strategy. The Haitian leader could be very cynical and cunning if it meant protecting the revolution, which is why he made alliances and counter-alliances at different times with the Spanish, French and British Empires against each other, all of whom ultimately had predatory ambitions for Haiti and had nothing but racial hostility towards the Haitian revolution. At one point, while officially still allied with France, he betrayed a French agent he had helped send to Jamaica to start another slave revolt, by revealing the plans of the expedition to a British agent.

On principle Louverture was “sincerely committed to the liberation of black people in Jamaica from British rule”, but suspected the French were using him and his army as cannon fodder for a risky foreign intervention, which he and his advisors feared would “imperil all the achievements of the revolution in Saint Domingue” and whose ultimate purpose was to get rid of him. Louverture’s raison d’etre was to defend and consolidate the Haitian revolution by any means necessary, which is why Hazareesingh clearly writes with admiration, although without descending into hagiography. Because Louverture, like almost every revolutionary leader since Oliver Cromwell, had an authoritarian streak too.

Hazareesingh recognises that he “became increasingly trapped in an authoritarian spiral” in his desperate attempts to restore the pre-revolutionary plantation economy, in order to kickstart the economic development of Haiti and protect it from external attack. He withheld civic roles from women, and in the infamous 1801 constitution named himself leader for life.

More from this author

Don't demonise the 'male gaze'

By Ralph Leonard

Nevertheless, perhaps the most enjoyable chapters come towards the end when Louverture’s cultural and political legacy are discussed, in death transformed into a symbol of liberation across the world.

Both William Wordsworth and Bob Marley paid tribute to him in song and verse. Jamaican slaves and Irish republicans were inspired by his opposition to racism, in the case of the former singing in 1799 that “black, white and brown, we’re all de same”. Louverture proved inspirational to 19th-century abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass and John Brown, and 20th century anti-imperialists like CLR James and Aime Cesaire. Louverture and the Haitian revolution were a “precursor for modern emancipatory politics” — and few people can claim to have a legacy as enduring as this.

The concept of the “Great Man of History” may no longer be fashionable, but if it has any validity then Toussaint Louverture is surely one of them. To rise from slavery to become the great emancipator of the 18th century, and in CLR James’ words the “finest product” of the Enlightenment, is a mark of greatness.

Louverture’s life shows how individuals can have a decisive role in changing, even in the midst of larger social and economic forces. His will and determination, his fierce struggle for man’s “natural liberty” is a testament to what Wordsworth called “man’s unconquerable mind”. So we should be thankful that Sudhir Hazareesingh has written the outstanding biography of “the first black superhero of the modern age”.

The aforementioned events aren’t descriptions of 2020, although the reader could be forgiven for making such an assumption. Rather they occurred some 240 years ago during the years preceding the American Revolution, as part of a terroristic campaign of political violence carried out by a group of insurgents, sometimes called “Patriots”, against fellow Americans who happened to simply not share their particular set of political beliefs. The story of this mayhem was an integral part of America’s founding: a founding which was far stranger and more violent than the vast majority of Americans have ever been taught to believe. Yet they are not events that can be described by any American alive.

The truth is that, as Thomas B. Allen documented in his 2010 book Tories: Fighting for the King in America’s First Civil War, America’s Revolution was as much a civil war as it was a bid for independence from a foreign power. And just like our current cold civil war, friends, neighbours and relatives were pitted against one another in a bloody, zero-sum struggle for dominance and survival. It was a conflict over taxes, representation and property, yes, but it was also over ideas. Radical ideas. A conflict which, upon closer inspection, bears far more of a resemblance to the street violence and political conflict that has gripped contemporary America than many would like to admit. 

As the Patriot cause built up steam in the years preceding 1776, the streets of America’s most prominent city bore striking resemblance to those of contemporary Portland, Seattle or Kenosha. Boston was a hotbed of revolutionary fervor and violence which manifested itself in running street battles between mobs and government forces. Arson, destruction of property and repression of religion reigned. Intimidation of local officials was common, as were physical attacks on any citizen foolish enough to dare to publicly dissent from the budding revolution’s radical new ideas.

Like today, much of the mob violence around the time of the Revolution was instigated and directed by what can only reasonably be referred to as a loosely-organised collective of “domestic terrorists” (as always, whether these men should be labeled “terrorists” or “freedom fighters” depends on one’s own political and moral priors). The Sons of Liberty, most famous for masterminding the Boston Tea Party, were essentially the 17th-century version of Antifa.

Founded in New England in 1765 — after the passage of the Stamp Act and the ensuing riots which would see the home of Royal Governor Thomas Hutchinson sacked and looted — the group would slowly, and then quickly grow, eventually founding chapters (cells?) in all thirteen colonies. Members would go on to become key instigators of the American revolution itself.

