American Revolution: Rights, Representation, and Identity
American Revolutionary Ideals: A New Foundation
The American experience diverged significantly from the European concept of the ‘individual’ in relation to pre-state rights. The Revolution established a dimension rooted in natural history, justified by both predominantly European theoretical formulations of natural rights and the British historicist tradition of limited government for security purposes.
American Historicism and Individualism
In short, the American revolutionary culture of rights and freedoms was both historicist and individualistic in nature. This was possible because historicism and individualism on American soil were not as they were in the Old Continent.
- Historicism: Emancipated from the traditional British model, it supported the possibility of a written constitution, desired by the constituent body, and from this foundation, defended rights and freedoms.
- Individualism: Meanwhile, it emancipated itself from the European-continental context, where the modern state represented the highest concentration of power (imperium). It moved towards a classic British binomial of liberty and property.
The culture of the American revolutionaries was very different, even in its historicist component, from the traditional British. At the same time, the individualism and contractualism of the revolutionaries themselves differed significantly from continental Europe, particularly from that of the French Revolution.
Divergent Conceptions of Political Representation
The motherland and the colonies held two fundamentally different conceptions of political representation.
The British Perspective: Virtual Representation
For the English monarch, his behavior was completely legitimate because, by imposing taxes, he had consulted with the sole legitimate representative assembly of all Englishmen: the English Parliament. In the English Parliament, all subjects of Her Britannic Majesty were expected to feel represented, regardless of whether they exercised the right to vote.
This right, moreover, was not exercised by the American colonists, nor by many other Englishmen in the motherland. The latter, therefore, were not expected to consider Parliament a foreign authority.
The Colonial Perspective: Actual Representation
For the American colonists, such reasoning could not be convincing, precisely because it was based on a different conception of political representation. They were accustomed to considering specific representatives for the diverse interests operating in civil and economic society, within a context of great social and political fluidity and a very small distance between the political class and civil society.
The historical and social situation in which the colonists had developed their ideas about political representation was very different from the mother country, which had established a political class of a more or less aristocratic origin. This class strongly legitimized itself as capable of being recognized as representative of all subjects, indeed, all Englishmen.
The settlers could not accept being virtually represented by a Parliament like the English one, many miles away, which they had not chosen and essentially did not know. This virtual representation differed greatly from the explicit representation of their interests, which they were accustomed to through their colonial practices.