Dilemmas of Popular Revolution: Popular Sovereignty and the Crowd in Post-Revolutionary

America and Russia

An Essay Presented

by

Abigail Rose Modaff

to

The Committee on Degrees in Social Studies

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a degree with honors

of Bachelor of Arts

Harvard College March 2012

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CONTENTS INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………..……………………....3

I. THE THEORY OF REVOLUTION AND THE CHALLENGE OF THE CROWD………………………………………………………………..…………………….12

II. POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY: ALTERNATIVES TO THE CROWD………………………………..31

III. THE CROWD PROBLEM LEFT UN-SOLVED: EPISTEMOLOGICAL SEPARATION IN STALIN, TROTSKY, AND JEFFERSON………………………………………………………………….79

CONCLUSION………………….………………………………………………………..….120 BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………………..……..123

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Introduction

And we also know to our sorrow that freedom has been better preserved in countries where no

revolution ever broke out, no matter how outrageous the circumstances of the powers that be. –

Hannah Arendt1

On the long, wide road to Pulkovo-2 airport in St. Petersburg, Russia, taxis and snub-nosed

marshrutka buses zoom past a larger-than-life monument: Lenin, fist thrust to the sky, leads a

handful of bronze workers into the communist future. Four thousand miles away, in Boston,

shadows of a very different revolution linger beneath the granite column at Bunker Hill, in a

quiet park overlooking the city’s skyline. In both of these places, spaces claimed by revolution

fill with everyday life. Russian children play in parks outside the Bolsheviks’ first headquarters,

and Boston Harbor hosts entirely decorous tea parties. The recent revolutions in the Arab world,

though, and the protracted battles in which many nations are still ensnared, have placed a sharp

focus upon the moment of post-revolutionary transition. As we wait for the familiar rhythm of

the everyday to reclaim the revolutionary space, we ask ourselves: how is it that post-

revolutionary nations move from a time of rupture to a time of continuity? How do

revolutionaries make sure that this transformation leaves their gains intact? And when we

transition from novelty to normalcy, regardless of how it is done, do we inevitably lose

something along the way?

In this thesis, I will examine the contested and conflict-ridden space between revolution

and post-revolution. I will focus upon two countries whose upheavals helped define the modern

age: America, in the years roughly between 1787 and 1791, and Russia, largely between October

1917 and 1924. The purpose of this work is to examine a conceptual problem in the nature of

revolution which helps to make sense of post-revolutionary conflict in America and Russia. To

1 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 106. 2 Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution, to take a prominent example, focuses upon the American and French Revolutions

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accomplish this, I will advance a two-pronged argument: first, that all revolutionaries shared the

same conceptual and practical task of defining popular sovereignty against the claims of the

unmediated people; and second, that this common task provoked fiercely divergent ideas

regarding what popular sovereignty meant and required, based not upon different valuations of

popular sovereignty, but upon different understandings of how popular participation relates to

the general good. I will use history and theory, similarity and difference, America and Russia,

and revolution and post-revolution to inform one another, arguing that at their nexus lies a

paradigm that reveals critical facets of revolution as both an abstract concept and a concrete goal

in the minds of Lenin, Madison, and their fellow makers of history.

The center of this work is what I call the challenge of the crowd. This conceptual

problem of post-revolutionary transition, which will be explicated in the first chapter, offers an

explanation of both the theoretical difficulties of post-revolutionary transition and the particular

historical disputes that occurred in the American and Russian cases. The crowd-challenge

paradigm locates the conceptual difficulty of concluding a revolution in the changes that must be

made, after a revolutionary seizure of power, in the relationship between “the people,” the

government, and the mass of citizens in their unmediated form, which I call “the crowd.” The

experience of revolution allows for a certain type of spontaneous, independent mass action which

both stakes a powerful claim to the appellation “popular sovereignty” and appears difficult to

preserve with the post-revolutionary restoration of government. A dilemma thus appears in

which claims of popular sovereignty by the government must defend themselves against the

crowd’s deinstitutionalized representative claim by putting forth an alternative understanding of

what “the people,” and their rule, truly mean. This construction of an alternative, in turn, forms

the touchstone for post-revolutionary conflict. As I will explain in the latter half of chapter one,

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the challenge of the crowd can be met by bridging the gap between rulers and ruled: creating a

governmental manifestation of the popular voice which gains the possibility of predominance

over the crowd by accessing the general good. In making this argument, my point is not the

familiar one that the tension between constituent and constituted power exists within democratic

societies, but that this tension shapes post-revolutionary proposals for the very manner in which

power is to be constituted in the first place. In the immediate aftermath of revolution, competing

conceptions regarding how the general good is distilled from the opinions of the unmediated

people create division within formerly united revolutionary coalitions. These divisions are

centered around the challenge of the crowd, for only the construction of a manifestation of the

people which can claim to represent the people better than the unmediated crowd – by accessing

their truer, better selves whose voice speaks to the common good – can preserve the fragile prize

of popular sovereignty past the conclusion of the revolutionary experience. In order for the

people to rule themselves despite the presence of government, the people must not be identified

solely with the crowd. The task of chapter one is to further explain this framework and to show

how it builds upon theoretical arguments from the past century regarding the possibility and/or

necessity of “permanent revolution.”

