THE SOCIAL IMPACT OF THE REVOLUTION AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE'S DISTINGUISHED LECTURE SERIES Robert Nisbet, historical sociologist and intellectual historian, is Albert Schweitzer professor-elect o[ the humanities at Columbia University. ROBERTA. NISBET THE SOCIAL IMPACT OF THE REVOLUTION Distinguished Lecture Series on the Bicentennial This lecture is one in a series sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute in celebration of the Bicentennial of the United States. The views expressed are those of the lecturers and do not necessarily reflect the views of the staff,officers or trustees of AEI. All of the lectures in this series will be collected later in a single volume. revolution · continuity · promise ROBERTA. NISBET THE SOCIAL IMPACT OF THE REVOLUTION Delivered in Gaston Hall, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. on December 13, 1973 American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research Washington, D.C. © 1974 by American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, Washington, D.C. ISBN 0-8447-1303-1 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number L.C. 74-77313 Printed in the United States of America as there in fact an American Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century? I mean a revolu­ tion involving sudden, decisive, and irreversible changes in social institutions, groups, and traditions, in addition to the war of libera­ tion from England that we are more likely to celebrate. Clearly, this is a question that generates much controversy. There are scholars whose answer to the question is strongly nega­ tive, and others whose affirmativeanswer is equally strong. Indeed, ever since Edmund Burke's time there have been students to de­ clare that revolution in any precise sense of the word did not take place-that in substance the American Revolution was no more than a group of Englishmen fighting on distant shores for tradi­ tionally English political rights against a government that had sought to exploit and tyrannize. The essence, in other words, was a war of restitution and liberation, not revolution; the outcome, one set of political governors replaced by another. This view is widespread in our time and is found as often among ideological conservatives as among liberals and radicals. At the opposite extreme is the view that a full-blown revolu­ tion: did indeed take place. This is clearly what John Adams believed: "The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of people; a change in their religious sentiments, of their duties and obliga­ tions. This radical change in the principles, opinions, senti­ ments, and affectsof the people was the real American Revolution." And Samuel Adams, more radical in ideology and hence more demanding in defining a revolution, asked rhetorically, "Was 1 there ever a revolution brought about, especially one so important as this, without great internal tumults and violent convulsions?" If there was a genuine revolution in America we shall find it not in the sphere of ideological tractarianism-which, history demonstrates, may or may not yield actual revolution-but rather in the social sphere. The comparative study of revolution makes clear, I think, that the heart of each of the great modern revolu­ tions is to be seen in the complex of authorities, functions, bonds, and allegiances which we define as social. More specifically, I refer to property, kinship, religion, and social class. I shall refer to this area, following the practice of many French historians of the mod­ ern area, as intermediate-that is, intermediate between individual and state. Without exception, the major revolutions of modern history have had immense and sometimes devastating effects upon this intermediate area. Whether we follow Tocqueville and Taine in seeing centralization and collectivization of political power as the principal consequence of revolution, or more radical historians in seeing individual liberty and welfare as the chief consequence, it is invariably the ties rising from land, kindred, class, estate, and servitude of one kind or another that are at the heart of the matter. If there was indeed a revolution as well as a war of liberation in America at the end of the eighteenth century, we should find its evidences in this intermediate social sphere. It is always useful to turn to comparative aspects of one's subject. Consider the French Revolution. Scholars may differ among themselves as to whether, in the final analysis, it was the individual with his rights and liberties or the political state with its centralized power and national solidarity that had the greater triumph. But what obviously is not subject to debate, what is unmistakably clear, is that the whole complex of social authorities. allegiances, and functions which are intermediate to individual and state, so largely the heritage of the medieval period, was vitally changed during the French Revolution. The real essence of this Revolution was not its reign of terror, formidable as that was, but the legislation enacted by successive revolutionary governments­ legislation that profoundly affected the nobility, the traditional family, the corporate nature of property, the laws of primogeniture 2 and entail, the place of religion in society, the guilds, and other elements of traditional society. Allowing only for inevitable differencesof detail and intensity, such changes in intermediate society are to be seen vividly in other modern revolutions-in some degree in the Puritan Revolu­ tion of seventeenth century England, in far greater degree in the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, and in our own time in some of the New Nations in the non-Western world. Whether in Europe or in other places, modern patterns of social individualism and political unification, even collectivism, take their rise in revolu­ tionary circumstances, in the impact of political power, upon this intermediate social sphere. Now, it is worth stressing that this sphere is commonly feudal in nature when we find it being assaulted by the hammer blows of revolution, using the word "feudal" in its broadest sense. More than any other type of social organization, feudalism seems not only to invite but to succumb to revolution. I am inclined to think that it invites revolution because it virtually consecrates inequality-the prime cause of revolution everywhere, as Tocque­ ville pointed out-and that it succumbs rather easily because of its seeming inability to command wide loyalties and because it is un­ able, by its nature, to mobilize the necessary military power quickly and effectively. Its characteristic diffusion and decentralization of power results in an inability to draw upon power in crises. Marxists have told us much about how capitalism and its associated political structures are subject to revolution. But, in all truth, all the revo­ lutions of modern history have been those launched against systems more nearly feudal than capitalist. It may well be true, as a long line of scholars beginning with Tocqueville has emphasized, that the overriding effect of modernity in both its economic and politi­ cal manifestations is to sterilize the revolutionary impulse. I In light of these observations, let us now consider our main subject, the American Revolution. Was there in the colonies a social order that can reasonably be called 3 feudal? Can conflicts ongmating in inequality, in social class, property, and religion be discerned, in whatever degree, analogous to the conflicts leading up to the English, French, and Russian revolutions? Finally, can substantial changes, effected politically, within revolutionary circumstances, be found taking place in the social structure of America during the two decades following the outbreak of war with England? If answers to these questions are affirmative, as I think they are, then I believe we are obliged to accept the view that revolution in the true sense of this word did indeed take place at the end of the eighteenth century in America, and that a good deal more than mere war of liberation from England was at work. That nothing resembling the zeal, ferocity, and terror of the other revolutions is to be found in the American experience need not be stressed here. That fact is obvious. But, as I have suggested, the essence of any genuine revolution is not the terror that may or may not be associated with it, nor even the kind of millennialist passion that is so often to be observed in modern revolutions. The essence lies in the social changes involved: changes in such institutions as property, family, religion, and social class. These changes, as I want to show, were very much a part of the American experience at the end of the eighteenth century. The first point to make clear is that there was indeed a solid substructure of feudalism in the American colonies. Since a "feudal stage" has so often been denied to the Americans, has so often been effaced by historians in their stress on the homogeneous middle­ class character of American colonial history, we must be emphatic on this point. Needless to say, in referring to feudalism, I do not mean the tidy thing Sir Henry Spelman had in mind when he coined the word in the seventeenth century, much less the ideal feudalism planned for Jerusalem by the medieval Crusaders. (It would indeed have been hard to findthat feudalism even in Europe by the eighteenth century. And it is chastening to bear in mind that more than a few continental scholars have denied England its feudalism on the ground that the oath exacted by William I of all freemen in England in 1086 instantaneously removed the possi­ bility of the true hierarchy of power, the stress upon intermediate institutions, and the decentralization which define feudalism.) 4 From the point of view of the comparative historian and soci­ ologist, feudalism has less to do with political and military struc­ tures, with knights, castles, and dukedoms, than with what Marc Bloch calls "the ties of dependence" uniting individuals of all classes into a society.