I’ve long admired Gordon Wood’s The Radicalism of the American Revolution as a model of intellectual history. I have compelled numerous undergraduates to read it in a seminar called “Republics and Republicanism” which I gave for a decade with my colleague Harvey Mansfield. The book was first published in 1991, but is newly relevant to our present moment since the radicalism of the American Revolution and the American Founding in general has become in recent years a contentious topic both among progressives and conservatives.

As Wood already noted in his book, the American Revolution has long been blamed by progressives for not being radical enough. Its inspiring ideals of liberty and equality weren’t immediately applied to grant women full equality with men; slavery was not immediately abolished; and this failure set the agenda for political conflict, civil war, and social upheaval for the next century and more. Because the Revolution wasn’t radical enough, Americans were required to make moral and political progress towards a more egalitarian future.

That was in 1991. In the last few years, the progressive critique of the Revolution has become even more radical. The trangressives (as Michael Lind would like to rename them) now see the Revolution as a fraud rather than a temporary failure. The radical left today holds that the Revolution’s failure to be sufficiently radical utterly discredits it and exposes its hypocrisy and bad faith. It claims that the ideals of the Founders were always a sham, and that our nation was really founded, from its true beginning in 1619, on slavery and oppression. The ideals of the American Founding were simply a lie, a smokescreen to disguise the fact that the revolt against England was in reality a war fought to preserve slavery. The fact that this interpretation is demonstrably false has not prevented it from being widely taught in American high schools and colleges. Such is the perversity of our age.

On the other side of the political spectrum, some conservatives in our country today, whom we can label broadly as “post-liberal,” blame the American Revolution for being too radical. There are various strands of post-liberalism, to be sure, but I will mention here only two: (1) Integralism or Common Good Constitutionalism, a movement primarily among socially conservative Catholics, and (2) National Conservatism, described on the website of the movement as a project of the Edmund Burke Foundation. The main institutional base of National Conservatism seems now to be the wealthy Heritage Foundation, under the leadership of Kevin Roberts, a self-described Burkean. The leading intellectual influence on the movement, it seems, is Yoram Hazony, who describes Edmund Burke approvingly as “the anti-liberal” par excellence, and a defender of tradition and the British constitution.

Post-Liberal Conservativism

Both brands of post-liberalism blame the American Revolution for being too radical. The blame is explicit in the case of the integralists, but only implicit with National Conservatives. Let’s start with the latter.

National Conservatives trace their intellectual lineage to Edmund Burke. They are post-liberal in the sense that they oppose “a global, rules-based liberal order,” and they aspire to create “an intellectually serious alternative to the excesses of purist libertarianism.” They are quick to stipulate that they deeply revere the ideals of the Constitution. Yet it seems unlikely that Burke himself could have approved of the radically egalitarian direction taken by the children of the Revolution. This is a serious problem for neo-Burkeans if we accept, with Gordon Wood, that this egalitarianism was the natural and inevitable outcome of the Revolution’s ideals.

Burke himself, of course, had a positive horror of the egalitarian ideals of the French Revolution. As his recent biographer Richard Bourke has explained, he praised his own British nation as a country that, unlike the French, had succeeded in engrafting a dynamic commercial society onto a feudal system of rank and privilege. Burke sought to explain why the resentment, jealousy, and fear of oppression that had powered the democratic spirit in the French Revolution had (or so he hoped) failed in Britain. Burke makes no claims about the superior virtue of British aristocrats, but rather dwells on the emotions aroused by British history and traditions. He does not maintain that the British class hierarchy was just, but rather that it was legitimate and necessary. He has an almost aesthetic appreciation for the social order that led the British to accept distinctions even when the holders of rank were less than admirable men and women. All complex societies will have forms of dependence, he assumes, but successful societies moderate their forms of dependence by recognizing the moral equality of all persons. In place of illiberal forms of subjection like slavery they substitute a civilized relationship of deference and care that recognizes the mutual dependence of high and low.