But it wasn’t until three years after their founding that the Sons would truly come into their own, when the passage of the Townshend Act saw the ship of one of their key allies and funders, John Hancock, impounded by Royal authorities on (accurate) suspicion of smuggling. 

Hancock was one of the richest men in the American colonies, having inherited a fortune inflated by the profits from his tax-free smuggling operation. He was also a key benefactor to the Sons of Liberty, and later on for the Revolution itself, basically playing the role of a colonial-era George Soros. 

As the Sons’ ranks swelled, an initiative was launched by a Patriot committee requiring anyone suspected of harbouring Loyalist sympathies to swear a public oath to the Patriot cause. Soon the Sons began, in what can only be described as an early form of doxxing, to publish the names of merchants refusing to participate in Patriot instigated boycotts against the Crown. 

One of those targeted by this 18th century doxxing, Theophilus Lillie, shot back at his persecutors in a pro-Loyalist newspaper, writing a fiery op-ed whose remarkable language could easily have been ripped from any the various open letters recently penned by victims of today’s so-called “cancel culture”.

“It always seemed strange to me that people who contend so much for civil and religious liberty should be so ready to deprive others of their natural liberty,” he wrote: “If one set of private subjects may at any time take upon themselves to punish another set of private subjects just when they please, it’s such a sort of government as I never heard of before… I had rather be a slave under one master (for if I know who he is I may perhaps be able to please him) than a slave to a hundred or more whom I don’t know where to find, nor what they will expect of me.”

Suggested reading

Stop pretending the BLM protests were peaceful

By Michael Tracey

Notable in Lillie’s letter is his focus on the obvious hypocrisy of the Patriots, who, while proclaiming their dedication to the natural rights of all men to life, liberty and property, didn’t seem to have many qualms about depriving others of those same rights, so long as said others held political views which they found offensive. Precisely the same species of argument deployed by contemporary conservatives bemoaning the attacks they now face at the hands of Black Lives Matter and its various ideological satellites. 

Patriots responded to Lillie’s defiance by erecting an effigy outside of his shop to intimidate potential customers, destroying his livelihood. When a local Loyalist attempted to tear it down, an enraged mob of Patriots chased him into his home, where, terrified, the man fired a musket into the crowd in an panicked act of self-defence, inadvertently killing a young boy playing nearby. 

Unsurprisingly, the boy instantly became a martyr for the Patriot cause. His funeral drew thousands into the streets, inspired revolutionary poets to compose verse in honour of his sacrifice, and stirred up the smoldering passions of the Patriot mobs. Passions which would boil over a week later when British troops would open fire during a confrontation with a violent and menacing mob — an event that we now know as the Boston Massacre.

Targeted violence against ordinary Loyalists increased. Mobs attacked and vandalised the private homes of suspected Loyalists, sometimes firing volleys of musketballs through their windows. The livestock of suspected Tories were mutilated and killed. Loyalist officials were dragged from their homes by mobs and forced to publicly recant their views while their wives and children looked on in terror. 

Mobs of thousands armed with clubs and muskets targeted town clerks, concillars, and other officials suspected of harboring loyalist sympathies, and marched on their homes and offices to demand their resignations — events almost identical to the ones that have taken place since riots began in May of this year, with the private homes of public officials being targeted and defaced by mobs attempting to intimidate them into bowing to their demands. After the terrified officials succumbed to the pressure of the Patriot mobs, they were then forced to march through the mob’s gauntlet while periodically being forced to read aloud an “acknowledgement of error and repentance”. 

Just as with the run on guns and ammunition that occurred after the George Floyd riots in Minneapolis, frightened Loyalists began to arm themselves, construct fortifications and assemble into local militias for self-defence, while Patriot tradesmen began to refuse to do business with Tories.

The goal of Patriot groups like the Sons of Liberty was to sow terror among Loyalist civilians and officials, to undermine the legitimacy of the latter’s authority while policing the thoughts of the former. The fact that this approach frequently manifested itself in the form of targeted violence which involved the degradation and dehumanisation of their opponents was a feature, not a bug of the overall strategy.

While contemporary America’s own low-intensity civil war is still in its early stages, the orgy of Patriot-instigated mob violence of the mid-1770s would eventually reach an apotheosis. On 18 April, 1775, with the “shot heard round the world” echoing from the village green in Lexington, Massachusetts, these incidents morphed from a mere series of localised rebellions and disorders into a full scale revolution — a revolution which itself would go on to become a far more brutal affair than is commonly known.

The ensuing “war of independence” would see both sides murder each other with glee while committing horrifying crimes in the process. Whole towns were burned and looted, farmers were cut down in their fields and scalped, women were raped in their homes, and children had their bodies torn apart with Tomahawks and their skulls smashed in with mallets.

Suggested reading

America is the greatest story ever told

By Tom Holland

Though conservatives, and even some liberals, are likely to instinctively recoil from these parallels, which are hard to interpret as anything other than glaringly obvious, they do so at their own peril. 

