The Unexpected Revolution

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. C. D. Clark
Keyword(s):  
American Revolution ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Frame Of Reference ◽  
Rights Theories ◽  
New View ◽  
The Revolution

Chapter 4 offers a new view of the American Revolution in terms more of negations than of affirmations: not the instantiation of modernizing natural rights theories or republicanism, but the result of older and passionate negations on both sides of the Atlantic, often religious. It reinterprets Paine’s Common Sense against the older contexts proposed in this book, and argues that the pamphlet, although important, was not transformative and ubiquitous. It traces Paine’s subsequent writings while in America, responding to and interpreting the course of the Revolution, and concludes that Paine’s understanding of that important episode was less than has been thought; rather, he largely remained within an English frame of reference, as did, indeed, most American colonists. He understood the American Revolution, then, in English terms.

scholarly journals Utopiens grænser i Den amerikanske revolution

2010 ◽  
Vol 25 (64) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mikkel Birk Jespersen
Keyword(s):  
American Revolution ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
The Political ◽  
American Farmer ◽  
Political Logic ◽  
The Revolution

Mikkel Birk Jespersen: "Utopiens grænser i Den amerikanske revolution - Om utopiske tekststrategier i Common Sense og Letters from an American Farmer"AbstractMikkel Birk Jespersen: “Boundaries of Utopia in the American Revolution: On Utopian Text Strategies in Common Sense and Letters from an American Farmer”The article discusses the relations between utopia, literature and revolution in the American Revolution through an analysis of Tom Paine’s Common Sense (1776) and J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782). It is arguedthat utopia constitutes a textual function whose ‘non-place’ or ‘point zero’ is not reducible to a political logic, but rather presents a challenge to it. In the revolution, however, the different logics of utopia and of the political can be said to confront each other, hereby illuminating the contradictions of both. The constellation of the two texts brings out the contradictory nature of utopia, as the texts have opposed approaches to the revolution and are characterised by two different utopian logics.

The Religious Conspiracy Theory of the American Revolution: Anglican Motive

1976 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 277-292 ◽  
Author(s):  
William M. Hogue
Keyword(s):  
American Revolution ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Conspiracy Theory ◽  
American Religion ◽  
Declaration Of Independence ◽  
Religious Dimension ◽  
The Revolution

The historian of American religion seeking to establish the relevance of his specialty to the event of 1776 labors under something of a handicap, a disability epitomized in the cold silence about religion in those documents which have become the secular scriptures of the nation's political faith. Neither the official justification for the Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, nor the popular contemporaneous one, Paine's Common Sense, accords the remotest of influences to formal religion. If the Revolution had a religious dimension, evidence for it must be sought elsewhere. Both the exegete, hoping to throw new light upon old truth, and the skeptic, to whom a received dogma is a standing challenge, have perforce turned to the antiquarian's shelves, stuffed with the literary remains of a pamphleteering age.

“THE POWER OF FEELING”? EMOTION, SENSIBILITY, AND THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

2011 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 659-672 ◽  
Author(s):  
SARAH M. S. PEARSALL
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
American History ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Thomas Paine ◽  
Emotional Culture ◽  
Expression Of Emotion ◽  
The Revolution

In January 1776, Thomas Paine demanded to know whether “the Power of feeling” did not require that American colonists declare independence from Great Britain. Paine's efforts included an appeal to “common sense,” to the idea that it was only natural for colonists to end their ties with Britain. For Paine, independence did not depend on elaborately wrought arguments; instead, it should be obvious to all, even the most unlettered. His own emotionally charged language—the king was akin to a “crowned ruffian” descended from “a French Bastard landing with an armed Banditti”—sought to stir even those who still longed for reconciliation to “examine the passions and feelings of mankind” and to throw off the yoke of oppression. Paine's formulations, like these two books, raise numerous questions. How significant has the expression of emotion been in American history? How far can scholars go in attributing to it sufficient momentum to effect major historical change? Can something so universal be harnessed into nationalist political trajectories? Should America be seen as having a unique emotional culture in the eighteenth century? Did this exceptional culture of feeling contribute to the Revolution itself? These two authors answer yes to the last three questions, thus prompting re-evaluation of the “power of feeling” in the American Revolution itself.

Rights of Man, Common Sense, and Other Political Writings

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Paine
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Common Sense ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Thomas Paine ◽  
Annotated Edition ◽  
The People ◽  
The World

‘An army of principles will penetrate where an army of soldiers cannot . . . it will march on the horizon of the world and it will conquer.’ Thomas Paine was the first international revolutionary. His Common Sense (1776) was the most widely read pamphlet of the American Revolution; his Rights of Man (1791-2) was the most famous defence of the French Revolution and sent out a clarion call for revolution throughout the world. He paid the price for his principles: he was outlawed in Britain, narrowly escaped execution in France, and was villified as an atheist and a Jacobin on his return to America. Paine loathed the unnatural inequalities fostered by the hereditary and monarchical systems. He believed that government must be by and for the people and must limit itself to the protection of their natural rights. But he was not a libertarian: from a commitment to natural rights he generated one of the first blueprints for a welfare state, combining a liberal order of civil rights with egalitarian constraints. This collection brings together Paine's most powerful political writings from the American and French revolutions in the first fully annotated edition of these works.

Conclusion: Legal and Constitutional Legacies

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
William E. Nelson
Keyword(s):  
American Revolution ◽  
Constitutional Change ◽  
War Of Independence ◽  
Military Life ◽  
American States ◽  
Historical Literature ◽  
British Military ◽  
Reign Of Terror ◽  
Property Destruction ◽  
The Revolution

The conclusion makes two arguments. First, it takes the position common in the historical literature that the American Revolution was a comparatively placid one, with few killings of civilians, little property destruction, and no reign of terror. It argues that the placidity was a consequence of legal continuity—the same courts, judges, and juries that had governed the colonies in 1770 in large part continued to govern the new American states in 1780. During the course of the War of Independence itself, legal and constitutional change occurred almost entirely at the top, and, except in the few places occupied by the British military, life went on largely as it always had. The conclusion also argues that old ideas of unwritten constitutionalism persisted during and after the Revolution, but that a new idea that constitutions should be written to avoid ambiguity emerged beside the old ideas.

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