Conditions of Revolution: Sic Sometimes Tyrannis

Almost two hundred years before the American Revolution, England’s King James narrowly escaped assassination. Shortly thereafter, it became customary to mark the event’s anniversary with a line or two of verse. Students at Oxford and Cambridge remembered the fifth of November with gusto by writing incandescently anti-Catholic poems, indicting the popish terrorists who had nearly exploded London’s most powerful district in 1605. And though he had been born shortly after the failure of the infamous “Gunpowder Plot,” no one commemorated it with more enthusiasm than the young John Milton.

At the age of 17, Milton wrote a Latin mini-epic “On the Fifth of November.” It was his sixth composition on the subject. In florid mythic diction, the narrator presents Satan himself flying from the bowels of hell, dripping with the slime of Tartarus and seething with rage to see a resolutely Protestant England poised on the brink of union with Scotland under James. Satan colludes in the dead of night with—who else?—the Pope, whom he encourages to rally Catholic dissidents in England and “reduce [Parliament] to ashes by casting the fire of gunpowder underneath the building in which they are convened.” In real life, the explosion was averted by an anonymous leak from among the insurgent ranks. Milton represents this as an act of God, who punishes the rebels for “conspiring against Me and My British.”

It’s hard to believe the same author, 23 years later, would unstintingly defend Parliament’s decision to execute James’s own heir. Charles I had not been dead two weeks when Milton published The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, which presents the deposition of any ruler whatsoever as the very essence of a free people’s liberty: “[S]urely that shall boast, as we do, to be a free Nation, and not have in themselves the power to remove, or to abolish any governor supreme…may please their fancy with a ridiculous and painted freedom.” The stern young moralist who had denounced even attempted regicide was now grown into a fierce defender of actual death for wayward kings. What—if anything—had changed?

Of course, there was the matter of religious allegiance: Milton was a Protestant. But there were also matters of principle and procedure: he was a Parliamentarian, too. A deliberative act by the nation’s legislative body, even one as drastic as beheading a king, was a far cry from the vigilantism of Guy Fawkes and his fellow private citizens. The ideal of government by consent, fast becoming the spirit of the age, fired Milton with something akin to holy zeal. Both James and Charles had steadily fallen afoul of that ideal in trying to force the issue of Union. Since the days of the Gunpowder Plot, the Stuart regime had squandered—in Milton’s eyes—all the legitimacy it once enjoyed. That such a thing was possible would have been news to English kings of old, who had flattered themselves that their mandate was from heaven. But supreme power was no longer so obviously the divine right of kings. Which raised the queasy possibility that it could be lost.

How it could be lost, and under what circumstances, became the subject of the century. The debate over the “social contract” was no learned parlor dispute. It was a reappraisal of communal life at its most fundamental level, paring human society down to its rawest elements and struggling to fit the pieces back together in a configuration that could hold steady. If the effort failed, the result was sure to be pandemonium. For this reason Thomas Hobbes was at pains to stress in Leviathan (1651) that the basic conditions of human existence force a choice between savagery and sovereignty. Either consent to hear the last word on justice spoken from the mouth of an inviolate magistrate, or expect each man to tear what land, mates, and food he can from his adversaries, on whatever terms his animal powers entitle him to. In a political commonwealth, “men agree amongst themselves, to submit to some Man, or Assembly of men, voluntarily, on confidence to be protected by him against all others.” To renege on this agreement was anarchy itself.

There are two parties to a contract, however. This was the uncomfortable truth that John Locke confronted in the incendiary conclusion of his Second Treatise of Government (1689). Under certain conditions, Locke argued, imperious monarchs or reckless legislatures might simply betray the trust vested in them. At that point the government is effectively already dissolved in all but name, a state of nature wearing civilization’s face. The people “are thereupon absolved from any farther obedience, and are left to the common refuge, which God hath provided for all men, against force and violence.” Locke pointedly included among the possible causes of this disaster scenario those cases in which “the prince hinders the legislative from assembling in its due time,” as Charles had done. But he listed other forms of “usurpation” (“the exercise of power, which another hath a right to”) and “tyranny” (“the exercise of power beyond right, which no body can have a right to”) that would justify free men in overthrowing their government. It was then 1689. The colonies were watching.