With this theoretical framework in place, I will proceed, in the second and third chapters,

to an examination of the American and Russian cases in depth, utilizing the insights provided by

the perspective of the challenge of the crowd to break down these post-revolutionary conflicts

and isolate their fundamental divergences. There are several reasons that the American and

Russian revolutions are useful cases upon which to draw. Each is complex, well-studied, and

well-documented, and they are both similar enough in certain ways and different enough in

others to be able to inform one another. With regard to chronology, the role played by poverty,

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and the use of terror, the American and Russian revolutions form opposite ends of the spectrum

of "great revolutions" of the modern age (America, France, Russia -- the triad of oft-cited

convulsions). This makes the fact that they share the problem of the crowd all the more striking,

and challenges the notion that the dilemmas and failures of either (such as Stalinist terror or

slavery) were caused by purely unique historical factors or that either case can provide a neat

paradigm for success.2 But despite their differences, the two cases are nevertheless members of

the same continuum, often discussed in relation to the French Revolution which they surrounded

or as indicative of the character of the modern age. Moreover, these two revolutions are

important in themselves. They mark the attempted instantiation of the two ideologies whose

clashing paradigms helped define the twentieth century, and the primary tests of these ideologies

against the realities of political life. Conclusions regarding these cases not only raise important

questions for more general research, but are also relevant simply because the American and

Russian Revolutions are well worth studying on their own. In the second and third chapters, I

will utilize the framework of the challenge of the crowd to analyze the arguments, conflicts, and

disputes that arose in the post-revolutionary days, months, and years in both nations.

In chapter two, I will accentuate the stark differences in approach to the

institutionalization of the popular voice that were inspired by the common challenge of the

crowd. In the first half of the chapter, I will take on the ratification-era positions of the

Federalists and Anti-Federalists, casting their distinct conceptions of the purpose of

representation as grappling with the location of the general good within a mutable popular voice.

While the Anti-Federalists focused upon the derivation of the general good from immersion

2 Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution, to take a prominent example, focuses upon the American and French Revolutions and views the Russian Revolution almost entirely as an extension of France’s mistakes. For Arendt, the American Revolution held unique promise that was almost entirely lost to history. See Arendt, On Revolution, 7, 13-4, 34-48, 51- 66, 69, 82-5, 90-1, 98-9, 123-31, 138-40, 148, 171-6, 186-8, 207, 209-10, 213, 252-3.

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within a homogeneous community, Federalists instead saw the general good as arising only from

wisdom that transcended particularity. I will approach the Russian case in a similar light,

demonstrating how these ideas of the general good, the mutable popular voice, and the crowd

were tied to the Bolshevik repudiation of “bourgeois” democracy and the conceptualization of

the party vanguard as the mouthpiece for the fallible proletariat. Here, as in the American case,

the idea of the shared challenge of the crowd reveals the underlying assumptions that divided the

Bolshevik leadership from its intra- and extra-party critics, turning the lens of analysis away

from baseline understandings of “more” versus “less” democracy and focusing instead upon

different methods of locating the general good within the people’s opinions. In this manner, the

challenge of the crowd demonstrates the depth and complexity of post-revolutionary conflict in

these two nations by calling into question the meaning and requirements of popular sovereignty

in the post-revolutionary context. Analyzing these debates through the lens of the challenge of

the crowd shows that it was these revolutionaries’ assumptions about how popular sovereignty

can be achieved, anchored in their understandings of the general good and its epistemological

relation to the declarations of the masses, and not their stances regarding the importance of

popular sovereignty itself, that led them to take such distinctive paths in conceptualizing their

post-revolutionary states.

In the third chapter, I remain closely focused upon the two cases themselves, but turn to

slightly later reflections upon the status of post-revolutionary nations to examine the perspectives

of those who advocated for leaving the crowd problem unsolved. Here, I turn from different

interpretations of how one derives the general good from popular participation to those who

question whether or not one even can. Focusing mostly upon Jefferson and Trotsky, and using

Stalin as a foil for the latter, I will discuss how providing a true solution to the challenge of the

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crowd – bridging the rulers-ruled gap, rather than managing its dichotomy – requires the

epistemological assumption that knowledge of the general good depends somehow upon popular

participation. Trotsky and Jefferson, both lacking this association, constructed post-revolutionary

systems that did not claim to institutionally amplify the people in their truest form, focusing

either upon non-participatory economic management until the general good becomes accessible

to the universal class (Trotsky) or upon rupture and tension, rather than unity, between rulers and

ruled as the safeguard of both the general good and democratic participation (Jefferson). Both of

the theorists upon which this chapter focuses provide an implicit critique of the entire line of

solutions to the crowd-challenge provided in chapter two, problematizing the process of

institutionalization and questioning the possibility of uniting general good and popular

participation in a single manifestation of the popular voice. They also reveal the dangerous

possible mutations of the strain of thought, explicit in Marxism but evident in segments of

American history and theory as well, that provide an objectively measurable standard for the

general good that is wholly independent of popular participation. In this chapter, Jefferson and

Trotsky, from very different corners of history, call into question the possibility of

institutionalizing the popular voice, and this problematization in turn highlights the foundations

of Trotsky’s and Jefferson’s own theories which forced them to seek alternative channels for the

rule of the people.

The purpose of this work is not to solve sociological or political-scientific problems of

post-revolutionary transition, nor to provide an all-inclusive account of each individual thinker’s

work, nor to elevate a single view of post-revolutionary popular sovereignty as best, most

correct, or most democratic. I make neither a causal nor a normative argument. Instead, I address

a deceptively simple question: why is successfully completing a revolution so difficult? This

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question draws us into both theory and history, and unearths a mutually dependent relationship,

embodied in the challenge of the crowd, between post-revolutionary conflict in the specific

contexts of each revolution, on the one hand, and, on the other, the conceptual acrobatics

inherent in a revolution’s close. My arguments here reveal important dimensions of both the

theory of revolution and the particularities of these two situations. The similarity for which I

argue lies in the common task of these revolutionaries, across two and a half continents and one

and a half centuries, in reinterpreting the popular voice to respond to the challenge of the crowd.

The difference, by contrast, lies in the wholly divergent responses that this common challenge

provokes, which entangle – we see through the crowd-challenge lens – on the level of

epistemological, sociological, and political assumptions regarding what popular sovereignty

entails and implies. The problem of the crowd illuminates recurring dilemmas which divide

revolutionaries into opposing camps, none of which is obviously true or right, regarding how and

whether popular participation and the common good can be reliably intertwined. As

revolutionaries in both these cases struggled to tame their revolutions without de-fanging them,

to enthrone the people without abandoning them to the anarchy of their own flaws, their

divergent understandings of how the people’s truest selves could be allowed to speak shaped the

courses of their nations’ futures, and thereby altered the course of history.

