Reflections on the Revolution: an Introduction

Editors’ note: “Reflections on the revolution: a symposium” examines the causes, conduct, and consequences of the American Revolution as well as the enduring pertinence of the United States’ founding ideals. Other participants include Myron Magnet, Dominic Green, Victor Davis Hanson, Wilfred M. McClay, Andrew Roberts & James Piereson.

Spoken or unspoken, all the essays on America’s semiquincentennial that follow in this special symposium conjure with the defining question of our political dispensation. The question was articulated for the ages by Alexander Hamilton in the very first of The Federalist Papers. “It has been frequently remarked,” Hamilton noted,

that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country . . . to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.

A quarter of a millennium on, that question has lost none of its pertinence. Which is to say that, astonishingly successful though the United States has been, the question that Hamilton posed was not decided once and for all with our founding documents, the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the Constitution, the virtues of which Hamilton and his Federalist coauthors James Madison and John Jay argued for in 1787–88. On the contrary, the great contest between choice and reflection, on the one hand, and accident and force, on the other, is never definitively settled.

Why? Because, as Madison said about the causes of “faction,” it is a contest that is “sown in the nature of man.” Indeed, the antiphony between force and reflection is inextricably intertwined with the reality of faction. Among other things, this implies that it is not given to human nature to enjoy permanent victories. Every triumph is provisional, every achievement tentative. This is part of what Ronald Reagan meant when he observed, in 1967, that

Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by way of inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation.