“The Rights and Nature of Man”

In comparing the American and Italian revolutions it is pertinent to note how the meaning of the word “revolution” has evolved over the centuries.  In Latin, “revolution” derives from the concept of a revolving wheel.  Just as positions on a wheel change as it rotates, so do power relationships.  

Pre-Enlightenment revolution implied returning to a prior, frequently experienced point, the replacement of one leader by a rival or rival band, sometimes conquerors from distant lands, without significant change in governing and social structures. While Athenians in the  fifth centurybce and later the Romans experimented from time to time with forums that had embryonic features of a legislature, for most of Western history the      repetitive revolution analogy applied more to a wheel rotating on a single stationary axis than one connected to axles of a cart of progress moving along bumpy, never-traversed political paths. 

Even as late as the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, the term revolution simply implied restoration of monarchical authority: the expulsion of the Stuarts and the transfer of kingly power in England to William and Mary.

The notions of progress and revolution were not fully intertwined until the eighteenth century.  What changed with the Enlightenment was greater introspection about the purpose of government and its legitimizing basis in moral, principally religious values, with growing doubts about the role of the church in governance itself.

The American Revolution was rooted in a profoundly different historical, geographic, and social setting than that of Italy or, for that matter, any other society that has undergone a modern-era revolution.  In envisioning and carving out new social structures, America had the benefit of the greatest foreign aid ever provided a people – the ideas and culture of the Enlightenment and the experiences of a diverse body of vigorous immigrants from distant lands.

With these advantages, the New World produced a forward-looking revolution that brought a new type of government into existence.   Instead of spinning to a prior condition, America’s revolution was linear, involving change-oriented and change-accommodating wheels of progressive political motion.

Our Founders were moral philosophers as well as political activists.  They rebelled against British authority to protect inalienable rights and then proceeded to structure a government to constrain the foibles of human nature.

Because concentrated authority was seen too often to have been tantalizing as well as corrupting, it was assumed that anyone entrusted with political authority was inherently vulnerable to the temptation to aggrandize power.  Accordingly, the Founders, at Madison’s insistence, followed Montesquieu and established a separation of powers model in which political authority was split between the Congress, the presidency, and the courts.  This federal system of checks and balances was then duplicated at the state level and again at both the county and city levels.

Tensions between and within branches and levels of government came to characterize the American way.  The implicit assumption was that a divided and decentralized partnership in decision making would check the hubris of over-reaching public officials.

But civic virtue in America was not intended to be simply the establishment of institutional techniques to constrain political behavior.  In the fifty-fifth of the Federalist Papers Madison noted: “As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust, so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence.”

The American government was thus founded on individual values as well as individual rights.  Church and state were separated in the sense that no church or faith would be established as the only American creed.  But citizens were expected to be guided by spiritual and humanistic instincts and values.

Government was premised on the active consent of the governed, with the right of revolution against civil authority—the right of self-determination—rooted in a higher law of conscience which was presumed both to precede and supersede the lesser, more mundane civil laws of society.  The government that eventuated was, as Lincoln later described, to be “of, by, and for the people.”

Jefferson, the wordsmith of American democracy, thus affirmed for posterity a trinity of creator-endowed rights:  “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”  The first two of these rights – “life” and “liberty” – were derived from John Locke, who had decreed a triad of natural rights – “life, liberty, and property.”  For Jefferson, the precept of private property was presumably implicit in the third, his most imaginative utterance – “pursuit of happiness” – a romantically expansive phrase borrowed from the writings of a somewhat obscure Swiss natural rights theorist, Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui.

If all men, as the Declaration of Independence asserts, are created equal, it follows that everybody can learn from somebody else.  Hence, trust could not be placed in governing arrangements where policies could exclusively be determined by a single individual or single political or social grouping.          

The linchpin of American democracy was to be the New England town meeting and the legislative assembly where everyone’s views could be taken into consideration.  Pride might be an inescapable character trait of individuals, but public decision making was to be devoid of single-minded certitude.  Democratic politics was considered to be an art anchored in the give and take of ideas elucidated by individuals with a myriad of judgments and personality quirks.   

The greatest protection against either anarchy or future revolution was thus assumed not to come from a government that could always be counted on to advance wise and successful policies, but from the respect that proceeds from the notion that the framework of democratic decision making reflects the public will.  If it doesn’t, change can be exacted through subsequent elections.  And if political structures prove inadequate or break down to the point that individual rights are not protected, further revolution may be justified.

The right to revolt inherent in the Declaration is perpetual.  It is uncoupled from stultifying notions like historical determinism, where at a final point a dictatorship of the proletariat can argue that it is the vanguard of history and thus immune to challenge.  Jeffersonian democracy contains ever present seeds of radicalism.

The Declaration was a revolutionary rather than governing document, singular in purpose.  Yet the philosophy it reflected was not intrinsically or exclusively about America.  While the abuses cited were specific to a time and place, the affirmations contained in the Declaration were deemed by the Founders to be universal in meaning and application.