A Note on Terminology

Throughout this thesis, including in this introduction, I use several terms interchangeably which

in reality have distinct meanings because the level upon which these terms differ is not relevant

to this analysis. This includes common good, general good, general interest, benefit, and, in a

few instances, welfare, as the first set of interchanged terms; and mass participation, popular

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participation, mass declaration, populism, and democracy, as the second. No distinction is to be

implied by the use of one or the other of these terms in certain contexts, nor do I seek to conflate

them; rather, I equate them here in order to work on a level upon which they perform roughly the

same function. Finally, I will be using the term “post-revolutionary” in a manner incautious to

the proponents of permanent revolution, simply for the sake of concision. This term, except

where indicated in chapter one, may be taken to represent the situation roughly following the

seizure of coercive and governmental power, allowing the truly post-revolutionary nature of that

situation to remain disputable based on revolutionaries’ particular assumptions regarding what

revolution means and/or whether it ought to end.

A Note on Methodology

It is also necessary to note that I intend neither to assume nor ignore the motivations of particular

individuals or groups, but rather to work alongside them. My focus is upon ideas rather than

individual desires. Assessing motives is difficult even with contemporary actors, let alone those

distorted by time; and in such high-stakes situations, arguments for personal gain could likely be

made for nearly any person or group. Moreover, focusing upon explaining the actions of

individuals may detract from the ideas at play, which are interpersonal, intergenerational, and

serve to shape the actions of individuals whether their motives are selfish or altruistic.3 In other

words, simply because an individual would be helped by a certain political or economic

arrangement does not mean that he or she could not make an argument for that arrangement that

a disinterested person would accept. It is upon these arguments that I will focus. This is not to

3 See Cecelia M. Kenyon, “Men of Little Faith: The Anti-Federalists on the Nature of Representative Government,” in The Confederation and the Constitution: The Critical Issues, ed. Gordon S. Wood (Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1973), 56-7. In the same volume, see Edward S. Corwin, “The Progress of Constitutional Theory Between the Declaration of Independence and the Meeting of the Philadelphia Convention,” 16-7.

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say that motives and interests are therefore irrelevant, but that my project is separate: to

determine, not the specific causes of actions (whether motive-related or sociological), but

whether one can locate internally coherent and historically sensible interpretations of popular

sovereignty on all sides of these post-revolutionary debates.

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1 The Theory of Revolution and the Challenge of the Crowd

Surveying the history of events and ideas, the nature of revolution can present a thicket of

dilemmas. In the twentieth century in particular, the rise in prominence of theories of permanent

revolution, and of their determined but discordant detractors, can make revolution and its own

completion appear to fly apart like oil and water. I will open this inquiry into post-revolutionary

conflict in America and Russia by examining the challenges that arise in simply defining

revolution on a conceptual level: why do theorists and revolutionaries alike struggle to draw

revolution to a successful close? What arises during revolution that is so difficult to preserve?

This chapter will propose an explanation for these theoretical difficulties of post-revolutionary

transition. I call this the challenge of the crowd.

In this chapter I will focus upon establishing the language and perspective of the

challenge of the crowd as a tool, built from revolution’s conceptual difficulties, with which to

illuminate post-revolutionary conflict in America and Russia. In a sentence, the crowd-challenge

consists in the fact that one of the tasks facing the leaders of a successful revolution is to redefine

the relationship between rulers and ruled, somehow institutionalizing popular sovereignty against

the persistent representational claim of the unmediated crowd. Here, I will elaborate upon

precisely what this means, focusing first upon the nature of the crowd-challenge, then briefly

discussing its relationship to pre-existing theories, and finally establishing the pattern of

cohesive, but divergent, responses which it provokes based upon linking popular sovereignty and

the general good. This chapter will construct the conceptual framework which will be then be

used, in the following two chapters, to analyze post-revolutionary conflict in the American and

Russian cases.

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The Crowd and Post-Revolutionary Dilemmas of Popular Sovereignty

I must first make clear what I intend by “the crowd.” For this concept, I build upon the work of

Jason Frank, who uses a very similar idea to focus upon a related issue. In his work Constituent

Moments, which examines the American Revolution and its legacy, Frank asserts that dilemmas

over the locus and meaning of popular sovereignty – which found their root and expression in the

double meaning of “the people” – characterize American life and, in a sense, allow the

Revolution to continue by binding popular sovereignty to both constituted and constituent

power.4 That is, for Frank, the fact that “the people” are both necessarily represented and

unrepresentable lends authority and flexibility to American constitutional government by leaving

the true identity of “the people” up for debate while preserving both their intra- and extra-

governmental authority.5 To elaborate upon this double meaning of “the people,” Frank invokes

the crowd as a prominent example of a contested and concrete manifestation of the people in

their unrepresentable capacity as transcendent, constituent power.6 In this work, I focus upon the

crowd’s role, not so much as constituent power in the abstract, but as the concrete form of the

people that exists prior to and separately from government. The crowd, because of the very

arbitrariness of its assemblage, holds a powerful representative claim as the most accessible and

obvious manifestation of the people: one absolutely un-distorted by government. The crowd acts

as a common-sense baseline for what “the people” means, and any alternative form of

representation must contend with this baseline (which, as Frank shows, will always exist in the

background of a healthy post-revolutionary society).7

4 Jason Frank, Constituent Moments (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2010), 3, 9-10, 19-25, 28-31, 44-5, 68-9, 85-6, 91, 94-5. 5 Ibid., 2-7, 10, 12, 14-6, 18, 26-8, 33, 43-5, 53, 64, 237-9, 244, 249. 6 Ibid., 52-3, 69, 75-92, 96-7. 7 Ibid., 4-10, 14, 24-5, 27, 30-1, 52-5, 63-4.

