The Essayist #20: The Right of Revolution

An oppressed people are authorized, whenever they can, to rise and break their fetters.
-Henry Clay

Every revolution contains within it something of evil.
-Edmund Burke

       With which of these two elegant quotations would the average person agree? The difficulty of the question becomes more apparent the longer it is considered. In the West, where the American and the French Revolutions constitute the birth-cries of the modern age, we feel an obligation to assent to the former. Yet any serious study of the French, Russian, or even the American Revolutions will compel us to give at least credence to the latter. We may shrug it off by retorting that revolutions are not made with rose-water, but this is the more persuasive with the understanding that whatever revolution we live under need not be repeated and will not be undone. In other words, we may ignore the blood of our birth so long as we need not be born again.
       But is revolution permanence? Have we established political structures so rooted in truth as to be past changing? To an extent, democracy is justified on answering, “yes” to this question: when the people rule, they need not revolt. But it is hardly a novelty to point out that majority rule can be tyrannical; James Madison pointed this out repeatedly. And if a majoritarian tyranny comes into existence, a revolution could surely be justified in destroying that democracy. Couldn’t it?
       Or could it?
       This essay will argue that every political system exists not for its own sake, but to protect a certain value that its framers held as essential to justice and order. This may seem obvious, but consider again its implications with regard to our current and beloved political ideal: democracy is not an end in itself, but a means to protect society. If it fails in that end, it may be reformed, altered, or even destroyed. No system of government is absolute; every state has an escape clause.

I. Serve the King of Babylon That You May Live

For failing to serve Yahweh your God in the joy and happiness that come from an abundance of all things, you will submit to the enemies that Yahweh will send against you, in hunger, thirst, nakedness, utter destitution. He will put an iron yoke on your neck until you perish.
-Deuteronomy 28:47-48

       Whenever the concept of Divine Right of Kings is discussed, it never fails to draw a modicum of contempt. And naturally so: we live in a society that self-consciously threw off the idea that Kings are sacred deputies of God. Our modern, Enlightened conception of the meaning and purpose of the state depends on this rejection.
       Nor is their anything specifically Biblical to absolute monarchy: although kings were the most common magistrates and religious leaders of the ancient world,(1) the Israelite demand for a monarchy is considered something of a backslide by the Old Testament. Prior to this, Israel was governed by a kind of tribal judiciary backed by the Levite priesthood. But when the monarchy is established, it too is sanctified, most notably by God’s relationship with David, to whom God promises an everlasting dynasty.
       Indeed, the Bible’s most persistent theme with regard to politics is that politics be subverted to theology: we see this both in Christ’s political moderation and in the numerous punishments meted out to the Israelites in the Old Testament for their sins, especially the worship of false gods. In the Book of Judges, the political history of Israel is a broken record as endless as China’s Dynastic Cycle: idolatry leads to foreign dominance, foreign dominance leads to repentance, repentance leads to liberation, liberation leads to idolatry. Seen in this light, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s”(2) is little different from Jeremiah’s warning to Zedekiah, last King of Judah (3):

Thus says the Lord of Hosts, the God of Israel: It was I who made the earth, and man and beast on the face of the earth, by my great power, with my outstretched arm; and I can give them to whomever I think fit. Now I have given all these lands into the hand of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, my servant; even the beasts of the field I have given him for his use. All nations shall serve him and his son and his grandson, until the time of his land, too, shall come…Meanwhile if any nation or kingdom will not serve Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon…I will punish that nation with sword famine, and pestilence. - Jer 27:4-8