Hence, for Burke, the solution to oppression is not personal autonomy or an egalitarian dissolution of the social order, but rather forming certain moral attitudes on the part of superior and inferior classes in society. Attitudes such as deference to rank and recognition of what was due to the male and female sexes were “generous” (i.e., noble rather than base). They were the product of “liberal manners” and “enlarged views” that accepted the unequal distribution of property and status as necessary for the common good and social harmony. A “noble equality” could be preserved through all the distinctions of social rank by recognizing the value of all participants to the social whole. “Authority is made gentle and submission freely given when haughtiness and servility [were] tempered by civilized manners, restraint, and due deference.” The best political society was one that balanced tradition and change, loyalty to the nation with practical reform.

These views, I submit, have little in common with the kind of early American egalitarianism described by Gordon Wood. As far as I’m aware, the tension has yet to be addressed by members of the National Conservative movement.

By contrast, the Integralists or Common Good Constitutionalists have mounted a wide-ranging and explicit critique of the American Founding and its philosophical sources. For Patrick Deneen, the group’s leading political theorist, the American Founding was based on a false individualistic anthropology coming out of Locke, which therefore led to a false idea of liberty. This bad intellectual seed eventually ripened into sickly fruit in the writings of J. S. Mill, one of Deneen’s bêtes noires.

Integralists argue more broadly that the American experiment was inherently unstable. It was an open-ended social experiment that tended to ever more uninhibited liberalism and individualism. The Founding licensed a complete separation between political power, on the one hand, and economic power and social norms on the other. Integralists hold that economic and social goals should be subordinate to political ends and regulated by judicial authority. In this way, society as a whole can be oriented towards the common good and social solidarity restored.

The kind of freedom that licenses individuals to practice radical and destructive social norms of their own choosing and to corrupt the traditions and settled ways of life of others is a false freedom. It is too radical a liberty. It is the false liberty of the transgressive left. But there is also an equally destructive, but unpolitical, liberty of the neo-liberal right.

This unpolitical liberalism has been particularly harmful in the sphere of religion, integralists argue. American religious radicals after the Founding created a form of religious life—denominationalism—inherently unable to support the state and to strengthen moral order in society. That had been the traditional role of established religions, but it was fatally undermined by the prohibition on established religion contained in the Bill of Rights. Of course, as scholars know, the First Amendment did not prohibit the several states from establishing their own religions, but the evolving understanding of the Amendment eventually established a “wall of separation” between church and state that empowered secularism and led to the undermining of American religion, which had been the chief bulwark of our common traditions and morality. American evangelical Protestantism and other forms of egalitarian religion, whose emergence is illuminatingly discussed in Gordon Wood’s book, from the integralist point of view represented a surrender of church to state.

There have been, to be sure, attempts throughout American history to bolster positive ideals by creating a civil religion from generic, non-dogmatic Protestant Christianity. Abraham Lincoln often appealed to a civil religion of this sort. The latest version of this impulse, as far as I am aware, was being encouraged by communitarians in the 1990s, following the lead of Robert Bellah. But these attempts have not been effective. Integralists hold that if government is to frame and enforce a stable moral order, as it should and must do, it has to be backed by a real religion, rooted in the actual faith of the people, not some construct of politicians and professors. (In the background here are French political theorists of the early twentieth century, who envisaged an established church backed by a monarchy; these were the theorists who coined the term integralisme to describe their position.)

Equality as understood presently in America is not an ideal that can be harmonized with the principles of ordered liberty.

Abhorring a Vacuum

The integralists have a point. Politics abhors an ideological vacuum. After the 1950s, the progressive left, which had long hated traditional Christianity as backward and an obstacle to their aspirations for radical change, was largely successful, mostly via control of public education and high culture, in dissolving the last shreds of loyalty to dogmatic traditions among the pewsitters of mainstream American religions. After a period of normless and gormless radical freedom in the ’60s and ’70s, transgressives have now harnessed the resources of cultural Marxism to produce their own religious faith, a brew of critical race theory, identity politics, post-colonialism, and gender ideology. All of these articles of wokist faith can be seen as applications of radical egalitarianism, the belief that all established hierarchies are inherently unjust, the historical product of white supremacy. With the help of French theorists of social constructivism, they radicalized the American revolutionary belief that all distinctions between persons were artificial.