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The challenge of the crowd* is anchored in revolution’s ability to accentuate, or perhaps

even create, the crowd’s claim to legitimacy.8 Several theorists of revolution over the course of

the twentieth century, including Frank, have noted this link between revolution and the

foregrounding of the unmediated people.9 Some, in considering the nature of revolutionary

action, have even viewed this type of unmediated action – the action of the crowd – as

intrinsically valuable or identical with pure popular sovereignty. Rosa Luxemburg, writing from

Germany in 1918, argued that “the only healing and purifying sun is the revolution itself and its

renovating principle, the spiritual life, activity and initiative of the masses which is called into

being by it and which takes the form of the broadest political freedom,” asserting, in other words,

that the experience of revolution itself harbors true political freedom.10 Half a century later,

Hannah Arendt grappled with the same relationship between revolution and active political life,

stating baldly, “What revolutions brought to the fore was this experience of being free.”11

Though Arendt saw the association between revolution and freedom as largely misleading, as I

will discuss below, her characterization of revolutionary experience underscores the powerful

and seductive ability of the crowd to rule only through rupture. In his controversial 1906 work

Reflections on Violence, Georges Sorel summarized this relationship between rupture and self-

rule: “we enjoy this liberty pre-eminently when we are making an effort to create a new

individuality in ourselves, thus endeavouring to break the bonds of habit…movement is the

* I should note that, while Frank discusses “the crowd” in depth, “the challenge of the crowd” as a phrase and concept is my own. 8 On how the American Revolution helped generate the idea of constituent power, see Frank, Constituent Moments, 9-13. 9 Ibid., e.g. 3, 5, 7-8, 9-10, 14, 17-9, 24-7, 52-3, 63-4, 67-8, 75, 87-91, 237-8, 243, 244, 249. This link appears on both discursive levels (upon which Frank focuses) and experiential levels (the focus of most of the following thinkers). 10 Rosa Luxemburg, “The Russian Revolution,” in The Russian Revolution and Leninism or Marxism? (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981), 74-5. 11 Arendt, On Revolution, 24. One must note Arendt’s particular definition of freedom, which will be discussed below.

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essence of emotional life, and it is, then, in terms of movement that we must speak of creative

consciousness.”12 For these theorists, then, and within the experience of revolution itself, liberty,

mass creativity, and rebellion were bound together, implying that complete self-assertion may

require the freedom and sovereignty of the unmediated crowd.

The essence of this link between revolution and the crowd is that the people appear to be

acting most directly, most popularly, most freely, and most sovereignly when they are engaged

in defying government and organization. The act of revolution both bases itself upon, and helps

to re-draw with vehemence, a dualism between rulers and ruled: as long as the revolution’s

immediate priority is destruction – that is, when the old order remains dominant – revolutionary

discourse and practice legitimize resistance and pit “the people” against those in power.13

Because the crowd’s – that is, the great body of the citizens as separate from and opposed to the

government – actions are classed and viewed as the actions of “the people,” this provides the

crowd with both representational status and a prominent role in the concrete work of the

revolution itself. But, importantly, this status exists despite – and, in the revolutionary moment,

largely because of – the crowd’s axiomatically deinstitutionalized nature. The crowd represents

precisely by rejecting all formal (i.e., purveyed by the de-legitimized old regime) methods of

representation, in a mutually reinforcing relationship with governmental de-legitimization. The

revolutionary act, in other words, implies the collision of two mutually exclusive entities, the

people and the government, and thus strengthens the idea that the people exist in negation of and

contradistinction to the state.

12 Georges Sorel, Reflections On Violence, trans. T.E. Hulme (New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1914), 30. 13 Frank discusses this in terms of the problematic legitimacy of quasi-legal post-revolutionary associations: Frank, Constituent Moments, 11-2, 15-9, 24-7, 43-5, 53, 67-8, 85, 91, 96-7. Also mentioned by John Dunn as “brigandry” in Modern Revolutions (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 229-30.

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After the revolutionary battles have been won, however, and power has been seized in the

name of the people, this leaves revolutionaries with a troubling dichotomy. The representative

claim of the crowd necessarily challenges the legitimacy and popular basis of any government

that may be set up, for it strengthens the idea that the people exist most truly and fully outside of

their government. But how can the sovereignty of the people coexist with the sovereignty of

government when the people are defined in contradistinction to government? This dilemma is the

essence of the challenge of the crowd. The crowd’s powerful claim to represent true popular

sovereignty saddles revolutionaries with the need to somehow depose, combat, or utilize this

claim, either by continuing the revolution in perpetuity (in order to maintain the sovereignty of

the people through negation and rupture), or by constructing a state that can somehow claim to

represent the people even while the claim of the crowd persists. Even if one admits the

persistence of such crowd-government tension in post-revolutionary society, which is the focus

of Frank’s work, revolutionaries must still decide how to respond to it, and this latter task – and

how it underpins post-revolutionary conflict – is the focus of this thesis. If there is to be any

notion of a post-revolutionary state, it must justify its own existence by presenting an alternative

claim to that of the crowd, constituting the people into another self that it may present as

somehow better, truer, or deeper. That is, a state that proposes to be both popular and post-

revolutionary must confound or bridge the rulers-ruled gap, emphasized so starkly during the

revolution, by presenting a version of the popular voice that is contained within the government

itself.

The Challenge of the Crowd: Extending Previous Theory

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The existence of such post-revolutionary demands has been recognized with varying degrees of

clarity and optimism throughout the twentieth century. I will discuss some examples in brief, in

order to both emphasize the importance of the crowd-challenge to the nature of revolution and

clarify the argument of this work by setting it apart from alternative lines of investigation.