         Studious readers of the books of Kings and Chronicles will know that God exalts Nebuchadnezzar not for his own sake but to punish Israel for infidelities going back to the time of Solomon. Deuteronomy 28, quoted at the beginning of this section, warns the Israelites that this will happen, and numerous prophets repeat it, to no avail. As in the days of the tribal Judges, the worship of foreign gods leads to rule by foreign kings.
         The Biblical understanding of the Right of Revolution, the “escape clause”, may therefore be stated thusly: God ordains a just ordering for society; He writes upon the hearts of the people and the tablets of the Law the social structure that He desires for them. Those who violated the structure of society are not just criminals; they provoke the wrath of God, who intervenes in His own good time to restore the balance.
        Note that these violators include the great and powerful themselves: Kings, foreigners and Pharisees alike all draw wrath from sanctioned rebels running from David to Elijah to the Maccabees to Jesus. When the state is obliged to serve God, rebelling against a sinful state is not merely permissible but an obligation, and though victory may not be granted to a particular revolutionary, final triumph is inevitable, and great is the reward of those who hunger for righteousness.(4)
       The Medieval conception of the state followed the Biblical: Kings were ordained and anointed by God; to harm one was to provoke Him. Shakespeare’s History plays, telling the story of the Kings of England from Richard II to Henry VIII, are sometimes cited as one long morality play on this theme: the murder of the former by the seditious Bolingbroke results in a century of rebellion and butchery culminating in the nigh-Satanic reign of Richard III and the establishment of the Tudor dynasty as God’s new champions.(5)
       Nor did it escape the medieval understanding that wicked kings would provoke Divine revolution as surely as rebellion against good ones would. The long history of papal intervention in temporal affairs will testify to this. Papal use of excommunication and interdict, which denied the sacraments to an unruly lord and all his subjects respectively, carried with them the implicit right of said subjects to rebel against their lord and establish a government sanctioned by Rome. Though the Catholic Church may have given support to the feudal system, it was never an unqualified support, and the struggle to determine whether Church or State had Law on its side never entirely ended throughout the medieval period.(6)
       By the same token, both the Inquisition and the various heresies which brought it into being were motivated by the desire to undo mass sin and thus prevent it from damning Christendom in God’s eyes:

Those whom the Church dubbed heretics always believed that they were practicing what Christ had taught, even when this conflicted with what the representatives of the Church were declaring as truth. From the Church’s point of view, however, heretics were those who embraced any believe explicitly or implicitly condemned by the papacy, or who, when confronted with the evidence of their error, refused to obey the teaching of the Church and retract their own beliefs. Heretics, however genuinely their beliefs might be held, were seen as those through whom the Devil worked to undermine the faith. (7)

       In light of this, no difficulty presents itself in believing that both Waldensian heretics and Dominican inquisitors imagined themselves as the reincarnations of Biblical rebels like Elijah or John the Baptist, coming into town to remind sinful Man that the true Kingdom was at hand.(8)
       A final point: like the Bible itself, the Church had no ideological preference for monarchy as a system of government. When in 1315 the Swiss revolted against feudal overlordship and established a democratic confederacy of elected officials, not a blandishment came from Rome.(9) Given the long association of Swiss soldiers as the Pope’s formal guard, which began over a century and a half after the Confederation’s birth, it seems unlikely that the lack of a Swiss king was ever a problem.

II. When in the Course of Human Events…

I should have loved freedom, I believe, at all times, but in the times in which we live I am ready to worship it.

-Alexis de Tocqueville

       Needless to say, we no longer believe that political orders are ordained and sanctioned by God. Indeed, the right of revolution has been democratized: the people themselves define the standard of and have ultimate responsibility for the dismantling of old orders and the creating of a just order for society. So Jefferson made explicit in the Declaration of Independence:

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. (10)

