Consolidation and the Problem of Legitimacy

Arendt, in addressing the American Revolution and its successful consolidation, cannot avoid the vexing question of how a revolution, which by its nature was illegitimate, resulted in a political system that was both stable and legitimate.

To confront this in her study of the American Revolution, Arendt relies not very convincingly on traditional social contract theory and argues for a continu­ous line of legitimacy from the Mayflower Compact to the US Constitution.^[219] For her, the Mayflower Compact is a social contract arising from a group of ship's passengers thrown into a state of nature as their ship arrived at a vast wilderness.

Yet, in revolutionary America, the entirely new and unprecedented constitution-making that began in 1776 was everywhere accepted as the legiti­mate means of consolidating the revolution. ‘By 1776 the idea of a constitution... had almost achieved the status of self-evident truth. That these new constitutions were formulated in writing evoked neither resistance nor amazement at such a novelty.'^[221] Arendt appreciates this astonishing constitution-making, but she seems to presume that because the people had a revolutionary (but not yet a legal) right to do so, they had the ability to do so. She does not satisfactorily account, in these terms, for either the success of American constitutions in consolidating the revo­lution or the failure of the French revolutionary constitutions to do so. The French accepted, as did the Americans, such notions as popular sovereignty, natural law and the social compact, but these failed to give legitimacy to the revolutionary governments in France, constitutional or not, none of which overcame the need for both the rhetoric and the acts of violence.

The unique success of the American Revolution and especially the absence of systemic violence (which so impressed Arendt) ‘cannot be fully explained by the theoretical insights' of the founders, who were ‘preoccupied by the absence of an absolute authority capable of legitimizing the legal foundations of the new republic’.^[222] This is where Arendt relies on her concept of foundation, the establish­ment of a body politic comprising communities of free people.

The problem is that Arendt's concepts, at least as applied to the American Revolution, seem, to use James Miller's term, almost ‘magical'.^[224] True to her theory of action and foundation, but not true to the history of the American Revolution (Arendt's treatment of which Miller somewhat harshly calls ‘shoddy'),^[225] Arendt marvels at how the American founders came together to found an enduring, stable and legitimate republic; that is, they uniquely consolidated a revolution. She assertively if vaguely attributes the broad acceptance of the new constitutions by the people to the ‘organizational impulses of the people themselves'.^[226] Here she seems to rely on her concept of spontaneous councils that she believed arise during revolutions. However, she pays little attention to any purported role they may have played in the American Revolution, where much of the activity occurred in duly elected and organised legislatures and conventions on the one hand, and in already-established and constituted town meetings on the other, and not in any spontaneously appearing councils.

The closest the Americans came to any such revolutionary councils were the committees of correspondence that the colonies established in 1773, originally proposed by John Adams for Massachusetts but adopted everywhere. The commit­tees were the colonies' first form of governance that functioned independently of royal authority. The last royal governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson, later lamented that independence began with the creation of these committees, calling them ‘a most glaring attempt to alter the constitution of the colonies... It was an act which ought to have been considered as an avowal of independency'.^[227] It is surpris­ing, then, that Arendt nowhere mentions the committees of correspondence.

Arendt inadequately addresses the difficult question of the consolidation of the revolution in America and does not account for the legitimation that consolida­tion inevitably required in that, or in any, revolution. We must look at this question of legitimation. Yet, the concept of legitimacy has not been addressed with much success, being neither clearly defined nor related convincingly to political activity, nor much studied empirically. Some 40 years ago, two students of the subject said that ‘the nature and underpinnings of legitimacy are among the most neglected aspects of the dynamics of society',^[228] and this has changed little since. Whatever the nature of legitimacy, it includes centrally the related elements of consent and perception. An act by those in power must be seen as having arisen from already- established and consented-to communal norms.^[229]

It was the early constitution-making of 1776 to 1780, all observers includ­ing Arendt agree, that effectively consolidated the revolution and provided its legitimacy and stability. But what was it about what Arendt calls ‘this spontaneous outbreak of constitution-making in all thirteen colonies... so that there existed no gap, no hiatus, hardly a breathing spell between the war of liberation... and the constitution of the new states'^[230] that made these early written state constitutions so immediately and broadly perceived as legitimate? While the unprecedented constitution-writing was spontaneous, the documents were framed on the author­ity of the Continental Congress by formally elected representatives who, with the rejection of the monarchy, saw themselves as sovereign. Popular sovereignty was a necessary but by no means sufficient element of legitimacy, partly, as Gordon Wood and others have shown, because there was widespread disagreement in the revolutionary era as to what this meant in practice, ranging from mob rule to duly elected legislatures and conventions.^[231]

For Arendt, ‘the legitimacy of rule in general, and the authority of secular law and power in particular had [before the modern era] always been justified by relat­ing them to an absolute source not of this world’.

While Arendt does not directly offer sufficient explanation, I believe that else­where in her thought, she does provide the basis for elucidating the successful consolidation of the American Revolution.

III.