Denial and self-deception didn’t save America’s Loyalists from being essentially ethnically cleansed from the country of their birth; estimates vary, but up to 100,000 ended up being forced to flee, abandoning their property and livelihoods in order to seek safety in Canada and other royal colonies. Similarly it is unlikely to rescue America’s conservatives from the wrath of their own latter-day revolutionary enemies.

While there are many obvious differences between today’s social justice mobs and those fielded by America’s first revolutionaries, the unseemly truth is that they are far more superficial than the majority of Americans are ready to let themselves believe. The real differences being perhaps no more significant than the physical ones present between the revolutionaries of the 1770s and their modern day descendents: the resemblance may no longer be obvious at first glance, but ultimately, the same blood still flows in their veins.

The most predictable objection to the drawing of these parallels is to claim that, however similar the violent tactics of American’s Revolutionary mobs were to those of today’s far-Left, their ideological motives couldn’t have been more different. At first this point may seem to hold a good deal of water, but a closer inspection starts to reveal noticeable leaks. 

If you talk to younger members of America’s progressive Left today — especially those who have participated in this summer’s protests and/or riots and are university-educated — about the philosophy behind their cause, you are likely to be bombarded with a cascade of sophisticated sounding buzzwords and concepts. It is a sloppily assembled collage which borrows isolated insights, terminology and quotes from an array of both past and current Left-wing and liberal thinkers to create a grotesque, and largely meaningless, ideological pastiche. Marx and Trotsky, Foucault and Derrida, Bakunin and Lacan are all likely to make an appearance. Alongside these are the works of prominent 20th century post-colonial authors as well as those of contemporary writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Robin DiAngelo. 

However it would be wrong to conclude from this that the ideology behind their unrest is alien to that of America’s Founding Fathers (and founding mobs), as the pieces of this incoherent smorgasbord ultimately serve, in most cases, as little more than a series of garnishes on the plate of radical chic. 

In reality, what today’s mob and its fellow travelers in the Democratic Party really want is eerily similar to the ideas of America’s most radical founding father: Thomas Paine. Ideas which found eager listeners among colonial America’s rioters and political terrorists. Paine’s Common Sense — easily the most important rhetorical and literary work of the revolutionary era, exceeded perhaps only by the Declaration itself — sold over 100,000 copies during the first three months of its publication in January of 1776. By the end of the war over 500,000 copies were in print, this in a nation of only approximately two million. The pamphlet had gone viral — with a vengeance.

And Common Sense was more than merely a stylistically brilliant call for independence. It was genuinely radical: attacking hereditary monarchy, embracing revolutionary egalitarian notions and democracy and even urging his readers to abandon their own British heritage in order to “begin the world over again” and spread the light of this new world to the far corners of the earth. By force.

Suggested reading

Imagine a world without the USA...

By James Kirkup

But these ideas are expressed in Common Sense primarily as an angry tirade: Paine glories in his righteous rage, using it to stoke and justify not only hatred of the King, but also of his subjects in America who remained loyal to him. As historian Robert A. Ferguson noted in his book The American Enlightenment 1750-1820: “Paine repeatedly justifies and encourages the fact of hatred… ‘Men read by way of revenge,’ he explains, and his own reading in Common Sense is fueled by images of blood, ashes, suffering, cruelty, villany, corruption, monstrosity and hellishness… The point to remember is that Paine’s natural intended audience is the American mob… Paine writes to give the mob specific direction in the act of independence.” 

While John Adams would bemoan Common Sense and its author in the pages of his autobiography, both Washington and Franklin would go on the record praising it. And they were right to do so, for its influence on the course of the Revolution simply can’t be understated. As Adams, a man who would go on to utterly despise Paine after the Revolution, noted: “Without the pen of Paine, the sword of Washington would have been wielded in vain.”

Paine would go on to write prodigiously during the war, writing the famous lines “These are the times that try men’s souls.” Afterwards, Paine would set sail for France,  and would later become a participant in the French Revolution. But, just like his modern heirs, Paine was no Jacobin. Rather, he was instead a kind of hyper-radical Lockean who dreamt of spreading the light of freedom abroad, toppling tyrants and despotism worldwide through the use of righteous rhetoric and violence. He would go on to be an early advocate for the development of the welfare state, and a venomous enemy to organised religion as a whole, and Christianity in particular. Positions not so meaningfully different from those of America’s modern day Democratic Party and its progressive allies. 

Though today’s mob, when it’s not busy attempting to terrorise and intimidate its political enemies in the same manner as their Patriot forefathers, has developed the habit of vandalising and toppling statues of America’s Founders, it’s likely an action that wouldn’t be frowned upon by Paine. After all, these were the same men that abandoned and made a pariah of him after the war, leaving him to die in poverty and obscurity due to his increasingly vocal and radical views. Men who were ultimately, in Paine’s view, little more than betrayers of the very revolution they had helped to start. 