       In other words, there are things above the State, and when the State violates those things, it breaks the social contract, and so may be dismissed. This is an act which may be repeated as often as is necessary to tame the State: ultimate legitimacy proceeds from the people and their natural rights, and like God, they may intervene in their own good time to restore a balance to their liking.
       Thus, although political order is no longer sanctified, it is still moralized: a just state devotes itself, like a well-kept guard dog, to the Life, Liberty, and Property of its citizen-masters. And like any dog, the state may be put down, and replaced with another; but just as killing a dog for sport or caprice is a criminal offense, to rebel against a state for any but the most serious reasons may be called treason as surely as an attempt on the life of an anointed King was, and will be punished as pitilessly.
       The surprise in all of this is that this revolution in the conception of the state was inspired, at least in part, by a religious dispute. The 17th-Century English Parliament, dominated by Puritans, that revolted against Charles I was as animated by what they deemed his crypto-Catholicism as by his levying of taxes without Parliamentary consent. (11) That this seems odd to us shows how little we understand the Puritans: their passion for self-government in secular affairs was a natural outgrowth of their determination for democratic congregations, itself a consequence of their Calvinist creed.(12) A century and a half before the French Revolution, the connection of absolute government with “prelacy” was entirely clear the Puritans,(13) and a century before George Washington presided over the Constitutional Convention, the English Bill of Rights provides most of the ideas and even the language of her American cousin.(14)
       As simple as the Natural-Rights theory of revolution is in conception, neither the Puritans nor Jefferson foresaw the difficulties of rights coming into conflict. The American Civil War was the fruition of a long debate, going back the First Congress, of whether property rights trumped the rights of property. The specifically-named Jefferson Davis,(15) when in January 1861 he resigned his Senate seat upon the secession of Mississippi, explicitly laid claim to the Revolutionary tradition in his speech announcing same:

We but tread in the paths of our fathers when we proclaim our independence and take the hazard…not in hostility to others, not to injure any section of the country, not even for our own pecuniary benefit, but from the high and solemn motive of defending and protecting the rights we inherited, and which it is our duty to transmit unshorn to our children. (16)

    Although history has tended to judge Davis and the revolution he led to be in the wrong about his ordering of property rights before human rights,(17) in 1861 the question was by no means as clear. Nor has the growing role, since 1865, of government in securing an egalitarian society, and the inevitable conflict of this with Jefferson’s understanding of liberty and property been without resistance; some would say it is at the root of our present political controversies.
    Discussion of the economic foundation of political structures brings us to Marx. His Revolution would seem, at first, to be justified on an entirely different basis from the Biblical or Jeffersonian conceptions: not as an act of supra-legal cleansing but as the natural outgrowth of the relationship between economic production and the ability of the upper class to control that production:

We see then: the means of production and exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage of development of these means of production and exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal organization of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder, they were burst asunder.

- Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

    But on second glance, this merely replaces God and Natural Rights with Economic and Historical Development; Revolution happens when the State, in its inherent conservatism, is left too far behind what the people are actually doing. The Marxist Right of Revolution, then, means the right of the lower classes to cleave violently with the past and then create a new order that reflects reality on the ground; which, we presume, will survive as long as it continues to do so.
    However, Marx believed that modern society had simplified class distinctions to merely Workers and Bosses, and when the Workers made themselves Bosses, there would be but one class, and hence no others to exploit, no economic tension, and no need for further upheaval. This represents a sharp difference with Jefferson and Deuteronomy; the Sage of Monticello believed that Revolution was a periodic and healthy thing, and the one he led by no means the last one:

What country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. (18)

    But the differences between Liberal and Socialist ideas of Revolution are many. They share with Deuteronomy the understanding that political systems may legitimately and morally be undone when they violate society’s true foundations; be these the Word of God, the Natural Rights of Man, or Social Economic Development. The State is not Master of, but Secretary to, what is true.

