Revolution on a human scale.

AuthorAckerman, Bruce
PositionMoments of Change: Transformation in American Constitutionalism

There are (at least) four ways of modeling change.

One appeals to the invisible hand: A bunch of actors, each pursuing his own interest, interacts with one another to produce an outcome that none, individually, desires or anticipates. The task is to elaborate the invisible hand processes that generate this surprising outcome--and to assess the outcome's desirability.

A second points to the visible hand of self-conscious elites. In presenting a model of elite management, the analyst eavesdrops on elite deliberations to determine and critique the way objectives are defined. She then considers the factors that facilitate and frustrate elite efforts to shape social reality, before reaching a final causal and normative assessment.(1)

A third studies the evolution of community folkways. In contrast to models of elite management, the accent is on ordinary people dealing with problems of ordinary life; in contrast to the invisible hand, the accent is on self-conscious change. In each sphere of life, existing patterns of behavior are subjected to an ongoing barrage of critical talk and experiment--countered by outraged condemnation and existential agony from those rooted in older folkways. Battered by this ongoing dialectic of reform and conservation, central norms of good behavior slowly change. The analytic task is to track the evolution of folkways (which may, of course, be different in different sub-communities) and consider how the law can and should interact with emerging patterns--supporting some, resisting others, in a dynamic interaction with social life.

And finally, there is the possibility of revolutionary transformation. This too is self-conscious, but it is the product neither of elite management nor community adaptation. The scene is dominated by mass movements mobilizing on behalf of grand ideals, and elites struggling for authority to speak in the name of their mobilized fellow citizens. The challenge is to consider the ways in which these movements succeed and fail in transforming the basic premises of the political and legal system, and to assess the legitimacy of such efforts.

I am speaking of ideal types. An adequate causal account often draws from all four models, as will thoughtful efforts at normative assessment. But since human beings are very finite creatures, they beam their searchlights of understanding selectively, giving undue emphasis to one or another mix of models. In constitutional law, the emphasis has been on the model of elite management, with a tip of the cap to evolving folkways and the workings of the invisible hand. Even as such studies go, the project has been understood in an exceptionally elitist way. The constitutional understandings of political and social leaders have been given very short shrift, as scholars pore endlessly over the opinions of nine men and women on the Supreme Court.

The crucial normative and empirical questions have all been posed from the vantage of this small group: Should the Justices seek to elaborate fundamental principles of human dignity, or maximize the general welfare, or interpret the plain meaning of the text, or content themselves with very particular and contextualized judgments? To what extent is the entire elite enterprise inconsistent with the democratic ethos of America? Do judges actually affect social reality as much as they imagine?

This focus is not inevitable, and its dominance has been the subject of endless critique(2)--most recently from the partisans of the invisible hand, who cannot comprehend how constitutional law, the Queen of the Juridical Sciences, has somehow escaped their imperial grasp.(3) We the People(4) joins this critical chorus, but: sings a different song. It aims to place the revolutionary experience of the American People at the center of constitutional thought. I do not deny that we have much to learn from the reflections of the juridical elite, the evolutions of communal folkways, and the workings of the invisible hand. But not if we isolate these forces from the ongoing efforts of the American people to mobilize their collective energies to revolutionize the foundations of their Union.

The twentieth century has not been kind to my proposal. On the level of popular consciousness, the American revolutionary tradition has been called into question by epochal historical events--most crucially, the Bolshevik power grab of 1917. As wave upon wave of revolution from abroad crashed against American interests and ideals, many began to doubt whether our "revolution" was the real thing. Perhaps the Marxists and fascists were right in claiming that theirs were the genuine article?

This question marked a big shift from the nineteenth century, when America prided itself as a revolutionary haven from the decadent empires of England and Europe. And yet, as the twentieth century moved on, only a fool would deny that America was displacing England as the great status quo power, defending the so-called Free World against the forces of revolutionary change. Were we really the same People who had won the first great colonial revolution of modern times?