Perhaps the most profound underscoring of the crowd-challenge dilemma derives from the very

existence of theories of permanent revolution, which react to the conceptual and logical

challenges associated with a revolution’s end by attempting to avoid them altogether through the

protraction of the revolutionary moment. Such theories have varied widely since the term

“permanent revolution” was first used by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Karl Marx in the mid-

1840s, but the most prominent (excepting, notably, Leon Trotsky’s economically-focused

account, which I will discuss at length in chapter three) center around the aforementioned

capacity of revolution to facilitate independent and unmediated mass action.14 I have already

mentioned Luxemburg, who did not formulate a theory of “permanent revolution” but linked her

uncompromisingly forward-looking radicalism with the idea that socialism was “the product of a

series of great creative acts of the often spontaneous class struggle seeking its way forward”;15

relatedly, but with a far more oblique bent, Sorel privileged the experience of revolutionary

struggle in itself, rather than organization or even ideological correctness, in raising mass

consciousness and re-starting the Marxist historical dialectic that would allow for eventual 14 Arendt, On Revolution, 41. Perhaps the most thorough treatment of the concept by Marx occurs in his and Engels’ “Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League,” written in early 1850. See “Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978), 501-11. See also Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in the same volume, 36. Trotsky’s concept of permanent revolution asserted the need for the proletariat to seize power in nations where the bourgeoisie was too weak to complete its tasks, a process that thereby blurred the lines between bourgeois/democratic and proletarian/socialist revolutions – as well as international boundaries – and challenged previous notions of interval-based progress. See Leon Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution, trans. Max Schachtman (Kapaau, HI: Gutenburg Publishers, 2011), in which he also quotes extensively from his prominent earlier work on the subject, Results and Prospects. 15 Rosa Luxemburg, “Leninism or Marxism?”, in The Russian Revolution and Leninism or Marxism? (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981), 92.

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transformation.16 For Sorel, revolutionary experience itself, especially “Proletarian violence,

carried on as a pure and simple manifestation of the sentiment of the class war,” was of such

paramount importance that to even discuss its endpoint in too much detail was harmful to

working-class self-assertion.17 Perhaps most infamously, this paradox of popular sovereignty –

the challenge of the crowd in the post-revolutionary moment as the primary representative of the

people acting in and for themselves – was seized upon by Mao Zedong to justify his divisive and

dictatorial policies in China, whose repeated injunctions to “strike while the iron is hot”

depended upon the independent action of the masses to combat the inertia of the cadres “who

only know how to follow the routine paths” and to render the government “truly representative

of the popular will.“18

In the early 1960s, two theorists of revolution, Frantz Fanon and Hannah Arendt, came

closer to clarifying the precise nature of this dilemma between people and state that arises so

acutely in the post-revolutionary moment. Each, however, also saw their version of the crowd-

challenge as inherently soluble, even illusory, if one properly understood the goal and needs of

revolution. Because of this, they did not emphasize the role of the crowd-challenge in post-

revolutionary transition to the same degree that this work does, nor did they consider the

possibility of multiple internally-coherent responses to the same problem of the crowd. Fanon,

writing on wars of decolonization, both lauded and was challenged by the spontaneity that

revolution unleashed, praising self-asserting violence as “the absolute praxis” and “totalizing and

16 Sorel, On Violence, entire, especially 15, 27-8, 30-2, 37, 81, 83-6, 88-92, 98, 130, 143-4, 147, 188-90, 243, 297. 17 Ibid., 99; 19, 32-3, 38-46, 49-51, 69-71, 78, 87-9, 98-9, 106-8, 119-22, 130-40, 164-7, 208, 240, 243, 267, 278-9, 297. 18 Mao Zedong, Speech on January 28, 1958, quoted in Stuart Schram, “Mao Tse-Tung and the Theory of the Permanent Revolution, 1958-69,” The China Quarterly no. 46 (April-June 1971): 221-244, Jstor.org/stable/652262, 226; Mao Zedong, quoted in John Bryan Starr, Continuing the Revolution: The Political Thought of Mao (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 215. See also Schram, Mao Tse-tung and the Theory, 226-7, 229-30, 232, 235-8, 241-2, 244. For a very thorough account of Mao’s thought on this topic, see Starr, Continuing the Revolution, 27-9, 39, 44, 129-72, 190-5, 199-200, 209-10, 215-6, notably this summary on 39: “left to their own devices, men and women may prefer to stagnate.”

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national” but warning that “this impetuous spontaneity…is destined to fail” without organized

decision-making regarding “means and tactics.”19 This version of the crowd-challenge, the

dilemma of individual self-assertion through violence as praxis versus the organization necessary

to achieve the collective liberation that was a prerequisite for true autonomy, Fanon solved by

envisioning a total alignment between individual and collective praxis that was achieved by

proper institutional formation and attention to mass consciousness.20 Fanon relied upon an

institutional structure that was “decentralized to the limit” to allow for both informational flow

and participatory interaction between masses and leaders, and he rendered this a true bridge

between rulers and ruled, rather than simply a compromise between goal-oriented action and

truly popular spontaneity, by associating organization with consciousness, consciousness with

harmony of interests, and conscious action with the individual praxis that he prized.21 According

to Fanon’s argument, if citizens were made aware of the essential unity between their interests

and those of the collective – if, every time a bridge were to be built, “The citizens [could]

appropriate the bridge” – the nation and its needs would become the “enlightened and coherent

praxis of men and women” by encompassing within itself the praxis and self-asserting power of

each individual.22 The government, in other words, eliminated the tension between itself and the

people by both representing and helping to generate their most autonomous selves.

From an utterly different context, Arendt provided an in-depth consideration of post-

revolutionary transition in her 1963 work On Revolution, which she focused around defusing the

challenge of the crowd as she viewed it: “if the end of revolution and the introduction of

constitutional government spelled the end of public freedom, was it then desirable to end the

19 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 44, 52, 85, 21; 2, 21-3, 44-52, 71-2, 78-9, 82-96, 177-8, 229, 239. 20 Ibid., 1-2, 21, 44-52, 78-82, 85-96. 21 Ibid., 128; 92-6, 127-44. 22 Ibid., 141, 144; 136-44, 233.