Paine’s personal disputes aside, the actions of today’s mob as it attacks the statues of America’s founders bears much similarity to the actions of the Patriot mobs of New York when they toppled the Statue of King George in 1776. Both were acts, not of a conquering foreign army, but rather of an oedipal uprising of children against their fathers. 

In any case, historic motivations (oedipal or otherwise) aren’t relevant any more. For the deeper truth is that these men are no longer in need of monuments to commemorate them. A simple epitaph is now more than sufficient: Si monumentum requiris circumspice.

The story of John Law and the Mississippi Bubble is fascinating, dramatic and intriguing. It also offers a wonderful counterfactual. What if the bubble hadn’t burst? What if Law’s gamble with the finances of 1720s France had paid off? With a few tweaks in the course of events, it’s just possible to imagine a world where the French didn’t rebel against their king, where Britannia didn’t rule the waves, and where the United States of America was never founded.

Law was born in Edinburgh in 1671, the son of a banker. Having learned the family trade, like many clever, educated Scots he then left the country seeking advantage elsewhere. In the first instance, that meant London. But after a row about a woman, he fought Edward Wilson in an (illegal) duel in 1694 and killed him with a single thrust of his rapier.

Imprisoned, he escaped and fled to the Continent, where his story really begins. Flitting between Amsterdam and Paris for almost twenty years, Law established himself as an early economist and advocate of financial innovation, as well as a fixture in aristocratic circles where his charm and intellect were highly prized. His greatest argument was that states should move away from money based on precious metal and instead adopt paper currencies based on government debt. By increasing the amount of money in circulation, Law reckoned, rulers could allow traders and investors to do more business, make more money and so pay more taxes.

That was a fanciful notion until 1715. That year, King Louis XIV of France died, leaving behind a country impoverished by years of his profligate spending and foreign wars and ruled by a child, five-year-old Louis XV. His regent was the Duke of Orleans, an acquaintance of Law.

Law persuaded Orleans to let him establish the Banque Générale, which was permitted to issue paper notes backed by gold and silver. It worked, so Law upped the stakes and bet again. He convinced Orleans to let him go global, and the result was the Company of the West, France’s first joint stock company. It controlled trade between France and its holdings in North America, a huge territory along 3,000 miles of the Mississippi from New Orleans to Quebec.

This wasn’t really new, of course. Britain had established joint stock companies in the previous century and the Bank of England, set up after the Glorious Revolution, had been printing paper money for 20 years by then. Meanwhile, the British and Dutch had long-established companies controlling their foreign dominions.

So Law’s innovations allowed a poor and backward France to begin catching up with the global leaders. And for a time afterwards, it looked like it might even overtake them.

Law sold shares in the Company of the West, and the French appetite for them was insatiable. The profits of early colonial settlements, rumours of gold and silver deposits in American soil and Law’s charisma combined to create a feeding frenzy.   Demand drove prices up and up. Shares worth 500 livres at the start of 1719 were worth 10,000 by the year’s end.

Suggested reading

The glorious reign of King Henry IX

By Suzannah Lipscomb

Shareholders became hugely rich, at least on paper. The word “millionaire” was coined for those who achieved great wealth from the Mississippi company.

Orleans was delighted, because Law insisted shares could only be bought with outstanding French government loan notes: people piling into the company shares were effectively helping to pay off the crippling national debt.

So delighted that he granted Law first control over all France’s foreign conquests and trade, and then effective command of the French economy. First his bank was taken over by the crown, which guaranteed its paper currency, though Law remained in control of what was effectively the country’s first central bank. Then in January 1720, Law became the Controller-General and Superintendent-General of Finance.

Law’s historic error was to use his bank — renamed the Banque Royale —  to create too much new paper money to allow people to buy yet more shares in the Company of the West. The paper gains created by ever-rising share prices naturally persuaded some investors to seek to cash in by selling shares and convert their gains into gold.

As share prices began to fall in early 1721, the sell-off accelerated. Neither Law’s bank nor the French crown had enough gold to cover the sales, of course, so Law doubled down again. He banned payments in gold of more than 100 livres and made the paper notes issued by his bank legal tender; his hope was to persuade the French to accept paper instead of gold and it was briefly successful as shareholders did indeed exchange notes for shares.

What followed, of course, was rampant inflation. Law’s last gamble was to devalue his notes by 50%, a policy that saw him dismissed from his post and eventually forced to flee France. Shares in what was generally known as the Mississippi Company, meanwhile, fell back to their original value of 500 livres, wiping out the wealth of the millionaires and many others.

The consequences of the Mississippi Bubble were vast. The financial pain experienced by many of the French helped turn the country firmly against paper money and other suspiciously complex financial novelties: it would be 80 years before the country accepted another paper currency.

