Atlantic contradictions: Democracy, revolution, and empire in the early modern Atlantic world

How should we understand the history of democratic thought in the modern West? Is the story of democracy one of progress or hypocrisy?

February 8 brought four scholars to the Whitney Humanities Center for a symposium devoted to these questions. The conference, titled “Atlantic Contradictions,” was sponsored by the Center for Representative Institutions at the MacMillan Center. It was organized by Mordechai Levy-Eichel, Yale University, and co-hosted by Steven B. Smith, Yale University. Harvard’s James T. Kloppenberg, discussed his new book Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and American Thought. Joshua Simon, Columbia University, spoke about his recent book, The Ideology of the Creole Revolution. Kloppenberg was introduced by Hugo Drochon, Cambridge University; Simon’s talk was introduced by Marcela Echeverri, Yale University.

Simon’s book, The Ideology of the Creole Revolution, advocates for a revisionist reading of the political thought of the American revolutionaries Simon Bolivar, Alexander Hamilton, and Lucas Alaman. Common to each figure, Simon argued, is a distinctly “creole” conception of politics. Their feet straddling the New and Old Worlds, the eighteenth century creole revolutionaries came to believe in an “anti-imperial imperialism”: once free from European colonial domination, they would seek to establish empires of their own. This contradiction, Simon concluded, has profoundly influenced the course of American democratic politics, particularly in the United States, which Jefferson proclaimed to be an “Empire of Liberty.”

The differences between Simon’s work and Kloppenberg’s Toward Democracy were striking. Speaking after Simon, Kloppenberg framed his own work, though grounded in intellectual history, as opposed to political theory, as an attempt to reclaim the American and Western democratic heritage, and to defend it from postmodern cynicism. Kloppenberg insisted that the principles of democracy, as a guiding force of American civilization, can be separated from its tortuous and often contradictory history—and deserve to be valued. Kloppenberg went to argue that the history of democracy should be understood as originating in an ancient Judeo-Christian ethic of reciprocity. It is this ethic, rather than some secret desire to dominate, that motivated democratic thinkers.

Echeverri and Drochon, as interlocutors, questioned Kloppenberg and Simon on many aspects of their research. Especially controversial were Kloppenberg’s insistence on an ancient origin of democratic thinking and Simon’s “imperial” reading of American revolutionary ideology. The audience was highly engaged, as well, and was amused to learn the disparate origin stories of the two books presented. Simon first conceived of his topic while surfing down the west coast of South America. By contrast, Kloppenberg’s lifelong fascination with the history of democracy began when, as an exchange student in rural France, he lived among a family of avowed monarchists “more pro-Bourbon than Louis XVI.”

Written by Gabriel Groz, Yale College Class of 2019.