20

revolution?”23 Arendt solved this problem by identifying true freedom, not with the

revolutionary action of the crowd, but with well-structured politics as usual.24 If one accepted

Arendt’s definitions, there was no intrinsic threat of a revolution’s conclusion destroying the

popular sovereignty that it had seemed to enable, for the association of freedom with the

experience of revolution was largely a “temptation” drawn from their historical simultaneity.25

For Arendt, there was nothing intrinsically populist about rupture, because freedom was instead a

“tangible, worldly reality, something created by men to be enjoyed by men.”26 Arendt thus

axiomatically aligned popular sovereignty with properly constructed post-revolutionary

government. Moreover, further ironing out the paradoxes of post-revolutionary transition, the

attainment of Arendt’s freedom did not involve dilemmas of organization versus spontaneity

such as those presented by Fanon, because Arendt’s politically constituted freedom eschewed

prerequisites: concerns other than proper constitutionalization, such as establishing civil rights or

ameliorating poverty, were at best distracting from and at worst dangerous to the revolutionary

project of constructing free political space.27 For Arendt, then, means, ends, revolution, and post-

revolution all came together without dilemma or lingering tension, because they centered around

the all-important and wholly political act of founding freedom. Attaining full popular

sovereignty contained no paradox at all: it required one simply to leave other projects, especially

economic ones, aside (when possible), found polities upon mutual promise, and preserve

23 Arendt, On Revolution, 125. 24 Ibid., 21-3, 110-115, 117-8, 133, 165-7, 210, 227, 267. 25 Ibid., 133; 19, 23-4, 41-6, 50, 54, 60, 102, 116, 123-5, 133-5, 145-6, 165-6, 225-7. 26 Ibid., 115 (emphasis added); 22, 58-60, 110-21, 210, 225. 27 Ibid., 1, 15, 19-23, 41-8, 49-104, 187, 145-6, 212-5, 224-7, 256, 265.

21

council-type systems that functioned as “spaces of freedom.”28 Institute the councils, Arendt

argued, and revolution will have succeeded.29

Arendt and Fanon thus both overcame the challenge of the crowd by advancing specific

interpretations of popular sovereignty’s demands. While they provided considered and nuanced

arguments for their positions, their belief in their respective assessments and definitions removed

the need to focus upon the multiplicity of responses – all with their own internal coherence – that

the challenge of the crowd provokes. Moreover, both of their arguments, because they presented

the challenge of the crowd as wholly soluble, are called into question by Frank’s demonstration

of the persistent legacy of constituent-constituted tension left by revolution.30 Even Frank,

however, though he emphasized this post-revolutionary legacy, did not extend his analysis to the

manner in which post-revolutionary leaders structure their proposed governments to respond to

the challenge of the crowd. While Frank convincingly demonstrates the permanence of the

tension, at least in America, within the concept of “the people” as those who “both menace and

ground the political order,” he does not delve into the role of the crowd in the formation of that

political order in the first place.31 This project focuses upon the latter. Facing the brunt of

extralegal popular legitimacy in the immediate aftermath of revolution, and knowing that this

unmediated people will retain its claim to immediacy and primacy, revolutionaries must structure

their post-revolutionary authority to create the other half of Frank’s constituted-constituent

tension: the people as manifested by the government itself. This need to bridge the rulers-ruled

gap is the challenge of the crowd, and its solution demands the conceptualization of a type of

28 Ibid., 256; 136-7, 156-62, 167-70, 174, 186-94, 232-71. On the danger of attempting to politically ameliorate poverty, see 49-104. 29 Ibid., 236-7, 271. 30 Indeed, Frank spends much of his first chapter criticizing Arendt’s interpretation of the American Revolution on this very basis, arguing that the revolution created a situation in which the people were not – and could not be – subsumed into a single governmental or extra-governmental form. See Frank, Constituent Moments, 41-66. 31 Ibid., 7. See 24-6 for where Frank’s argument touches upon structural formation.

22

popular sovereignty which ontologically unites the people with the state so as to form a proper

opponent for the unmediated crowd; one which makes its own claim, in other words, to speak for

the people. The touchstone of post-revolutionary conflict, then, lies in answering the next

question that arises: if the task of post-revolutionary transition is to provide an alternative

manifestation of the people to that provided by the crowd, how can this be done?

Facing the Challenge: The General Good and Dual Meanings of Popular Sovereignty

The answer to this question is simple in theory and controversial in practice: the rulers-

ruled gap can be confounded by creating an institutionalized version of the popular voice that

betters the crowd because it is able to privilege the general good. While the government can

never fully identify itself with the crowd save through its own dissolution, it can challenge the

true location of the people within the rulers-ruled dichotomy by seeking another manifestation of

the popular voice. If the system of rule is constructed such that the people’s voice is funneled,

filtered, or amplified in a manner that, through the government, they come to speak not only their

opinions, but also their interests, then the crowd’s claim to best represent the people meets with a

forceful challenge. For who are the people truly, and what does it mean to have them rule – is it

to take them as they are, either without government or in perpetual contradistinction to it, or to

build a state around both their opinions and their interests at once?

Interestingly, the general shape of this solution to the challenge of the crowd may have

been hit upon, perhaps unknowingly – he was never a great theorist32 – by Mao, who stated in

one of his more pro-government moments that “freedom is freedom with leadership and this

democracy is democracy under centralized guidance, not anarchy. Anarchy does not accord with

32 See Schram, Mao Tse-tung, 223-4; Stuart R. Schram, The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung (New York and London: Frederick A. Prager, 1963), 111-2.