Suggested reading

The greatest stories never told

By Peter Franklin

Notably, the French response to a bursting bubble was very different to the British reaction to similar events. For, at around the same time as Law was at work in France, Britain was experiencing the better-known South Sea Bubble, a scheme partly inspired by Law’s apparent early success.

However that financial disaster persuaded the British to strengthen the Bank of England to control the money supply and allow the country to use paper money with confidence. The BoE’s new power helped Britain to borrow at low rates and finance both global military expansion and domestic industry: Rule, Britannia! was written in 1745, celebrating imperial power based on sound finance. These are the foundations of London as a global financial centre.

France, by contrast, stuck to gold and stagnated. Unable to raise capital, French industry struggled and the economy failed to develop. The monarchy was likewise short of cash, able to raise money only by imposing ever higher taxes on people ever less able to pay. The national trauma of the Mississippi Bubble also shattered public trust and confidence in the crown; bursting the bubble cost French rulers not just money but authority.

In 1763, the Seven Years War ended with France humiliated and broke. Louisiana east of the Mississippi river went to Great Britain; Louisiana west of the Mississippi and the Isle of Orleans went to Spain. Defeated on land by Robert Clive and its navy shattered, France abandoned any claim to India, clearing the way for what would become the British Raj.

The following decade, France backed the American revolutionaries challenging British rule in America, in the hope of denting its rival’s global domination. But the cost of that successful effort was the final straw for the Ancien Régime, helping to bring about revolution in 1789.  In due course, French leadership fell to Napoleon Bonaparte, who ended French claims in North America by agreeing the Louisiana Land Purchase with Thomas Jefferson.

All of this, the founding of our modern world, can be partly traced back to that bitter French experience of financial engineering. So what if Law had avoided inflating and bursting his bubble? What if he had resisted the temptation to print more money to fund more share purchases? There’s an important distinction to be drawn between Mississippi and the South Sea Bubble. The British scheme was fraudulent but Law was genuinely trying to improve France’s finances and economy. His failure was not inevitable.

Let’s say Law had found a way to stabilise the Mississippi share price without disaster. France in the 1720s would have had the basic elements of a modern capitalist economy: paper money and joint-stock companies. Such a nation would very likely have been a more effective rival to Great Britain during the 18th Century. A better-equipped and funded French military might well have secured a stalemate in India; Britain’s empire would have been a very different, and smaller, affair.

A more even outcome to the Seven Years War might well have seen France keep at least some of its Louisiana territories. Perhaps the same forces that brought about the American War of Independence against Britain would also have triggered an uprising against France there too. But with the two countries united by the desire to maintain control over their American colonies, would the rebels have succeeded?

Suggested reading

Britain's divisions go way, way back

By Ed West

In our universe, French support for the revolution helped bring about the birth of the USA.  In the world where John Law’s gamble paid off, the French would have been colonial powers in North America alongside the British, and unlikely to support revolutionary forces there. Similarly, while the removal of the French threat in 1763 fed support for American independence, in a world where the hated rival still fields troops across the frontier the colonists’ desire for separaton would is far more limited.

It seems likely that both the British and French American colonies would still eventually gain their independence, but not as a single, continent-straddling republic and eventual superpower.

Meanwhile, a French domestic population enjoying greater economic growth and international success would have less reason to rise up against the monarchy in 1789, though doubtless the idea of absolute monarchy would still have crumbled eventually. A French revolution in the mid 19th Century, perhaps in 1848?

And in this alternative history, Napoleon Boneparte would still rise to prominence, albeit as the general commanding Royal French forces in a prolonged war with Britain in the early 19th Century. Who would have won those wars? If John Law’s gamble had paid off, it would be hard to bet against France.

If the Mississippi Bubble had not burst, today half the world would speak French, Paris would be a financial powerhouse, and the Gare du Nord would be the Gare du Waterloo, named in honour of the military victory that secured France’s place as the world’s first superpower.

It is said by many observers and participants in the Government’s lockdown policy that the most remarkable thing about a remarkable policy is how successful it has been. Arguably too successful.

Some people in and around government have been surprised, and not always happily, at how widely people have accepted and even embraced lockdown. Many more people than anyone really expected have chosen to heed the government’s messaging and shut themselves away for the duration.

That has deepened the economic impact of lockdown, and led to some unexpected misallocations of resources. Officials expected that around 20% of children would continue to go to school, either because their parents were key workers or because they qualified under the provision made for those eligible for free school meals by virtue of low incomes. In fact, the figure is barely 2%.

One reason the NHS has avoided catastrophic overload is the sharp drop in people presenting for non-Covid reasons. Some industries, such as construction, have all but shut down even though they were not told to do so and might have continued to operate in some form.