Couched in the framework of individual rights, the Declaration was anti-colonial, despite being signed by and embraced by a people who themselves were colonists.

The Italian Risorgimento didn’t bear fruit until almost a full century after the American Revolution, but its philosophical underpinnings predated American revolutionary thought and the two Enlightenment thinkers who most affected it – Locke and Montesquieu.   

While Jefferson embraced Lockean natural rights theories to justify revolution and while Madison followed Montesquieu in his efforts to circumscribe post-revolutionary political power, the philosophical seer of modern Italian unification was Machiavelli.

A pragmatist whose principal concern was how to exercise power most effectively, Machiavelli longed for unification of the Italian state. His most influential treatise, the “Prince,” was a call to end foreign intervention.

For centuries the various Italian states had engaged in sustained rivalries, leaving each precariously vulnerable to foreign influence. The French, Germans, Spanish, and later the Austrians maintained rival hegemonic ambitions concerning various parts of Italy. Machiavelli thus appealed to a unique Italian spirit to overcome traditional regional rivalries. In practical power terms, he called for a single army strong enough to secure and maintain national unity.

The German-American philosopher Hannah Arendt describes Machiavelli as a “spiritual father of revolution.” She considers him seminally important because he was the first to give voice to the significance of an enduring Italian body politic and the first to visualize the rise of a purely secular state where laws and principles of action would be freed from the teachings of the church and even from widely accepted moral standards.

The values of the American Revolution were capsulated in the natural rights notion of  “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;” the ideals of the French Revolution in the call for “liberté, égalité and fraternité;” but for Machiavelli, diplomatic realism was the Italian way. “Life” for him meant security; “liberty” meant the absence of foreign domination. The individualist dimension of Machiavelli’s revolutionary creed is a nobility of spirit and character, a “virtù” that applied both to a prince and to citizens. The purpose of the renewed Italian spirit was re-acquisition of the power and glory associated with Rome of an earlier millennium.

Although revolution in a later Enlightenment sense was alien to Machiavelli, his emphasis on the question of security as a goal in itself as well as a rationalization for liberation puts him at the forefront of post-Enlightenment approaches to politics, especially so-called realist schools of thought.  Presaging Adam Smith, he understood the symbiotic connection between politics and economics.  Freedom, “vivere libero,” he argued, is a foundation for creation of wealth and power.  Principalities run by a tyrant couldn’t be as prosperous or as powerful.

For Hannah Arendt, the American Revolution was the quintessential political revolution. It was premised on the ability of individuals acting together to establish a public space of freedom. But seldom noted or at least given much weight by political scientists and philosophers is the fact that our Constitution also established a common market. It was a free trade agreement as well as a blueprint for government.

America’s earliest citizens experimented in the 1780s with a weak central government under the framework of Articles of Confederation. The arrangement proved inadequate both because of the frailty of the central governance structure and because the newly formed states proved unable to resist the temptation to seek revenue and competitive advantage by taxing commerce that emanated from other states. Inter-state taxing ended with enactment of the Constitution. Free trade in goods came to be protected as did free expression of ideas.

“Taxation without representation” was a rallying cry for the American Revolution.  But it was taxation with representation less than a decade after Lord Cornwallis surrendered to Washington that propelled creation of a common market between the newly unified states.

In political theory Locke borrowed the paradigm of a state of nature from Hobbes who had pessimistically asserted that man was so self-centered that life in a natural state tended to be “nasty, brutish, and short.” Locke, on the other hand, held a more optimistic view of human nature. He recognized self-interest was a natural instinct but believed that man was innately rational and thus capable of understanding the need to accommodate the concerns of others.  This rationality allowed for the prospect that civil society could be created by the establishment of common rules with neutral arbitration procedures.

Sharing Lockean optimism, our Founders embraced the notion that human nature had a rational dimension which allowed personal safety and economic advancement to be secured with mutual recognition of the needs and interests of others. While it was assumed that political power needed to be constrained, the Founders did not apply as deep a concern about self-aggrandizing human instincts to the economic sphere.  Greater confidence seemed to exist that the nature of competition and the ability of citizens to recognize mutual advantage would tame despotic commerce.  Protectionist concerns existed in infant manufacturing industries, but in general, free markets—wide-open opportunities in wide-open spaces—were the heart of social self-determination.

Slavery aside, equalitarian opportunity unfettered by social stratification became a corollary in the American psyche to the importance of protecting individual rights.

Machiavelli’s view of human nature was similar to Hobbes’s in the sense that he believed man was driven by passion and self-interest, but like Locke he argued that Princes or republicans could empirically find common ground, symbolized by balancing factions. While many have become discomforted with Machiavelli’s seemingly value-free advice to Princes, a number of America’s Founders, from Jefferson to Madison to Franklin appreciated his predilection for republicanism and his embrace of conflict as a positive force. 

Indeed, Machiavelli may have been the first to affirm that conflict by its nature provides an opportunity to find the right balance in human affairs.  In this philosophical context, America’s founders shared with Machiavelli an admiration for the Roman Republic, which was perceived at its highest moments to have given room to deliberate in such a way that conflict could be settled in a civil fashion.

