If Radicals Ruled the World

To grasp the argument of Jonathan Israel’s sprawling new book, one hardly needs to read past the title page. Between 1775 and 1848, Americans set the world ablaze, igniting parallel revolutions in Canada, Ireland, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Poland, Cape Town, Haiti, Greece, Venezuela, Argentina, and, eventually, the rest of Spanish America. They did this, Israel maintains, by taking the radical and moderate strands of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and transforming them into the novel ideology of republicanism. The first people to make this intellectual leap, though hardly the last, Americans created “a new ground-plan for human society,” one that inspired radicals even as it repelled conservatives (8). Although its influence ebbed and flowed, the American Revolution became the “global model” for would-be revolutionaries everywhere (485). Americans occupied this exalted position because the republicanism that they created was in Israel’s telling not one ideology but two. The first was the democratic republicanism of Tom Paine, Benjamin Franklin, and, until he abandoned his radical principles after the election of 1800, Thomas Jefferson. Taking their cue from the Pennsylvania constitution of 1776, with its unicameral legislature and universal male adult franchise, democratic republicans opposed slavery, they defended freedom of speech, most favored separation of church and state, some advocated for greater equality between men and women, and a few supported steps to protect the rights of Native Americans and other indigenous peoples. Arrayed against them was the aristocratic republicanism of John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and George Washington. Aristocratic republicans were the moderates of the American Revolution. They believed in “mixed government” that would check the worst excesses of the people. They also tended to favor religious establishments, property-based voting qualifications, and protecting the rights of slave owners. The most important exemplar of moderate republicanism was the Federal Constitution of 1787, which had a quasi-monarchical executive, a judiciary whose justices served for life, and a bicameral legislature, the upper chamber of which its Federalist authors envisioned as an aristocratic counterweight to the democratic House of Representatives. It was radicals who gave the American Revolution its global appeal. Ultimately, though, moderates determined how the revolution’s ideals would be put into practice.

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