Suggested reading

Lockdown is just a holiday from modernity

By Niall Gooch

Elsewhere, lockdown is causing social tension and even protest. Only very small numbers of people in some American states are demonstrating against the curtailment of liberty, but they are demonstrating. The English, by contrast, have accepted lockdown with a wistful shrug and maybe a bit of passive-aggressive grumbling, eschewing riots in favour of settling down with a nice cup of tea to wait things out.

Curious, because I’m not sure how this sort of behaviour fits into ideas of the English, or at least, into English cultural history. Running through that history is the notion of the English as a people with a deep and even unique love of liberty, a desire to be left alone, especially by people in power.

After all, we had Magna Carta, did we not? That extraordinary document echoed down the centuries, with consequences far beyond my scope here. One was probably the Civil War, which in England at least had its roots in the legal reasoning of men such as Sir Edward Coke, that even the monarch was subject to Parliament’s laws. Coke paved the way for William Blackstone, the 18th century judge who defined “the absolute rights of every Englishman” including freedom from unwarranted interference by the state.

These “rights of Englishmen” were a cornerstone of the American Revolution and the establishment of the United States. At least some of the founders believed that their new nation was brought into being to preserve the liberties that supposedly defined England yet which a tyrannical king and his ministers had defiled.

Here is George Mason, one of the Founding Fathers, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention of 1787:

“We claim Nothing but the Liberty & Privileges of Englishmen, in the same Degree, as if we had still continued among our Brethren in Great Britain: these Rights have not been forfeited by any Act of ours, we can not be deprived of them without our Consent, but by Violence & Injustice…”

When our American cousins cry “Live Free or Die” and take to the streets to protest overweening state authority during lockdown, whether they know it or not, they are honouring the tradition of English liberty.

More from this author

Will the pandemic kill off libertarianism?

By James Kirkup

That tradition has not entirely died out in England itself, even if many of the English prefer to hallow St George and the nation’s history by ignoring the issue altogether. Or perhaps by grumbling at the lack of a Bank Holiday, a propensity for long weekends apparently being an essential part of our Protestant national character — so unlike the idle French and other workshy southern papists.

But some people still remember, upholding the idea of “freeborn Englishmen” as a band especially committed to personal freedom. One of them is our Prime Minister, whose writings for the Telegraph (I used to help edit them) are shot through with a silvery vein of liberty in the face of an intrusive state.

For Boris Johnson, it is an essential part of the English character that, when faced with pettifogging officialdom giving us orders, we tell the offending bureaucrat to bugger off.

Here is Boris in 2004 when Tony Blair was keen on a national ID card:

“If I am ever asked, on the streets of London, or in any other venue, public or private, to produce my ID card as evidence that I am who I say I am, when I have done nothing wrong and when I am simply ambling along and breathing God’s fresh air like any other freeborn Englishman, then I will take that card out of my wallet and physically eat it in the presence of whatever emanation of the state has demanded that I produce it.”

If Boris Johson has a personal philosophy, it is probably contained in those words. At least until the coronavirus, he saw himself, fame and Cabinet rank notwithstanding, as “simply ambling along and breathing God’s fresh air like any other freeborn Englishman”.

That view of the English character was visible in Johnson’s early, stumbling Covid-19 press conferences, when he resisted initial calls for lockdowns and the rest. “We live in a land of liberty,” he insisted on March 18th:

"We live in a land of liberty… we don't intend to pose… restrictions on people… but we will rule nothing out"

UK PM Boris Johnson says "we will consider bringing further… measures where that is necessary to suppress the peak of the epidemic"https://t.co/1Rs1TN7gTf pic.twitter.com/CDb6epjvKE

— BBC News (UK) (@BBCNews) March 18, 2020

 Not all of his now-famous resistance to lockdown was about personal politics. A big part of the expert calculations put to ministers was about how many people would reject restrictions on personal freedom, rendering lockdown ineffective. Some government advisers counselled that people would simply get bored and resentful about being told to stay at home, so ministers should be wary.

I doubt the behavioural scientists making that calculation explicitly considered Magna Carta, Coke, Blackstone and the “rights of Englishmen”, but the people whose behaviour they were attempting to predict are the inheritors of that tradition, knowingly or otherwise.

Suggested reading

I don't want life to go back to 'normal'

By Graeme Archer

So what to make of the way we have largely accepted and obeyed a polite instruction to put ourselves under house arrest? Why is England, land of liberty, so happy to spend St George’s Day — and maybe many more days beyond — in lockdown?

The search for a definition of the English character is endless and largely fruitless. I used to write about England a lot (for a Scottish newspaper, the Scots often being more interested in Englishness than the English) and have sometimes wondered if the refusal to agree on a common idea of Englishness is, in fact, the defining characteristic of the nation.

Fortunately, there are much better thinkers than me who have looked at this question, doing work that might shed some light on the failure of freeborn Englishmen to resist orders to leave the pub and go home.