Less than 100 years later, the Declaration of Independence would fault King George’s government for both “abuses and usurpations.” This was no mere rhetorical flourish on Thomas Jefferson’s part. He meant quite definitely to say that both of Locke’s conditions had been satisfied. The crown had laid claim to powers that belonged to local officials by overriding colonial legislatures. And it had asserted powers no man should possess, suspending the right of trial by jury and trying to wrest control of the army from the civil authority.. All the same, the Declaration sounds a Hobbesian note of caution to the effect that things have to get really bad before anyone thinks to yank out the basic rigging of law and order: “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes.”

The causes at issue, though, were neither transient nor light. It would be missing the point to object that none of George’s individual actions was all that unreasonable or unusual for the time: the offenses were cumulative. No field surgeon wants to amputate a leg unnecessarily, but once the gangrene is clearly spreading it would be malpractice to wait until it covers the whole body. The decisive factor was less the magnitude of the present injustices than their direction of development. Taken together, the revolutionaries felt they added up to “a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.” It was time for Lockean daring to supersede Hobbesian reservations. 

Though the circumstances and terms of that decision were entirely modern, its spirit and its inspiration were ancient. Perhaps no work of contemporary literature fired the rebels’ blood more vigorously than Joseph Addison’s tragedy Cato, about an ancient Roman Stoic who insisted that death as a republican citizen was preferable to life as an imperial subject. “It is not now a time to talk of aught,” says Cato at the decisive hour, “But chains or conquest, liberty or death.” That line may well have inspired Patrick Henry’s famous war cry on the eve of revolution: “give me liberty, or give me death.” If scrapping a broken social contract means preferring the chance of destruction to the indignities of submission, then ultimately the crisis can’t be decided by abstract reasoning: it’s a question of values. The rebels took theirs in part from the severe old stock of ancient Rome.

Crucially, though, they weren’t only Lockeans or only Romans. They were also Christians. It’s often suggested this was irrelevant, or even inconvenient, for their revolution. “Let every soul be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority but that ordained by God”: Paul’s instruction to Roman Christians was to bear the yoke of empire patiently, and loyalists were fond of suggesting that subjects in the colonies should do likewise. But events since the death of King Charles had turned that passage into a two-edged sword. In a dazzling sermon on the subject, Boston preacher Jonathan Mayhew argued that God’s authority over earthly power could motivate resistance as much as quietism. For even monarchs serve, not by their own right, but at God’s pleasure and for his ends. The minute they defy him, they are no rulers at all: “Common tyrants, and public oppressors, are not entitled to obedience from their subjects.”

Justice, not birthright, is the mark of the divine mandate and the key criterion of a government’s legitimacy. This principle both underwrote the founders’ revolution and gave them a plausible basis for discouraging repeat performances. Not that they all felt compelled to do so. Jefferson, the most radical among them, flirted with the idea that periodic revolution might be a salutary habit. He did so most famously in 1787, less than a year after Daniel Shays’s violent uprising against an insolvent fledgling government under the Articles of Confederation. The month before, delegates to the Constitutional Convention had shocked the nation by proposing fundamentally, though peaceably, to transform the Articles into the Constitution. Writing from Paris, where the French were nearing the verge of their own gory regime change, Jefferson suggested a little flippantly that “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” 

That was not what he had written in the Declaration, however. There he had defended the people’s right specifically “to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness” (emphasis added). Once such a government was established, it would be self-defeating to overthrow it again without a plan to replace it with something still safer and happier. George Washington, leaving office in 1796, warned that no such improvement upon the Constitution was forthcoming. By that point the various efforts of the French to come up with something better than they started with had furnished punishingly mixed results. Americans, for their part, would do well to regard “the unity of government which constitutes you one people” as “a main pillar in the edifice of your real independence, the support…of that very liberty which you so highly prize.” For since the new federal Constitution had been painstakingly framed in support of ordered liberty, to dismantle it would be to destroy the means of freedom in the name of freedom.

