A revolution to restore the old order

Eighteenth-century people were not like us with regard to change.   Modern people see change as a good thing.  Pre-modern people did not.   They viewed change negatively, or at least suspiciously.  These divergent attitudes toward change are embedded in the term “revolution,” which modern Americans use differently than did 18^th-century Americans.

By “revolution,” modern people mean a fundamental change that moves us from an old system to a new, different, and better system – in political institutions, social customs, or technology.  (See, for example, the industrial revolution, market revolution, sexual revolution, agricultural revolution, financial revolution, or AI revolution.)   “Revolution” thus means fundamental and radical change; destroying something old and replacing it with something new and better.

A diagram of a revolution therefore looks like an arrow leading from A to B, forward and upward.   But the world “revolution” comes from the word “revolve.”  A diagram of a revolution should therefore trace a circle – not a straight line from A to B, but a 360-degree movement that leads from A back to A; back to the starting point, like a revolving door or the earth’s revolution around the sun.  When the earth or a revolving door completes a revolution, it is back at the starting point once again.  A revolution is a reset; a restoration of the original setting.  

It is evident that the word “revolution” has retained its original meaning in the field of mechanics (as in the revolving door or the engine’s revolutions-per-minute) but not in the field of politics. The transformation and modernization of the word “revolution” in the realm of politics and society took place during and because of the French Revolution.  The French Revolution destroyed, burned, and beheaded the old system and created a brand-new system of government in France, with radical change in every part of public and private life – new political institutions, new leaders and power brokers, new rituals and titles, a new calendar, and new social and political practices.

And because the French Revolution was so monumental and influential all over the world, that is the image that moderns now have for what a revolution looks like.  But before the French Revolution, back in the 17^th and 18^th centuries, the term “revolution” described what it always did – not the creation of a new order, but a restoration of original order; a return to square-one, to the way things used to be.

When the English rebelled against their king in 1688, in what they called “the Glorious Revolution,” they described their rebellion as a revolution because this term conferred legitimacy on armed revolt against the lawful ruler.  The term “revolution” signaled to all that the rebels were not radical agents of change.  They were traditionalists working to restore the good old order that the king had corrupted.  The rebels of 1776 signaled the same sentiment.  They advertised it by embracing the term “American Revolution,” but also by spelling it out in diplomatic documents like the Olive Branch Petition and in their own domestic discourse: “we do not wish or desire any innovations, but only that things may be restored to, and go on in the same way as before the era of the Stamp Act, when Boston grew great, and America was happy.” [Westmoreland County Resolves, 1775]

It is evident, moreover, that the British government understood that this was the meaning and purpose of the Revolution.  When the British approached the United States Congress with a peace plan in 1778, they offered a return to the constitutional condition of 1763.  That is, they were willing to offer Americans in 1778 what they had refused to grant in 1775-76 – a restoration of the old order, before the constitutional innovations of the Sugar Act, Stamp Act, Declaratory Act, Townshend duties, Tea Act, Quebec Act, and Coercive Acts. The British concession came too late, after too much blood had been spilled, so the war continued to its happy conclusion.

Americans had tried to restore the old and good imperial order within the British Empire for a decade before the outbreak of the war, with petitions and demonstrations.  When that failed, they restored that old and good order outside the British Empire, through the first American constitution, the Articles of Confederation.  

When Americans won their independence, they wrote down (as their first constitution) the unwritten rules that they had lived by for generations under the old imperial structure.  In those good old days, the British Empire was a loose confederation of self-governing colonies; each colony governed itself but followed imperial instruction and leadership in matters of defense and foreign trade.   Under the Articles of Confederation, the United States looked quite similar to that old British Empire:  it was a loose confederation of self-governing states; each state governed itself, but followed US instruction and leadership in matters of defense and foreign trade. The first constitution, ratified at the moment of military victory, thus reflected the original purpose of the American resistance movement -- to restore the old and good imperial order, “before the era of the Stamp Act, when Boston grew great, and America was happy.”