One of them is Paula Surridge of Bristol University, who studies the values that underpin voting behaviour and much else besides.

Last month, she spoke to the English Labour Network, which wants Labour to pay more attention to English identity and those voters who think it’s important. More on that in a minute.

Dr Surridge — whose work really should be followed by everyone interested in UK politics — has looked at voters and how they identify themselves. She finds that around 35% of the electorate in England consider themselves to be “very strongly English”.

Within that group, you will probably find the 20-odd % who, in other surveys, are identified as “English not British” or “more English than British”.

However you measure them, these people are very important, politically and otherwise. According to John Denham, a former Labour Cabinet minister who now studies Englishness and the English, almost all of the Labour voters who switched to the Tories last year are from that “very English” group. Until Labour reconnects with England and the English, he argues, it will never regain power. I think he’s probably right about that.

Suggested reading

Is there a future for English nationalism?

By Paul Mason

But how to do that? And what’s this got to do with lockdown?  Back to Dr Surridge.

A lot of her research looks beyond traditional Left-Right divisions on economic questions and incorporates another scale of measuring attitudes: liberal-authoritarian.

Your position on that axis depends on your view of the following five statements:

• Young people don’t have enough respect for traditional values
• Censorship is necessary to uphold moral values
• We should be tolerant of those who lead unconventional lifestyles
• For some crimes the death penalty is the most appropriate sentence
• People who break the law should be given stiffer sentences”

The more strongly you agree with those, the further towards the “authoritarian” end of the scale you fall.

And guess what Dr Surridge found about the “very strongly English”, the group most likely to be celebrating St George’s Day today and to generally embrace Englishness in preference to other identities? The more English you feel, the more likely you are to say that the state and society should tell people what to do, to make them conform and, when they disobey, to punish them harshly.

This correlation between Englishness and authoritarian attitudes strikes me as fascinating, important and underexplored in a lot of political conversation — possibly, in part, because the Prime Minister who seems to appeal so much to authoritarian English voters is so keen to tell a story of them as freeborn lovers of liberty.

Johnson is not unaware of the importance of authoritarian inclinations, of course. Priti Patel isn’t Home Secretary because she likes Brexit. It’s because she used to like the death penalty.

On the other side of the Commons, I wonder what would happen if Sir Keir Starmer managed to reinvent himself as a hardline prosecutor of yobs and petty criminals and shifted Labour’s home affairs posture back to “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”?  That might go some way to solving Labour’s very grave English problem.

Suggested reading

Every Home Secretary must fight the Home Office

By Stephen Pollard

As for lockdown, this is, of course, just my speculation, but it seems likely that people who think that the majority and its official representatives should be able to tell us all what to do would be willing to heed instructions to stay at home — even on their patron saint’s day. And to make sure others do too, hence all those calls to the police from people informing on others for such transgressions as walking the dog not once but twice a day. So numerous are those calls that the National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC) has had to urge the public to “exercise common sense and only report well-meaning concerns”.

In other words, the police in England, this land of liberty, have had to beg people to stop grassing up their neighbours to the authorities for “simply ambling along and breathing God’s fresh air like any other freeborn Englishman”.

Happy St George’s Day.

He would not have been out of place in Frankfurt or Berlin in the 1850s, where the great rabbis of German Jewry, of whom Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch was the exemplar, reconciled modernity and Orthodoxy. They built new Jewish Communities in which tradition and citizenship, Kant and Moses were brought together, under the slogan Torah im Derech Eretz — Jewish teaching and respect for the way of the land. It is to the great credit of Rabbi Sacks and Anglo-Jewry that he held the office of Chief Rabbi for 22 years and resurrected that tradition in Britain, so that the voice of the dead could be heard once more.

In the book, Rabbi Sacks defines us as “meaning-seeking beings” for whom relationships are central, and he reveals an Aristotelian turn in seeing happiness as the “expression of the soul in accordance with virtue”. He laments the passing of a ‘Common Good’ in favour of twitter echo chambers, the hateful denunciation of those who disagree, and the apotheosis of self-definition rather than recognising that other people have something to say about whether you are a good person or not.

His statement that “love is the supreme redemption of solitude” is worth repeating. The chapter on self-help being no help at all is instructive, and his critique of multiculturalism and safe spaces is a reasoned refuge from a demented kind of liberalism.

His central thesis is that while there has been a parallel growth in the power and scope of both the state and the market, there has been a simultaneous disintegration of civil society, which is the source of relationships, ethics and happiness. We have never had more things or more rights; and we have never been so unhappy. This paradox is the driving force of the book. It is its greatest strength and its greatest weakness.