23

the interests or wishes of the people.”33 Though this may not seem entirely trustworthy coming

from Mao, it plays upon an “opening” for fighting the claim of the crowd that appears on the

conceptual level, in defining “popular sovereignty” itself. Popular sovereignty has two halves

which it is tempting to connect: popular participation in government, and popular benefit from

the actions of government. What is the goal of popular participation if not, at least partially, the

general good – in Abraham Lincoln’s infamous words, how would we conceive of a hypothetical

government that was “by the people,” but not “for the people”? Would the people truly be

sovereign? The promise of a vague but fundamental, and frustratingly tense, association between

popular good and popular voice – the “public spirit” and the “public opinion,” as Arendt

sometimes puts it, or the “general will” and the “will of all,” as in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s

famed approach – has dogged democratic theory for centuries, with many attempting to either

demonstrate how the general arises from the cacophony of particulars, or formulate the question

in such a way that the divide does not exist.34 In the specific context of post-revolutionary

transition, this general-particular problem sharpens and takes on a particular role: it becomes the

controversial means to tackling the challenge of the crowd. Whether or not a connection between

popular voice and popular good is in reality logically inescapable, such an association has been

used by many leaders and thinkers to address the problem of post-revolutionary transition. In the

context of the challenge of the crowd, the possibility of a link between popular good and popular

participation feeds into the validity of a governmentally constructed popular voice that can claim

to speak to interest as well as opinion.

33 Quoted in Starr, Continuing the Revolution, 154. 34 Arendt, On Revolution, 217, 65-70, 155. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “On the Social Contract,” in The Basic Political Writings, trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987), 148, 150-1, 155-8, 161-2, 203-6.

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The second conceptual “opening” for the general interest to enter upon the scene of

popular sovereignty and post-revolutionary transition is provided by the governing ideologies of

the American and Russian Revolutions themselves. Though republicanism and Marxism

permitted myriad variations in terms of how the crowd-challenge was to be combated and what

popular sovereignty truly required, they also provided overarching considerations that brought

the voice of the unmediated crowd into doubt. In most instances, this was closely related to the

concerns that made government necessary at all. In the American case, the ideas of the

Enlightenment, Christianity, and social-contractarianism emphasized the inherent fallibility of

man, especially when he allowed his passions to pull him from the course of reason or virtue.35

Evident in many theories of that era was a tendency to equate the most rational and/or religiously

virtuous man with the true manifestation of the person himself, or, equivalently, to equate liberty

not with license but with adherence to natural, divine, or rational law.36 The ideas such as these

that fed into eighteenth-century republicanism tended to cast vice and malignant passions or

interests as inconsonant with the highest form of the human: they were semi-external forces

which one ruled one’s self by overcoming. As we will see in the following chapter, this concern,

formulated mostly as the fear of passion, played a much larger role in the work of the Federalists

than of the Anti-Federalists. It was relevant, however, to the shared ideas of divided government,

35 Morton White, The Philosophy of the American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 20-7, 38-49, 65; Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 286-7, 475-7, 492-6, 501, 505, 510; Frank, Constituent Moments, 69-81. Corwin, The Progress, 16, 22, 24-5; Kenyon, Men of Little Faith, entire, especially 63, 78-9. 36 For example, all of these tendencies are evident in the work of John Locke, who, whether or not he played a pivotal role in American Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary thought, represents well the era’s separation of real man from flawed man. See John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), especially 270-2, 284, 305-9, 351. See also Corwin, The Progress, 16. The faith in reason (to overcome the ugliness of tyranny) that marked the age is well demonstrated by John Adams’ “A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law,” in The Political Writings of John Adams, ed. George W. Carey (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2000), entire, as well as Adams’ 1970 letter to Samuel Adams (which emphasizes human fallibility more than the former): John Adams, “Letter to Samuel Adams, October 18, 1790,” in The Political Writings of John Adams, ed. George W. Carey (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2000), entire.

25

a judiciary, and especially the concept of representation (and the necessity of a relatively small

assembly), as the Founders shared a fear of the mob that, for many, was even stronger than their

fears of individual vices and failings.37 For the Americans, then, the crowd did not necessarily

form a trustworthy representative of the people in their truest capacity, for it subjected and even

enhanced the flaws that they were instituting government to escape. There was room, therefore,

in the era following the American Revolution, for an institutional manifestation of popular

sovereignty that isolated the people from the influences of passion, vice, and demagoguery to

claim superiority to the voice of the crowd.

In the Russian case, the overarching ideology of Marxism called the veracity of the

crowd’s voice into doubt as well. Marxism is especially relevant to this discussion because it

tackled, on the scale of world history, the resolution of the same tension that this work addresses:

the relationship between the particular and the general.* Because “Man’s individual and species

life are not different,” but only appear to be so because of historically inherited material

conditions, to be truly free and to achieve the highest state possible for man it was necessary to

overcome, through communism, the general-particular tension embedded in the social, religious,

37 Kenyon, Men of Little Faith, 70-2; James Madison, Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787, Reported by James Madison (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1987), 39, 42, 135, 443; Frank, Constituent Moments, 76-9; Ralph Ketcham, Introduction to The Anti-Federalist Papers and the Constitutional Convention Debates, ed. Ralph Ketcham (New York: Signet Classics, 2003), 6-8; Corwin, The Progress, 18-22; Wood, The Creation, viii, 322, 509. Federalist 1 (Hamilton), in The Federalist Papers, ed. Clinton Rossiter (New York: Signet Classics, 2003), 29. The Federalist Papers, which are all taken from this volume, will hereafter be cited thus: Federalist number (author), page number. Federalist 10 (Madison), 76; Federalist 15 (Hamilton), 106; Federalist 55 (Madison), 339-40; Federalist 62 (“Probably Madison”), 377; Federalist 63 (“Probably Madison”), 380-8. Brutus, “Brutus XVI,” in The Anti-Federalist Papers and the Constitutional Convention Debates, ed. Ralph Ketcham (New York: Signet Classics, 2003), 331. Unless otherwise noted, all Anti-Federalist writings and speeches are taken from this volume and are listed separately in the bibliography under their pseudonyms, authors/speakers, or titles if authorship is collective (e.g. The Pennsylvania Minority). Brutus 1, 277; Pennsylvania Minority, 251-2; Melancton Smith, “Speech of June 25, 1788,” 352. * This, of course, despite Marx’s distaste for the abstracted term “general interest.” (Marx, “The German Ideology: Part I,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York & London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978), 161, 174.)

