On Revolution

The dramatic difference in outcome between the French and American Revolutions stems from the fact that, in the French Revolution, the people “were neither organized nor constituted” (171). Under the old regime, where bodies such as parliaments and estates existed, their membership had been determined by hereditary privilege, “not […] mutual promises” (171), and dominated by private interests.

When the colonies won independence from the British king and parliament, the colonial governors were removed but the legislative assemblies remained, and the people still felt bound by their own various agreements. When the French revolutionists insisted that “all power resides in the people,” they conceived of power as “a ‘natural’ force whose source and origin lay outside the political realm” (171). In other words, they conflated power with violence, whereas the Americans understood power as springing from reciprocity and mutuality. The Americans also understood that although power springs from below—i.e., it derives from the citizens and their mutual promises—the people cannot also be the “higher law” that sanctions their own law-making power.

In France, by contrast, the king’s will was replaced by the people’s will, so it too was a law unto itself. In practice, this resulted in constantly-changing laws. Robespierre recognized that he needed “an ever-present transcendent source of authority” to give “some permanence and stability to the republic […] from which the laws of the new body politic could derive their legitimacy” (177). Similarly, John Adams invoked “a Supreme Being which he, too, called ‘the great Legislator of the Universe” (177).  

This impulse for seeking a transcendent source, even among secular-minded revolutionists, reflects the influence of deism in 18th-century Enlightenment thought. In deistic philosophy, there were still a Creator-God who had created the world and universe along rational and harmonious lines, but he was not a personal god who directly intervened in human affairs. In considering the notion of a transcendent authority, both Robespierre and Adams reflected the more general Enlightenment concern of seeking to order human affairs in a way that reflected the harmonious design of the universe and the supreme being that made it.  

Neither the ancient Greeks nor the Romans claimed a transcendent source of authority for their laws, because they understood laws as entirely man-made conventions, the validity of which was by definition relative rather than absolute. In the centuries since then, however, the word “law” took on a new meaning as a “commandment to which men owe obedience regardless of their consent and mutual agreements” (181) and which, therefore, does require a higher source of legitimacy. The 18th-century notion of law was thus modeled not on Roman law but on the Ten Commandments of the Hebrew Bible. Arendt suggests that Jefferson, in his famous phrase from the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” was indirectly invoking a higher authority, because “self-evident” truths are by definition pre-rational and beyond argument, like “the revealed truths of religion or the axiomatic verities of mathematics” (184).

However, Arendt argues that the Americans’ perceived need for a transcendent authority was only theoretical because the Constitution’s legitimacy in fact derived not from some quasi-religious revealed truths, but from the colonists’ mutual agreement to believe those truths. The Founding Fathers were inspired by the example of the Roman Republic, where the validity of laws derived not from a higher authority, but from a political institution: the Roman Senate. The Founders themselves located the source of authority in the judicial branch rather than the legislative, thereby keeping authority separate from power, which is vested in the legislature. The Supreme Court has the authority to engage in “a kind of continuous constitution-making” (192), but it possesses no power to enforce its decisions. The authority of Roman Senators derived from the fact that they were believed to be the heirs of the ancestors who founded Rome, whereas the Supreme Court derives its authority from the written Constitution. The common thread is that, in both cases, authority derives from the act of foundation.

The Americans were thus consciously emulating the Roman spirit by calling themselves “founding fathers.” The “reverent awe” that many Americans feel about the Constitution is rooted less in the document itself than in the memory of the act of constituting it, of “a people deliberately founding a new body politic” (196). In other words, the absolute authority for which revolutionists sought a transmundane source actually inhered “in the very act of beginning itself” (196).