The French Revolution of 1789 is sometimes described relative to the American Revolution as a socially impelled phenomenon precipitated by widespread poverty and class immobility. Wealth inequality, individual and regional, existed in Italy during the Risorgimento, but the unification movement was not as socially driven as the Jacobinic rebellion in France.

           France had been unified for centuries and had been bound together culturally by a common language.  Italy was less homogenous.  An Italian identity existed but so did regional antagonisms.  The German-speaking north had little empathy for the more impoverished south, and Rome in the center had both an ancient history and a Vatican-centric identity different from other Italian states. The compelling unifying factor was the populist goal of ridding the peninsula of foreign occupation.

The result of the Risorgimento might be described as: consolidation, yes; social revolution, no; anti-colonialism, yes; republicanism, advocated but deferred.  Nevertheless, despite its quasi-monarchical conclusion, the independence movement was driven by impressive intellectual republican leadership.  Camillo Benso, conte di Cavour founded a newspaper and like Thomas Paine was a polemicist of revolution.  Later he became, akin first to Hamilton and then to Madison, an effective minister of finance and successful prime minister.

Giuseppe Mazzini, likewise, was a revolutionary intellectual who had an even deeper philosophical bent.  Frequently in jail, hiding, or exile, he advocated both liberty and Italian unification.  Under the banner of “One, Independent, Free Republic,” he believed an Italian popular uprising could touch off a European-wide revolutionary movement that could eventually lead to its logical conclusion: a “United States of Europe.”  He might have relished putting on his tombstone the criticism Karl Marx leveled at him.  Mazzini’s ideas, Marx bitterly told an interviewer, represented “nothing better than the old idea of a middle-class republic.” 

While Italy is central to Western history and culture, the irony of the Risorgimento is that it may have closer parallels to Chinese dynastic history and political thought than the events of 1776 in America or 1789 in France.

Over most of the past two millennia, struggles to consolidate power in both China and Italy failed. Decentralized governance structures defied centralized authority. In Italy, regional states had unique cultural and trade identities and localism proved stronger than nationalism. In Northern Europe, symbolized by German fiefdoms, the castle had allowed land- owning nobles to defend themselves against larger arrays of forces.  By the nineteenth century, gunpowder—which had made the castle vulnerable—proved to be a friend of nationalism.  But, in Italy, more than anything else, it was the unifying desire of a people to rid themselves of hegemonic forces that proved stronger than both regional loyalties and assorted foreign influences. 

Machiavelli, for his part, was the Sun Tzu of Italy. He analyzed and opined on the practicalities of power. Despite a presumed preference for republicanism, he was a Kissinger-esque figure wielding at times personal authority as an advisor or hopeful advisor to powerful figures. In his writings he would refer in the abstract to a prince just as a geo-strategist today might refer to a president or prime minister. He understood as two controversial Italian political theorists, Mosca and Pareto, articulated three centuries later that however a government is structured there are times when only a few, even a single person, can make decisions affecting multitudes.

Machiavelli’s reasoning is sometimes considered inconsistent and the basis of both autocratic and republican governance models. In a notion echoed by Lenin in his 1902 treatise “What Is to be Done?” Machiavelli doubted the capacities of populist rebellions.  Instead, he had great admiration for singular figures credited with founding states—Moses, Lycurgus, Solon, and Romulus —and believed that successful revolutions required the concentration of authority in an extraordinary leader.  But unlike Lenin, he envisioned a strong leader yielding after the revolution to republican sentiment or, implicitly at least, to a willingness to embrace enlightened counsel.  Accordingly, a Prince might be needed to unify Italy and an advisor must deal with power arrangements as they exist.  But with Machiavelli there is little celebration of hereditary rule or the divine right of kings.    

In the eighteenth century there were, arguably, greater differences between the American colonies in everything from trade to religion to slavery than existed in the nineteenth century between Italian cities and regions. Nonetheless, while differences were understood and conflicts did occur in the New World, there was no great history of irreconcilable antagonism between the colonies. They were too sparsely populated during the revolutionary era and too far apart to rub up strenuously against each other. The inevitable separatist confrontation based on the question of whether rights extended to people of all hues of skin came a century later, coinciding with the Risorgimento.

It is said that Lincoln invited Garibaldi to fight for the North in the Civil War. While sympathetic to the abolitionist cause, the charismatic Italian general with his distinctive red shirt never donned the union blue. But in a gesture of respect, Garibaldi saw to it that one of his grandsons was named Lincoln.

In the words of the Victorian novelist and poet George Meredith the three names—Cavour, Mazzini, and Garibaldi—could be described as the Brain, Soul, and Sword of the Risorgimento.

American counterparts aren’t as clear. Madison might be considered the structural brain; Jefferson the inspirational but personally blemished soul; and Washington, of course, the sword. Whether or not the analogies are frail, these six Italian and American revolutionary leaders are soul mates. What binds them together is that all were sons of the Enlightenment. To this day it is these Enlightenment ties, more than any other, which bind Italy and America together.