This was remarkably similar to the conclusion Milton had eventually reached at the pinnacle of his career. Despite William Blake’s insinuations to the contrary, Paradise Lost is not even an unwitting argument for Satan’s manifesto that it is “better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav’n.” Instead the poem works out to a bitter condemnation of misjudged rebellion, as Satan discovers that he has revolted not against some arbitrary curtailment of his freedom but against the very conditions of order and justice that make true freedom possible at all. His powerlessness becomes so extreme that even at the ends of the earth he cannot escape the prison he has created for himself: “Which way I fly is Hell; my self am Hell.” Something like the same fate, Washington seems to imply, would await Americans who undertook to unravel their own Constitution—which is why they should always be “watching for its preservation with jealous anxiety; discountenancing whatever may suggest even a suspicion that it can in any event be abandoned.”

In the years that have followed, more than a few suspicions of that kind have been suggested. There was the pro-slavery Senator John C. Calhoun, who rejected wholesale the Declaration’s prime assertion “that all men are created equal.” He argued in a famous 1848 speech that “There is not a word of truth in the whole proposition” of human equality, so that a union of states which depends on it can and should be dissolved. Then there emerged the theory that, in the words of New Deal architect James Landis, a truly efficient government is “not too greatly concerned” in its regulation of industry “with the extent to which such action does violence to the traditional tripartite theory of government organization.” This thesis has lately evolved into the more forthright assertion that the Constitution is “dangerously outdated” and needs a total rewrite. Progressive disdain for the law of the land, especially when put into practice during COVID, has also left some conservatives eyeing the Declaration and fingering their rifles. It has not been uncommon in recent years to meet with assertions that the founders would have revolted for less than lockdowns and unilateral debt cancellation. The mutual antipathy has gotten so extreme in this decade that both right-wing Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and left-wing professor Nathan Newman have publicly declared the social contract void. Those who agree have posited, in true Lockean fashion, that it’s time for real Americans to make a new declaration of independence.

The structure of the old Declaration, however, would suggest that any serious effort at secession needs to satisfy a few conditions of which the current proposals fall short. First, pretenders to rebellion would need a workable plan for a government more likely than the current one “to effect their safety and happiness” and defend the equality of all men, rather than to usher in a ruinous Miltonic hellscape of unfreedom and vulnerability. “[C]ompact, express or implied is the vital principle of free Governments,” wrote James Madison in 1833. “A revolt against this principle leaves no choice but between anarchy and despotism.” Absent clear guidelines for a new and improved Constitution, America II would look more like CHAZ/CHOP than colonial Georgetown.

Perhaps even more importantly, aspiring revolutionaries would have to make the case that the social contract really is beyond repair. This would mean showing convincingly that the recent abuses of our system have been not only egregious but also consistent, uninterrupted, and destined without violent intervention to establish permanent tyranny. It’s been a turbulent few years, to be sure. But they have been punctuated by dramatic changes of direction, not marked by uninterrupted decline. The most recent presidential election seems to reveal a country not so much helplessly gliding toward serfdom as vigorously enacting an as-yet undecided struggle over the future’s trajectory. Prudence, indeed, would therefore dictate playing this thing out within the remit of the current system, which (if the present state of alternatives in Europe is any indication) remains the best thing going. Two and a half centuries on, the Declaration of Independence is still unsurpassed, and not only as a warning to potential autocrats. It is also a reminder to the public of the conditions that have to be met before pulling the ripcord becomes a good idea.