The sole hierarchy transgressivists approve of is that between the enlightened and the benighted (to use Thomas Sowell’s terms). But the ultimate goal of hyper-egalitarian politics is to abolish even that hierarchy too, by converting and herding the benighted up the shining path that leads to the egalitarian Utopia. In recent years, DEI regimes have been using all the tools of seventeenth-century established churches—including catechisms in the form of mandatory sensitivity training, loyalty oaths in the form of required adherence to mission statements, suppression of free speech, censorship, informers, surveillance, and punishment, to enforce public and private acknowledgment of their neo-racist and radical anti-traditionalist credo.

This illiberal trajectory of transgressivism brings into focus some of my own misgivings about the radicalism of the founding generation. I have more admiration than do the Integralists for the ordered liberty the designers of the Constitution tried to create—something I take to be inspired as much by Montesquieu’s praise of moderate government as by the individualist anthropology of Locke. I have considerable sympathy with National Conservatism and its defense of American traditions. That’s why I have misgivings about the radicalism of the American Revolution.

My misgivings concern the unstable form of egalitarianism that emerges from the Founding. Gordon Wood sees it as a great sea-change in American values, a reaction against the established principles inherited by the American colonies from the British monarchy and class system, above all kinship, patriarchy, and patronage. According to Wood, American radicals of the Founding generation wanted to replace monarchical oldthink with new social bonds of love, universal benevolence, respect, and consent. They wanted to base government on virtue and disinterested public leadership rather than inherited rank and loyalty to British tradition. As Wood writes, “Equality was in fact the most radical and most powerful ideological force let loose in the Revolution. … It became what Herman Melville called ‘the Great God Absolute! The center and circumference of all democracy!’”

My misgivings about this early American egalitarianism, which (I admit) in some ways was admirable—and certainly better suited to American society as it emerged in the early nineteenth century than the monarchical attitudes of the past—have mostly to do with the “-ism” in egalitarianism. As is well known, the Greek suffix -idzein (-ιζειν), rarely attached to adjectives to form abstract nouns before the nineteenth century, acquired a new lease on life thanks to Hegelian philosophy with its emphasis on process as a fundamental feature of reality and as a way of orienting moral change. An “ism” thus indicates a process and a project. Liberalism, for example, is a process and project of becoming more liberal. The historian Johann Gustav Droysen coined the word “Hellenistic” to indicate the process of becoming more Greek in the lands conquered by Alexander the Great. The “isms” in socialism and communism also refer to movements. In the same way, egalitarian-ism is a process and a project of becoming more equal. The underargued assumption of contemporary egalitarianism is that making society more equal makes it more just. In the selection of magistrates, for example, any system other than a one-person-one-vote system is held to be inherently unjust. In states legitimated by popular sovereignty, any other system is assumed to be undemocratic. Any obstacles to one-person-one-vote must therefore be removed, and that is therefore the goal of egalitarian political movements.

It is this American way of considering equality—as an open-ended process of making the world more equal—that I think needs to be reconsidered. Equality as understood presently in America is not an ideal that can be harmonized with the principles of ordered liberty. The American revolutionary form of egalitarianism inevitably turns into a political movement and sets in motion an insatiable process of social change. As a movement, it thus acquires something of the physiognomy of religious revivalism. When egalitarians of this new, American kind fail to get their way, frustrating the commands of their Great God Absolute, they can and do undermine and subvert the liberal, moderate, prudent forms of government that are the most valuable parts of the American political tradition.

In The Radicalism of the American Revolution, Gordon Wood made the claim that “by the early nineteenth century America had already emerged as the most egalitarian … society in history.” I think this is true, but unlike Wood, I don’t see this as necessarily a good thing for America. Wood argues throughout The Radicalism that the form taken by political equality after the Revolution was unexampled in world history, a proud “first” for humanity. That originality of course does not mean that American egalitarianism has no intellectual roots in the Western intellectual tradition. Wood himself emphasizes the role of Locke’s “sensationalism” and Locke’s invocation of the Biblical principle that all human beings were equal in the sight of God. This principle was later used by egalitarians like John Adams to fight artificial hierarchies, which Adams took to be undergirded by Calvinist doctrines of predestination, unmerited salvation, and unconditional election. For Adams, if you accept dogmatic Calvinism, you will be more likely to accept the traditional view that everyone should be content with the station to which God has called him [or her]. Adams was himself never a man to be content with his station in life.

