Dilemmas of Popular Revolution: Popular Sovereignty and the Crowd in Post-Revolutionary America and Russia An Essay Presented by Abigail Rose Modaff to The Committee on Degrees in Social Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a degree with honors of Bachelor of Arts Harvard College March 2012 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………..……………………....3 I. THE THEORY OF REVOLUTION AND THE CHALLENGE OF THE CROWD………………………………………………………………..…………………….12 II. POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY: ALTERNATIVES TO THE CROWD………………………………..31 III. THE CROWD PROBLEM LEFT UN-SOLVED: EPISTEMOLOGICAL SEPARATION IN STALIN, TROTSKY, AND JEFFERSON………………………………………………………………….79 CONCLUSION………………….………………………………………………………..….120 BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………………..……..123 2 Introduction And we also know to our sorrow that freedom has been better preserved in countries where no revolution ever broke out, no matter how outrageous the circumstances of the powers that be. – Hannah Arendt1 On the long, wide road to Pulkovo-2 airport in St. Petersburg, Russia, taxis and snub-nosed marshrutka buses zoom past a larger-than-life monument: Lenin, fist thrust to the sky, leads a handful of bronze workers into the communist future. Four thousand miles away, in Boston, shadows of a very different revolution linger beneath the granite column at Bunker Hill, in a quiet park overlooking the city’s skyline. In both of these places, spaces claimed by revolution fill with everyday life. Russian children play in parks outside the Bolsheviks’ first headquarters, and Boston Harbor hosts entirely decorous tea parties. The recent revolutions in the Arab world, though, and the protracted battles in which many nations are still ensnared, have placed a sharp focus upon the moment of post-revolutionary transition. As we wait for the familiar rhythm of the everyday to reclaim the revolutionary space, we ask ourselves: how is it that post- revolutionary nations move from a time of rupture to a time of continuity? How do revolutionaries make sure that this transformation leaves their gains intact? And when we transition from novelty to normalcy, regardless of how it is done, do we inevitably lose something along the way? In this thesis, I will examine the contested and conflict-ridden space between revolution and post-revolution. I will focus upon two countries whose upheavals helped define the modern age: America, in the years roughly between 1787 and 1791, and Russia, largely between October 1917 and 1924. The purpose of this work is to examine a conceptual problem in the nature of revolution which helps to make sense of post-revolutionary conflict in America and Russia. To 1 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 106. 2 Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution, to take a prominent example, focuses upon the American and French Revolutions 3 accomplish this, I will advance a two-pronged argument: first, that all revolutionaries shared the same conceptual and practical task of defining popular sovereignty against the claims of the unmediated people; and second, that this common task provoked fiercely divergent ideas regarding what popular sovereignty meant and required, based not upon different valuations of popular sovereignty, but upon different understandings of how popular participation relates to the general good. I will use history and theory, similarity and difference, America and Russia, and revolution and post-revolution to inform one another, arguing that at their nexus lies a paradigm that reveals critical facets of revolution as both an abstract concept and a concrete goal in the minds of Lenin, Madison, and their fellow makers of history. The center of this work is what I call the challenge of the crowd. This conceptual problem of post-revolutionary transition, which will be explicated in the first chapter, offers an explanation of both the theoretical difficulties of post-revolutionary transition and the particular historical disputes that occurred in the American and Russian cases. The crowd-challenge paradigm locates the conceptual difficulty of concluding a revolution in the changes that must be made, after a revolutionary seizure of power, in the relationship between “the people,” the government, and the mass of citizens in their unmediated form, which I call “the crowd.” The experience of revolution allows for a certain type of spontaneous, independent mass action which both stakes a powerful claim to the appellation “popular sovereignty” and appears difficult to preserve with the post-revolutionary restoration of government. A dilemma thus appears in which claims of popular sovereignty by the government must defend themselves against the crowd’s deinstitutionalized representative claim by putting forth an alternative understanding of what “the people,” and their rule, truly mean. This construction of an alternative, in turn, forms the touchstone for post-revolutionary conflict. As I will explain in the latter half of chapter one, 4 the challenge of the crowd can be met by bridging the gap between rulers and ruled: creating a governmental manifestation of the popular voice which gains the possibility of predominance over the crowd by accessing the general good. In making this argument, my point is not the familiar one that the tension between constituent and constituted power exists within democratic societies, but that this tension shapes post-revolutionary proposals for the very manner in which power is to be constituted in the first place. In the immediate aftermath of revolution, competing conceptions regarding how the general good is distilled from the opinions of the unmediated people create division within formerly united revolutionary coalitions. These divisions are centered around the challenge of the crowd, for only the construction of a manifestation of the people which can claim to represent the people better than the unmediated crowd – by accessing their truer, better selves whose voice speaks to the common good – can preserve the fragile prize of popular sovereignty past the conclusion of the revolutionary experience. In order for the people to rule themselves despite the presence of government, the people must not be identified solely with the crowd. The task of chapter one is to further explain this framework and to show how it builds upon theoretical arguments from the past century regarding the possibility and/or necessity of “permanent revolution.” With this theoretical framework in place, I will proceed, in the second and third chapters, to an examination of the American and Russian cases in depth, utilizing the insights provided by the perspective of the challenge of the crowd to break down these post-revolutionary conflicts and isolate their fundamental divergences. There are several reasons that the American and Russian revolutions are useful cases upon which to draw. Each is complex, well-studied, and well-documented, and they are both similar enough in certain ways and different enough in others to be able to inform one another. With regard to chronology, the role played by poverty, 5 and the use of terror, the American and Russian revolutions form opposite ends of the spectrum of "great revolutions" of the modern age (America, France, Russia -- the triad of oft-cited convulsions). This makes the fact that they share the problem of the crowd all the more striking, and challenges the notion that the dilemmas and failures of either (such as Stalinist terror or slavery) were caused by purely unique historical factors or that either case can provide a neat paradigm for success.2 But despite their differences, the two cases are nevertheless members of the same continuum, often discussed in relation to the French Revolution which they surrounded or as indicative of the character of the modern age. Moreover, these two revolutions are important in themselves. They mark the attempted instantiation of the two ideologies whose clashing paradigms helped define the twentieth century, and the primary tests of these ideologies against the realities of political life. Conclusions regarding these cases not only raise important questions for more general research, but are also relevant simply because the American and Russian Revolutions are well worth studying on their own. In the second and third chapters, I will utilize the framework of the challenge of the crowd to analyze the arguments, conflicts, and disputes that arose in the post-revolutionary days, months, and years in both nations. In chapter two, I will accentuate the stark differences in approach to the institutionalization of the popular voice that were inspired by the common challenge of the crowd. In the first half of the chapter, I will take on the ratification-era positions of the Federalists and Anti-Federalists, casting their distinct conceptions of the purpose of representation as grappling with the location of the general good within a mutable popular voice. While the Anti-Federalists focused upon the derivation of the general good from immersion 2 Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution, to take a prominent example, focuses upon the American and French Revolutions and views the Russian Revolution almost entirely as an extension of France’s mistakes. For Arendt, the American Revolution held unique promise that was almost entirely lost to history. See Arendt, On Revolution, 7, 13-4, 34-48, 51- 66, 69, 82-5, 90-1, 98-9, 123-31, 138-40, 148, 171-6, 186-8, 207, 209-10, 213, 252-3. 6 within a homogeneous community, Federalists instead saw the general good as arising only from wisdom