III. There is a Specter…

Every state is a community of some kind, and every community is established with a view to some good, for mankind always act in order to obtain what they think good.
-Aristotle, Politics Book I

       Thus does Aristotle begin, blandly as ever, his treatise on Politics. As thorough and wide-ranging as all of his surviving works, the Politics has much to say, especially in Book Five, on the subject of Revolution. And alone among our thinkers, Aristotle, though he sagaciously adduces the causes of revolution, conceive of Revolution not as a right, but rather as something of a wrong.
       In Book V of the Politics, states are organized according to some view of justice and equality. Democracies, for example, operate according to the principle that humans, equal in some respects, are equal in all, while oligarchies follow the opposite principle. Both states, according to Aristotle, are incorrect to believe so, and this is a cause of much trouble.
       However, there is no one cause of revolution for Aristotle;(19) they derive from a multitude. Foolishness comes among them; as does fear; as does change in the population of a state, be it sudden or gradual. Democracies tend to fall due to an excess of demagoguery, and become tyrannies. (20) Oligarchies tend to become victims of their own restrictions, either excluding those who consider themselves as properly belonging to the ruling group, or by the rivalry of those among the ruling group, or by rapaciously wasting the wealth of the state, and then needing to bring others in for innovations, which leads to democracy or tyranny. Monarchies and aristocracies and mixed states tend to fall for their own reasons, centering around violations of established norms that suddenly or gradually transform the state into something else.
       These states are all manifestations of the differences in various socio-economic classes; and class warfare is a constant in Aristotle as it is for Marx. And again, where they differ is in the idea that the class warfare cycle can be transcended. Because, whereas in Marx class warfare is the single force driving all things, in Aristotle the problem lies not in the classes but in how men in those classes behave. In his section on tyrannies, Aristotle points out the usual means tyrants employ to maintain themselves: to sow distrust among, take the power of, and humble their subjects. And then he suggests that the best way for a tyrant to keep power would be to act as a king acts: with restraint, moderation, and tradition. (21)
       In other words, revolutions are not a solution, but a collapse, brought about by an excess of passion and dearth of good sense. (22) Any form of government can survive, and every form of government “have a kind of justice, but, when tried against an absolute standard, they are faulty. . . “(23) There is no perfect form of government, because governments are made of, by, and for human beings, and human beings are the problem.
       Thus, while Aristotle would not disagree with the arguments of Jefferson or Marx regarding the governments they desired to destroy or set up, he might question the narrowness of their focus. He might ask Jefferson what rights the wealthy could legitimately protect that were distinct from those of the poor; if property being considered a natural right might make both the rich and the poor distrust one another. He might ask Marx why he assumes that new classes do not appear when old ones are destroyed.(24) In short, he might ask why they took some of his wisdom and left the rest.
       Aristotle’s framework for dealing with these questions was different from ours in many respects, but one way in particular: he lived in a time when revolutions were common in his culture; he had first- or second-hand experience of them. They were not world-historical apocalypses, but part of political life as he understood it, as much as the olive harvest or bad weather was. And revolutions, with all their blood and loss, were in some way just like a storm: predictable, destructive, and unsurprising.
       I conclude with my thesis intact, but with greater questions than perhaps I intended, discovering that the old master agrees and yet disagrees. I find myself wondering why the Modern West takes revolution, disorder, as its fons et origo, and what this portends. I find myself wondering why the numerous factors, and thus numerous errors, endemic to the running of a modern government have not made revolutions far more common than they are. And I wonder whether Deuteronomy was not right after all, in assuming that the origins of human activity lie in a Logic we only dimly perceive.