The academy had its doubts. From Beard and Dunning onward, professional historians have cut their teeth by debunking the revolutionary pretensions of the Founding Federalists and Reconstruction Republicans. So, more subtly, have generations of political scientists. Their main line of disciplinary inquiry has moved from pluralism to behaviorism to public choice, but it has systematically avoided one destination: a sustained engagement with America's revolutionary origins. So too have the philosophers, whose main focus has been individual rights, not popular sovereignty.

But perhaps the time is ripe for reappraisal? Since 1989, we have increasingly recognized that "revolution" is a complicated idea, requiring a good deal of intellectual discrimination. Skepticism is certainly appropriate when hearing news of some great upheaval in a foreign land--the proud promises of a revolutionary breakthrough may well be mocked in after years by a sad relapse into bureaucratic tyranny. But we no longer suppose that all revolutionary scripts are written in Moscow. They may instead lead to a genuine rebirth of freedom. The revolutionary heroes of our time are Nelson Mandela, Vaclav Havel, and Lech Walesa--for all their human imperfections, surely the most inspiring political figures of the age.

And in its own way, this Symposium carries a similar message. Walter Dean Burnham, for example, proffers a political science that broadly confirms my view of American constitutional history as a series of "punctuated equilibria."(5) The many contributions by historians seek to enrich my statement of the crucial facts more than to refute them. Several provocative pieces move beyond the Founding, Reconstruction, and New Deal and consider how other eras of American history, and developments abroad, enlighten the model of revolutionary change developed in Transformations.

I begin with some basic ideas. If we are to recapture the centrality of the revolutionary experience in American law, we had better clarify the meaning of this much-abused term. Part I, then, is an essay in retrieval; it seeks to extract a useable concept of "revolution on a human scale" from the totalitarian aspirations of the twentieth century, and to relate this concept to a distinctive form of American constitutional practice--I call it unconventional adaptation--that is at the center of Transformations. The need for conceptual clarification became plain to me as I read the outstanding contributions to this Symposium. The commentators often made powerful points with which I completely agree--but I was sometimes surprised to learn that they supposed they were undermining, rather than confirming, my basic argument. This could happen, I became convinced, only because I had failed to clarify my organizing ideas sufficiently.

In any event, my conceptual exercise in Part I will give a distinctive spin to my concrete discussions of the Founding, Reconstruction and New Deal in Parts II, III and IV: To what extent do the Symposiasts' critical insights confirm, rather than deny, the centrality of "revolutions on a human scale" to the American experience? To what extent do they represent genuine historical disagreement with my interpretation of events?

Part V concludes with some reflections on the relationship between constitutional theory and legal practice. Is it a mistake to hope that the revisionist account presented by Transformations might ultimately change the way constitutional law is actually practiced in this country? Or is such a practical aim misguided for serious legal scholarship?

I will use the recent Clinton impeachment as a vehicle for exploring these questions.

  1. LAW AND REVOLUTION

    I have been much influenced by Hannah Arendt's essay On Revolution.(6) As she points out, classical Greek thought is thoroughly unsympathetic to the notion of sudden change. But the followers of Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed had a different idea. The Semitic religions understood these leaders as bringing something genuinely new into the world--a truth that broke time into a Before and an After, and required all true-believers to revolutionize their preexisting beliefs and practices. In contrast to the views of Plato and Aristotle, a break in time heralded a new beginning for mankind.

    Revolutions became more secular with the American and French experiences of the eighteenth century. Though it is a mistake to discount religious revivalism as a modern force, the dominant emphasis has been on the revolutionary possibilities of man-made change--with spokesmen for We the People claiming the authority to inaugurate a breakthrough in political meaning by constructing a new constitutional order. This idea, once unleashed, has been one of the great exports of the modern West, generating a host of abuses and achievements both in the world of ideas and...

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