Subsequent studies by Jeremy Waldron and Sarah Mortimer have emphasized the theological roots of Locke’s thinking and his reliance on radical interpretations of the Bible at odds with traditional, dogmatic readings. Sarah Mortimer in particular shows that Locke did not need to be a practicing Socinian to absorb from English political sectarianism of the seventeenth century, the belief that individual consciences should not be forced by the state—the ultimate presupposition of American denominationalism—or the idea that the individual conscience, formed by reason and a correct reading of Scripture, was in a sense sacred and its understandings and ethical insights were necessarily prior to the authority of religious tradition and therefore of established churches.

American egalitarianism has its roots in these radical, anti-authoritarian religious traditions, and it is this origin among what Martin Luther called the Schwärmerei, religious nuts, I suggest, that has made the politics of equality in America sometimes resemble a religious crusade, and ultimately driven it in illiberal directions. It may have begun well, but has ended up being a destructive force—an ideological sledgehammer driving us into ever more radical outcomes. To my mind, it is something like the ideology of “ever-closer union” in the European Community: a fine idea, until the union gets too close for comfort. The abuse does not abolish the use, as Augustine says, but if an ideological engine for radical change is built into the use, you eventually and inevitably end up with the abuse.

We need to cultivate a different attitude to equality: the attitude of Greek democrats, Roman plebeians, medieval guildsmen, and citizens of Renaissance republics, all of whom made the claim: “I deserve equal rank and reward in this community because I have earned them, because of my contributions to the common good.” 

The Wisdom of the Ancients

This is why I believe we Americans need to rethink our inherited, quasi-religious form of egalitarianism, and recover older and sounder ways of thinking about political equality that are rooted in the Western tradition. Like the Founders themselves, we should turn to the ancients and the premodern Western past for inspiration.

The Western tradition is not only unique among world civilizations for its long traditions of democracy, republicanism, the rule of law, and citizenship, but also for its ideals of equality. Ancient and medieval political ideals of equality are not, however, for the most part, based on ideals of unique personal dignity and the equal respect owed to all human lives qua human. These ideals come out of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, are passed down in the Christian tradition, and eventually filter into modern republican politics via the radical Reformers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Premodern (by which I mean “pre-Reformation”) political ideals of equality, however, have different antecedents.

Greek democracy between the time of Solon in the early sixth century and the time of Pericles in the late fifth went through a process of radicalization similar in some ways to what happened in America after the Revolution. But the basis of Athenian egalitarianism was very different. There, too, egalitarian ideals emerged to fight tyranny and aristocracy, but the argument for equality was not just that it prevented arbitrary and unjust rule, but also that citizens were roughly of equal competence when it came to ruling themselves. It was their participation in self-rule itself that educated them in the arts of government. Protagoras, the great fifth-century theorist of democracy, whom we know principally from Plato’s dialogue named after him, taught that man was the measure of all things and that the gods had given all men an equal measure of justice and of shame. Ordinary people had the capacity to rule themselves. Protagoras held that through its laws and through deliberation in common, a democracy can instill in ordinary citizens enough political virtue to govern themselves. But the most powerful argument for democratic equality in ancient cities was the obligation of all adult males to fight in the city’s phalanx or in its navy. Greek democratic equality was based on desert, an equal contribution of citizens to the city’s welfare. It was an earned equality, a deserved equality, and not a constitutionally ascribed equality, as in modern America.

Plato and Aristotle contributed to the Greek theory of equality by introducing the principle of proportional merit. Civic honors (mainly magistracies) and rewards should be proportional to the individual’s contribution to the polis. Equal contributions by individuals should earn them equal rewards. This was a form of what today would be called political meritocracy, though Aristotle called it, misleadingly for us, aristokratia.

