In his new book, Michal Jan Rozbicki undertakes to bridge the
gap between the political and the cultural histories of the
American Revolution. Through a careful examination of liberty as
both the ideological axis and the central metaphor of the age, he
is able to offer a fresh model for interpreting the Revolution. By
establishing systemic linkages between the histories of the free
and the unfree, and between the factual and the symbolic, this
framework points to a fundamental reassessment of the ways we think
about the American Founding.
Rozbicki moves beyond the two dominant interpretations of
Revolutionary liberty--one assuming the Founders invested it with a
modern meaning that has in essence continued to the present day,
the other highlighting its apparent betrayal by their commitment to
inequality. Through a consistent focus on the interplay between
culture and power, Rozbicki demonstrates that liberty existed as an
intricate fusion of political practices and symbolic forms. His
deeply historicized reconstruction of its contemporary meanings
makes it clear that liberty was still understood as a set of
privileges distributed according to social rank rather than a
universal right. In fact, it was because the Founders considered
this assumption self-evident that they felt confident in
publicizing a highly liberal, symbolic narrative of equal liberty
to represent the Revolutionary endeavor. The uncontainable success
of this narrative went far beyond the circumstances that gave birth
to it because it put new cultural capital--a conceptual arsenal of
rights and freedoms--at the disposal of ordinary people as well as
political factions competing for their support, providing priceless
legitimacy to all those who would insist that its nominal
inclusiveness include them in fact.
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