Notes

1. The Germanic kunig (“man of the kin”), from which we get the word “king”, was originally possessed of judicial and sacral functions, and only later identified as the leader of armies. 
2. Mk 12:17
3. Zedekiah was brother to Jeconiah, who Matthew’s Gospel lists as Christ’s ancestor. Luke prefers to give Jesus a prophetic lineage going back to David’s son Nathan rather than Solomon, the ancestor of Josiah, father of Zedekiah and Jeconiah. In any case, Jesus links both prophetic and royal authority in Israel.
4. Elijah, for example, lived to see the downfall of Ahab but not of Jezebel, because he was instead taken to Heaven in a fiery chariot for his reward (2nd Kings 2:9-12). Similarly, Jeremiah lived to see the destruction of Jerusalem by Babylon but not its restoration.
5. The fact that Shakespeare wrote the latter part of the story, the Henry VI trilogy and Richard III, when he was a struggling young playwright, the Richard II – Henry V cycle in his more “mature” period, and Henry VIII as a much later coda, casts doubts on his intending so straightforward a lesson. Nevertheless, the idea was very much part of the society he lived in, and his work cannot help but reflect it.
6. One might argue that the modern conceptions of politics merely denote the victory of the State over the Church as the true instrument of God, as Kant or Hegel might.
7. George Holmes, The Oxford History of Medieval Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 185.
8. Unlike its Spanish cousin, the early Papal Inquisition did not have established, permanent courts, but rather roving monks who set up shop in areas overrun with heresy and left when they were done, in the manner of the heroes of Western films.
9. Will Durant, The Age of Faith, Vol. 4 of The Story of Civilization, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1950), 687.
10. Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence, 1776. ME 1:29, Papers 1:429
11. Will and Ariel Durant, The Age of Reason Begins, Vol. 7 of The Story of Civilization (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1961), 208. The first two acts of the “Long Parliament” in 1640 were two impeach and imprison the King’s first minister for treason on suspicion that he was going to assemble and Irish army to “alter law and religion,” and to do the same to Archbishop Laud, the King’s Chancellor, on grounds of “popery.”
12. Ibid, 190.
13. Ibid, 219. And to Charles: Before his trial, the army leaders offered to acquit him if he would agree to the confiscation of bishop’s lands and to give up the power of the veto. He refused, saying that he had sworn to be faithful to the Church of England.
14. Act Declaring the Rights and Liberties of the Subject and Settling the Succession of the Crown, 1689, 2 Will. 3.
15. Shelby Foote, Fort Sumter to Perryville, Vol 1 of The Civil War: A Narrative (New York: Random House, 1986), 6.
16. Foote, 5.
17. Not even the most ardent admirer of the Revolutionary aspect of the Confederate States of America, or the harshest critic of Lincoln, defends the practice of human slavery; hence their determination to change the subject.
18. Thomas Jefferson to William Stephens Smith, 1787. ME 6:373, Papers 12:356
19. At the end of Book V, he criticized Plato’s Republic for being too simplistic with regard to the causes of revolution.
20. By which Aristotle means, not an oppressive government, but the government of a popular dictator. Napoleon would have, in Aristotle’s mind, been a model tyrant.
21. By the same token, he earlier suggest that monarchies fall due to an excess of power coming into the hands of the king, which tempts the king to oppression and makes his subjects suspicious.
22. Thus, Plato regarded the tyrant, of all classes of person, as the most degraded soul, because his passion was supreme and his reason feeble.
23. Aristotle Politics V.1
24. Certainly the modern West has transcended the somewhat simplistic bourgeois-proletariat split. We now have industrial & agricultural workers, and bourgeois for these, and we have public sector workers, and state bureaucrats managing while barely distinct from them, and we have the media-entertainment-intelligentsia complex, which enjoys a mutually parasitic relationship with our slowly congealing political-advocacy class. This leaves out the military, which over the course of the 20th century has become something of a culture unto itself.

 

 

 

 

Bibliography

1.    History of the Pontifical Swiss Guards. Official Vatican web page, Roman Curia, Swiss Guards, retrieved November 7, 2009.
2.    Holmes, George. The Oxford History of Medieval Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.
3.    Durant, Will. The Age of Faith, Vol. 4 of The Story of Civilization. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1950.
4.    Durant, Will and Ariel. The Age of Reason Begins, Vol. 7 of The Story of Civilization. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1961.
5.    Thomas Jefferson on Politics & Government. University of Virginia web page, retrieved November 29, 2009.
6.    Schermann, Katherine. The Merovingians: France’s Long-Haired Kings. New York: Random House, 1987.
7.     Marx, Karl. The Communist Manifesto. New York: Bantam, 1992.