Among the Greeks proportional equality remained a theory; among the Romans, it became a political reality. The kind of equality that emerged from the Struggle of the Orders in the early republic was meritocratic. Plebeians and patricians deserved political equality when they made equal contributions to the state, especially in war. Mere citizenship entitled the citizen only to equality under law. In Livy’s words, the rule of law meant that “the commands of the laws are more powerful than those of men.” They were equally binding on all because they were the result of a republican political process that included all citizens, whose unequal weight in that political process reflected their differential contributions to the state. All this was theorized by Cicero in his dialogue On Laws. Equality under law consisted in the fact that any citizen could claim his citizen rights to a fair trial, no one was above the law; and (with the permission of the magistrate) anyone could bring suit against anyone else. Citizen equality under law, however, did not entitle citizens to equal power in the political system, which is why the Romans did not recognize the principle of one-man-one vote. Office-holding in the community was supposed to depend on rank (dignitas), personal worth, or prestige. When it came to government, everyone was not as good as everyone else, and leadership in principle depended on merit and desert.

In medieval Italian city-republics, it was believed by the more egalitarian elements that all citizens should enjoy equal shares in common good (the bonum commune or res publica); everyone should have an equal right to participate in government and hold office. Offices were assigned by sortition, picking names randomly out of an urn or leather bag, a selection procedure that demonstrated citizen equality. But the basis of this equality was not human dignity in some abstract sense, but work: participation in a trade. To be a citizen and enjoy citizen equality you had to belong to a guild. This could be anything from laying bricks to manufacturing wool, but you had to work in order to be a registered member of a guild, and the guilds ran the city. Medieval city-republics were thus the first commercial republics. Citizens also had to be a member of the city’s militia. Citizens organized themselves collectively to fight forms of inequality imposed by elites whose power was based on hereditary wealth, ecclesiastical office, or armed force.

Among the humanist political thinkers of the Renaissance—before Machiavelli—equality is considered instrumental to liberty; you can’t have liberty in a society where there are vast disproportions in power and wealth. Equality and the expectation that everyone should engage in useful work help to maintain concord; excluding citizens from office for political reasons makes them bitter and seditious. Equality is also a way of behaving, even a virtue. It is like Suetonius’ civilitas: the virtue of equality, aequalitas, means knowing how to comport yourself like a citizen, how to contribute to and to receive your just proportion of the res publica, “that which belongs to the public.” It means learning how to rule and be ruled in turn. If you didn’t know how to act like a citizen, you were liable to be sent into exile. The Renaissance form of equality is “equality in the capacity for virtue,” which is the basis of the claim, fundamental to “virtue politics,” that political legitimacy must be based on moral authority and not on mere hereditary privilege (the ownership of political dominium or lordship) or on custom or religious authority.

None of these forms of equality assume the innate, natural, god-given equality of all human beings qua human. None demand that the political system must grant people equal rights based on the bare fact of their being human and having citizenship. Premodern equality is based rather on work, merit, and contributions to the republic. That earlier Western form of equality is the product of prudence and good judgment as well as justice. In the premodern West, equality, like liberty, is not an absolute value, an ideal goal without which no polity can be truly just. It is rather a reward for virtue, public spirit, and loyalty to the country.

Now contrast these premodern, merit-based claims to equality with radical, American-style egalitarianism. Our egalitarianism is an evangelical crusade that must triumph as quickly as possible because the Great God Equality commands it. It is a reformation that must happen “without tarrying for anie”—to quote the title of a book by Robert Browne that inspired the American Pilgrim Fathers. So long as radical egalitarianism continues to be the driving force behind our politics—so long as justice is construed as impossible to achieve apart from the achievement of radical socio-economic and political equality—well, until then we will have no peace: “no justice, no peace,” as protestors like to chant. So long as the transgressivist, anti-traditional equality of the kind that grew out of the American Revolution is taken as a precondition of justice and freedom, so long will our politics and social life be too radical to allow, in the long run, for a stable and flourishing society.

Celebrating the sentiment, “I’m as good as you,” is not, in my opinion, the best way to build a cooperative and harmonious society. If we want to restore sanity and stability to American political life, I would suggest we try to re-imagine equality as it was conceived in the older Western tradition. We need to cultivate a different attitude to equality: the attitude of Greek democrats, Roman plebeians, medieval guildsmen, and citizens of Renaissance republics, all of whom made the claim: “I deserve equal rank and reward in this community because I have earned them, because of my contributions to the common good.”

This essay is an edited version of a paper delivered at the symposium “America’s Once and Future History” in honor of the work of Gordon S. Wood, held at Princeton on June 5–7, 2023, sponsored by the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.