Suggested reading

All hail Good King Boris

By Maurice Glasman

In lamenting the disintegration of a shared public culture, Sacks develops certain dualities, between selfishness and altruism, power and morality, contract and covenant — in which the first term has become dominant when the second term should prevail. He particularly identifies politics as “about power and the distribution of resources”, and morality with “civil society”. The problem is that the examples he gives of a covenant are profoundly political, citing the American Revolution and the Burkean Covenant between the generations.

But the American Revolution was constitutively political, and it embodied a certain form of ethics; life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It enshrined the separation of the powers and the primacy of rights. In the case of Burke, it refers to Parliament, the Monarchy, the Church and the body politic as embodied in the sovereignty of the Ancient Constitution.

Brexit is a sublime example of this ambiguous duality. The Remain side accepted Sacks’s view of politics, and fought the battle on the terrain of policy and prosperity, emphasising the threats to our livelihood imminent in rejecting the sovereignty of the European Court of Justice, the Customs Union and the Single Market.

In contrast, the Leave side drew on the idea of the renewal of a covenant between the generations, of keeping an ancient promise, the restoration of Sovereignty through the reclamation of the inheritance of Parliament, the common law and our tradition of combining democracy and liberty.

“Take back control” is not best understood as a policy decision. Brexit was political but it was also moral in its assertion of the primacy of democracy as the ultimate decision-making process. That is what made it so alarming and threatening.

Suggested reading

Ditch the City, enrich the nation

By Maurice Glasman

As a result, Sacks’s narrow view of an instrumental and utilitarian politics, a desacralised politics, gives the book a whiff of a lament for the era that has passed — of the Third Way, of Blair, Brown, Cameron and May, in which the nation state was a regional administrator of a global system of capitalism and individual rights. There is no recognition here of the power of democracy to resist the domination of capitalism, of the primacy of people over things. This was the crux of the issue in Brexit and is absent from the conception of the Common Good developed by Sacks.

Left to itself, capitalism pursues the highest rate of return on its investment at the greatest speed. Invariably this involves the attempt to turn human beings and nature into commodities organised in labour, land and food markets. In other words, in a language familiar to Rabbi Sacks, capitalism wishes to commodify creation itself. This is unsustainable to life, community, society and ethics, and is at the heart of the inequality he dislikes and the ill-defined ‘populism’ he fears, which is mentioned eight times in two pages in the chapter entitled “Democracy in Danger”.

The problem, as mentioned, is that in denying the ethical content of the resistance to globalisation, the move is reduced to “populism”. But the demonic energy of capitalism needs to be constrained, and democratic politics is the traditional way of doing so.

Perhaps there are two reasons why Sacks relegates politics and democracy in this way. The first is a lack of a mediating principle between selfishness and altruism, which would be that of mutuality and reciprocity, of self-interest broadly conceived as a political concept embodied in shared institutions. Civic peace, mutual security and a reciprocal welfare system are political as well as civic achievements.

At one point Sacks refers to “reciprocal altruism”, but this phrase indicates that what binds us in political community is mutually beneficial and not altruistic at all. Sacks argues that both Darwin and De Tocqueville conclude that both co-operation and competition are necessary for a good society, despite their different disciplines and objects of observation. But this is not developed politically.

Suggested reading

Farewell free trade, and good riddance

By David Goodhart

The second problem with the book is its lack of recognition of the power of capitalism as an incentive system. Sacks uses the phrase “structure of grace” to describe the well-ordered relationship between market, state and civil society. It echoes that used by Pope John Paul II in describing capitalism as having a “structure of sin”, in incentivising vice in the form of greed, selfishness and unconstrained desires.

Catholic Social Thought, though, does not turn to the state as the exclusive refuge and remedy, but to decentralised institutions, worker representation on boards, regional banks that can only lend in the areas in which they work, and the upholding of vocation and status in the form of apprenticeships as a necessary condition of labour market entry. These are civic institutions but they are not voluntary: the state underwrites the strengthening of society and constraints on capital by embedding mediating institutions within the economy.

Catholic Social Thought recognises the need for ethical constraints within a competitive market which preserves a sense of relational accountability. It also stresses the need for limits on interest rates and for a living wage in response to inequality and the dehumanisation of people as mere commodities. But despite the lauding of civil society in this book, it does not present any institutions through which the market and the state could be constrained or held to account.

The final problem in a book subtitled “Restoring the Common Good in divided times” is that the Common Good, as a tradition of thought and practice, has always been political and participative in both its secular and religious forms. It is rooted in the governance of cities with a recognition of estranged interests and the necessity of their reconciliation within the polity.

In other words, the Common Good requires an active citizenry engaged in democracy which respects the dignity of difference and the mutual interests that bind them. It is an ancient tradition of immediate contemporary relevance. And while Jonathan Sacks deserves great credit in restoring it to our national conversation, he does not quite recognise the radical consequences of its restoration for the redistribution of power and the renewal of our democracy.

You can't have morality without politics

Subscribe: