The United States of America, as a political organization, was undoubtedly created by a revolution, which found its expression in the Declaration of Independence of 1776. The experience of revolution is therefore one which Americans share with others. In a book devoted to comparative history it is important to try to see the American Revolution in a comparative light, assessing both resemblances and differences between it and other revolutions, and the effects it may have had on revolutionary developments in other parts of the world.

The task is not easy. Nor is it new, for Americans have been concerned with their special relationship to the rest of the world from the time of the Revolution itself, and indeed since the first settlement of the country. Europeans, and others also, have found much in the American experience to illuminate their own. But though old, the question has its relevancy today, when some see the United States as the great conservative power opposed to twentieth-century revolutions, while others, such as Senator Robert Kennedy of New York, believed that the American revolutionary example should be carried to Latin America and elsewhere. It may be added that what is called the "Negro revolution" in the United States today--that is, the struggle for equality for American citizens of whatever race--may be seen as a contemporary manifestation of principles deriving from the American Revolution.

There are many possible views. Some have thought that there was really no revolution in America at all, in any modern sense of the word, but only a successful war of independence, which removed British control but left the country internally much the same. Closely related is the idea that the American revolt was really a conservative movement, to protect old liberties against novel demands by Great Britain, somewhat like the revolt of the Belgian estates in 1789 against the attempted reforms of the Emperor Joseph II. This idea, which later found favor in conservative circles in the United States, appeared in Europe as early as the 1790's, when Friedrich Gentz, for example, praised the conservatism of the American Revolution in order to attack the French. Other European conservatives of the time, however, for example the Abbé Barruel, insisted that the French Revolution had been anticipated in America. It was in America, said Barruel, that a "sect" of secret revolutionaries had first announced "its code of equality, liberty, and sovereignty of the people." Though no one now agrees with Barruel's conspiratorial theory of the Revolution, he nevertheless shared in a third view, indeed the classic view, common to persons of both conservative and liberal inclination, that the American Revolution was the first episode in a long revolutionary period extending from about 1770 through the European revolutions of 1848, and principally marked by the great French Revolution of 1789. Within this view many nuances exist, depending on how much one wishes to stress similarities or national differences. George Lefebvre, the eminent French historian, thought that the American Revolution had more in common with the English revolution of the seventeenth century than with the French, believing that the Anglo-Saxon revolutions, as he called them, were primarily concerned with liberty, while the French Revolution aimed most especially at equality. While the idea of equality took on a far wider range of meanings in the French Revolution, it seems certain that Lefebvre greatly underestimated its importance in America. For Alexis de Tocqueville, writing his Democracy in America America in the 1830's, the United States offered the world's leading example of "equality," though it is true that Tocqueville did not relate his observation to the American Revolution.

The various revolutions up to 1848, including the American, and that of England in the seventeenth century, have sometimes been put together as the "bourgeois revolution," a view congenial to Marxists but not limited to them, and one in which everything depends on what is meant by the "bourgeoisie." Since, in brief, the English revolution was an affair of fairly aristocratic landowners, the American of small farmers, planters, and country lawyers, and the French of a large composite urban middle class reinforced by peasants and workers, with occasional nobles and priests, the conception of a bourgeoisie must for this purpose become excessively generalized, and signify hardly more than persons who possessed or aspired to possess private property, in land or in goods, in amounts either very large or very small. Indeed, strong emphasis on the concept of a "bourgeois revolution" is likely to imply a future stage of development in which the bourgeoisie is to be succeeded by a new dominant group, with private property in income-producing goods abolished. Such came to be the message of revolutionary or Marxist socialism in Europe after the mid-nineteenth century. In the rise of this movement, the American Revolution was of little significance. There has been little affinity between the American Revolution and the Russian Revolution as it developed after 1917, or the Chinese Revolution as it developed after World War II.

There is another category of revolutions, those aiming at national independence, in which the American Revolution is seen as a precedent, since, whatever else it may also have been, it was clearly a struggle for independence against Great Britain. In general, such revolutionary movements ran their course in Latin America through the nineteenth century, and in Europe through the close of World War I, producing such newly independent states as Czechoslovakia and Ireland. They have been in progress since that time in Africa and Asia, in the form of resistance to the European colonial rule. The leaders of such movements of national independence have often looked to the American Revolution as an example to follow, and have characteristically been befriended by the government of the United States. The situation becomes confused when movements of national independence take on a strong social character, and are directed against foreign capitalism, foreign economic control, or foreign ideas, influence, or privileges, as in the Mexican Revolution after 1910, the Cuban Revolution since 1959, and indeed in the Russian and Chinese revolutions also. The extreme of aggressive xenophobia, with doctrinaire rejection of Western civilization, individual liberty, representative government, and even of reason itself, as in the National Socialist movement in Germany, has nothing in common with the American or any other eighteenth-century revolution.

Let us consider at greater length only two matters suggested by the preceding survey: first, the relationship of the American Revolution to the French and European revolutions of almost two hundred years ago; and second, the relationship of the American Revolution, whether in resemblance or by contrast, to the anticolonialist revolutionary disturbances in the AsianAfrican-Latin American world in recent times.

As for the first, the view taken here is a form of what has already been called the "classical" interpretation. There was one great revolutionary period from about 1770 to 1848; this was the European revolution or revolution of Western civilization. The American Revolution was part of this process, was indeed the opening movements of this general European or "Atlantic" phenomenon. On the other hand, the American Revolution was directed against Europe--Europe as a whole, and not merely Great Britain. Hence it has a positive significance for anticolonialist revolutionaries today, who are fundamentally antiEuropean, and can with some justice see the American Revolution as the opening movement of their revolution also. But in both cases we run into difficulties and paradoxes. The American Revolution of 1776 was different from the French Revolution of 1789, if only because Americans were not Europeans. But it is different also from later anti-colonial and anti-European movements because the Americans are, after all, a species of Europeans--the "colony of all Europe" as Thomas Paine said in 1776, the "daughter of Europe," as General Charles de Gaulle remarked in 1965.

Similarities between the revolutions in America and in Europe in the eighteenth century are impossible to deny. It is idle to pretend that the uprising in America was not truly revolutionary, or to see it as primarily a conservative protest. The Americans rebelled against the legal authority of the British crown and Parliament, they passed from more moderate to more radical stages, reaching the point of armed conflict and a secession from the British empire which many Americans were unwilling to accept, so that the war of independence was at the same time a civil or revolutionary struggle between native Americans, in the course of which, as a few years later in France, there was a good deal of intimidation, if not actual "terror," emigration of tens of thousands who remained loyal to Britain, and confiscation of the property of these political émigrés. Victorious after a long struggle, thanks to the intervention of France, the revolutionary Americans set up new governments according to new principles, and to a large extent operated by new men, of a kind who could not have achieved prominence had the colonies remained British. This is true not only of such notables as George Washington or John Adams. A study has recently been made of men who sat in legislatures of the colonies just before independence, and of the corresponding states just after, according to the classifications of "wealthy," "well-to-do," and "moderate." In New York, New Jersey, and New Hampshire, between 1770 and 1784, the proportion called "moderate"--i.e., in wealth, not opinion--rose from 17 to 62 per cent, with corresponding loss of the "wealthy" and "well-to-do." Even in the South the "wealthy" lost their predominance in the legislatures. When classified by occupation, the proportion of merchants and lawyers greatly declined, whereas the proportion of farmers doubled. In short, the revolt in America meets the external criteria of a true revolution and of a revolution in a democratic direction, since it was a former upper or "aristocratic" class that was displaced.

It is in principles, purposes, and ideas, or what may be called "ideology," that the resemblance between the American and the French or European revolutions is most evident. On the plane of actual politics, the modern doctrines of liberty and equality, or natural rights and the sovereignty of the people, were first proclaimed by the American Revolution. The Declaration of Independence, as is well known, announced that "all men are created equal," with an equal right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." There has been much discussion of what Jefferson meant by inserting "happiness" into this document; the Americans had not really been "unhappy" under British rule, and "happiness" makes a vague political program; but all students of the eighteenth century will recognize that "happiness," le bonheur, la félicité publique, was a common idea of the European Enlightenment. It was the revolutionary belief that men may take action to improve their conditions of life, even against the established authorities of law, state, church, or society--as St.-Just remarked a few years later, at the height of the French Revolution, "Happiness is a new idea in Europe." The Declaration of Independence went on to assert that government exists only to protect the rights thus affirmed, and that when government failed in this function, the people "may alter or abolish it." They might then "institute new government" as they chose. This is a pure formula of revolution.

As a matter of fact, it was not the Declaration of Independence which first attracted attention in Europe, or which best illustrates the resemblances in ideas between America and Europe at the time. A complaint by disaffected provincials against the king of England, rehearsing his real and alleged misdoings, however adorned with familiar eighteenth-century generalizations, could have little universal appeal. The connection between the American and European revolutions is more apparent in the constructive part of the American program, the way in which the Americans "instituted new government." They instituted it, or "constituted" it, first of all in each of the thirteen states, each of which received a new written constitution (except that in Connecticut and Rhode Island the colonial charters were retained, being virtually republican anyway), and then by establishing the federal union with the Constitution written in Philadelphia in 1787, which, as amended, remains the Constitution of the United States today. For this purpose, at the state and federal levels, the Americans devised the mechanism of a special convention or constituent assembly, which was held to exercise the sovereign power of the people, and which characteristically did two things. First, it issued a declaration of rights, listing the "rights of man" in a series of numbered articles, and setting limits beyond which the powers of government could not go. Second, it produced a written constitution, one short single document, by which the people were supposed to create a government for themselves, all public power was held to be merely a revocable and delegated authority (as in the Social Contract of Rousseau), various political bodies and offices were defined, and the executive, legislative, and judicial powers were separated and balanced, so that abuse of government, despotism, or dictatorship might be prevented. The American constitutions and declarations of rights gave a practical embodiment to ideas of political liberty and legal equality, to the principle of representation by numbers rather than by classes or corporate groups, the rejection of hereditary office and privileged status, the opening of careers to merit rather than birth, and the separation of state and church, or at least of citizenship from religious affiliation.

This machinery and these ideas--the constituent convention, the declaration of rights, the written constitution, the separation of powers, the new basis for political representation, the equality of rights, the career open to talent, the separation of church and state--soon became common to the great European or "Atlantic" revolution, from the French Constituent Assembly of 1789 and the French Convention of 1792, through the new regimes in Holland, Switzerland, and Italy--that is, the Batavian, Helvetic, Cisalpine, and other republics that arose during the wars of the 1790's--to the French Constituent Assembly of 1848, the German Frankfurt Parliament, and other European developments of that same year.

Yet the American Revolution was very different from the European, and especially the French Revolution, for the good reason that America in the eighteenth century was a very different kind of country from Europe, more so than it is today. The astonishing thing is that any parallel in political behavior or ideology could exist at all. In the Thirteen Colonies, at the time of their revolution, there was no feudalism, no seigneurial or manorial system, and no peasantry--for the mobile and property-owning American farmers were hardly peasants. There were no lords or nobility, no magnificent and privileged church, and one might almost say no monarchy, though the distant king and his agents were long respected. Before the troubles with England the Americans lived virtually without problems of taxation, civil service, armed forces, or foreign policy. There were no craft gilds or other medieval economic survivals. The Americans had no developed capitalism, as in Europe, no banks, no corporations or trading companies, no great wealth, and no extreme poverty. The exceptions were the Negro slaves, who were numerous in the South but played no political role (except to give importance to their owners) and whose very existence accentuated the difference between the two continents. There were no large cities and no significant network of roads. There were a handful of small colleges but no universities; and although many Americans, such as Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson, were well read and well informed, there was in truth no intellectual class. Almost no books were written in America; the book trade was part of the import trade from England. There was as yet hardly any distinctive national culture or political unity. How could such a country give lessons to Europe, or even share in European ideas?

The answer, of course, is that for many revolutionary developments in Europe, America offered no parallel. It is obvious that the French Revolution was a vaster and more profound social upheaval, involving more violent conflict between classes, more radical reorganization of government and society, more farreaching redefinition of marriage, property, and civil law as well as of organs of public authority, more redistribution of wealth and income, more fears on the part of the rich and more demands from the poor, more sensational repercussions in other countries, more crises of counterrevolution, war, and invasion, and more drastic or emergency measures, as in the Reign of Terror. From very early in the French Revolution the American Revolution came to seem very moderate. Thomas Jefferson, who was then in France, feared that the French were going to dangerous extremes as early as June 1789. For the advanced democratic leaders of France and Europe, from 1789 or 1793 down through the nineteenth century, the Americans seemed "Girondist" or "federalist." They failed to see the need of a powerful, enterprising, centralized, unitary, democratic state as a means not only of carrying on war but of reducing inequalities against strong opposition. Only in our own time, as the federal government intervenes locally, to protect the rights of Negroes, or to assure more equality in such matters as schools and highways, are Americans learning what has long been known to Europeans.

Yet the parallels between the American and European revolutions, as already indicated, remain. Apart from the fact of rebellion itself against an older authority, the parallels have mostly to do with constitutional principles, and with the essentially ethical goals summed up in the ideas of liberty and equality. At this level there was undeniably a transatlantic ideology common to the revolutionary era of Western civilization. The Americans thought like Europeans because they were transplanted Europeans. Their only culture was an English and European culture, modified and diluted by the experience of living in a new and simpler environment. They drew their ideas from the same sources as Europeans, from their own experience in affairs, from their churches in part, and from Greek and Latin classics read in school, from Cicero and Plutarch, from Livy and Tacitus, and from the modern philosophers of natural law, such as Grotius, Pufendorf, and John Locke. Social conditions, social structures, problems, and grievances were very different on the two sides of the Atlantic. But a political philosophy is not merely the product of specific social conditions, or an instrument devised to meet immediate practical needs. There are many kinds of restraints from which a desire for liberty may arise, and many kinds of inequalities or injustices from which equality may be made an ideal. Different though the circumstances were, the American Revolution could announce a revolutionary program for Europe.

But it is at the highest level, that of abstract ideas, that the American Revolution has something to say to the anticolonialists of the twentieth century, as to European revolutionaries at the time of the great revolution in France. The Americans justified their independence by the grandeur and universality of a revolutionary message. The idea that peoples should choose their own government, and determine the forms and powers of this government by constituent assemblies, is not yet exhausted. The old eighteenth-century "rights of man," though much criticized by philosophers from that day to this, and now known more tamely as "human rights," are still very much alive. As a matter of fact, a more lucid and balanced statement of these rights was given in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789. Some of the first American state constitutions likewise expressed the idea in more definite form. But for the belief that all men are "created equal," and have an equal right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, whose protection is the function of good government, we still turn, with good reason, to the American Declaration of Independence.