26

political, and, especially, economic organization of society.38 Once the material basis of society

had been transformed such that society no longer contained irreconcilable class interests, the

existence of the state as an abstract public realm and an alienated coercive force would no longer

be necessary, and it would eventually disappear.39 However, Marx and Friedrich Engels’

“withering away” of the state that comes with defeating all alienation requires a long and

arduous post-revolutionary process.40 Though the goal of Marxism was a society in which, in

essence, the crowd would reign, it was critical that the revolution and its aftermath address

“people as they are now…people who cannot dispense with subordination,” adjusting the

economic, political, social, and ideological conditions of the nation in order to transform fallible

capitalist man into communist man capable of stateless existence.41 In other words, then, though

38 Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978), 86. See also Marx, The German Ideology, 150, 154, 156-66, 168-70, 190, 193-200; Marx, On the Jewish Question, 32-6, 40-3, 46, 51-2; Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978), 54, 60, 65; Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, 70-101, 104-5; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978), 484-6. 39 Marx, Contribution to the Critique, 64-5; Marx, Economimc and Philosophic Manuscripts, 75-86; Marx, The German Ideology, 160-3, 174, 186-8, 193-200; Marx, After the Revolution, 545; Marx and Engels, Manifesto, 482-3, 485-6, 490-1 (“When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another.”). 40 Marx, On the Jewish Question, 39; Marx and Engels, Manifesto, 490-1; Karl Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Program,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978), 538; Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, 84; Karl Marx, “After the Revolution: Marx Debates Bakunin,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978), 542-3, 547; Friedrich Engels, Herr Eugen Duhring’s Revolution in Science (Anti-Duhring), quoted in Vladimir Ilich Lenin, “The State and Revolution,” in The Lenin Anthology, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1975), 320-1. Unless otherwise noted, all Lenin works are from this volume; they are listed separately in the bibliography to facilitate consultation. For Lenin’s affirmation of the principle that the state is an alienated and alienating power that both results from and proves class struggle, and thus must be eventually eliminated, see Lenin, State and Revolution, 313-7, 320-3, 326-7, 352-7, 382-4. For an affirmation of the length and difficulty of this process, see Lenin, Fright at the Fall of the Old and the Fight for the New, 424-5. 41 Quote is from Lenin, State and Revolution, 344-5. See also Marx, The German Ideology, 154-9; Marx, On the Jewish Question, 48-52; Marx, Contribution to the Critique, 64; Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, 84-5, 87-9, 94-6, 102; Lenin, State and Revolution, 322, 371-2, 376-82, 392; Lenin, Fright at the Fall of the Old and the Fight for the New, 425; Lenin, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, 489-91; Lenin, The Tasks of the Youth Leagues, 668-9.

27

the truly ideal voice was the crowd of the communist future, in which general-particular conflicts

on a large scale had been rendered impossible by material transformation, the crowd now – in the

moment in which that transformation needed to take place – was enmeshed in the material

relations and thought constraints of the capitalist system, and thus had no guarantee of advancing

the common good (i.e., that transformation itself).42 However, the transitional state of Marxism,

the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” was required to be controlled by the people, representing

“the most complete democracy,” “a higher type of democracy” than the “bourgeois distortion.”43

Because of this, Marxist revolutionaries were still forced, during the process of constructing

communism, to tackle the same challenge of the crowd as the Americans were: to construct a

democratic institution that somehow extracted the common good from a society of fallible

individuals.

In both cases, the fallibility of these individuals created an opening for bridging the

rulers-ruled gap and thereby solving the challenge of the crowd: not by deposing or eliminating

the crowd, whose persistence is Frank’s thesis, but by providing an alternative to it that married

the two halves of popular sovereignty. Because of ambiguities regarding where the people’s

truest selves can be found and whether their rule can be complete if their interests are not served,

the popular voice is mutable, each version with its own advantages. Because the general good

and the inclusion of the people in their own rule are intuitively related – though this relationship

is construed in a variety of different ways by different groups – the institution of popular

42 Marx, Contribution to the Critique, 61; Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, 87-9; Marx, The German Ideology, 148-51, 157-8, 163-4, 169, 172-4, 190-3; Marx, Manifesto, 483-4, 489 (“man’s ideas, views and conceptions, in one word, man’s consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and his social life”); Marx, Critique of the Gotha, 536; Lenin, State and Revolution, 344, 375, 380, 383-4. 43 Marx, Critique of the Gotha, 538; Lenin, State and Revolution, 322; Lenin, The Immediate Tasks, 457. Lenin elaborates upon this point while engaging with Marx’s writings on the Paris Commune: see Lenin, State and Revolution, 326, 338-46, 372-5. Lenin’s ideas regarding proletarian democracy will be considered at length in chapter two.

28

sovereignty becomes a qualitative project rather than a quantitative one. The people are no

longer clearly defined solely in contradistinction to their government, with their sovereignty

increasing only vis a vis that of the state; instead, they and their rule are constructed, not found.

In unifying the two halves of popular sovereignty, revolutionaries attempt to solve the challenge

of the crowd by allowing the people to rule through the government, and not solely against it.

Looking Ahead to the Next Two Chapters: The Crowd, the General Good, and Post-

Revolutionary Conflict

We have thus seen both the shape of the challenge of the crowd and the foundation of its

solution: bridging the rulers-ruled gap by institutionally constructing a version of the popular

voice that speaks to the general good. However, this last step is difficult and ambiguous enough

to form the epicenter of the bitter post-revolutionary conflict that defined the futures of both

nations. These conflicts, and their relationship to the crowd-challenge, will be the focus of the

next two chapters. The challenge of the crowd, in demanding a consideration of the relationship

between general and particular in order to legitimize post-revolutionary states, saddles

revolutionaries with the task of deciding and discerning where the general good lies, and how

one may privilege it using post-revolutionary institutions. It is over this task, that of how one

unites popular participation and popular good and of whether such a pursuit is feasible, that

revolutionary coalitions in both America and Russia fractured into bitterly dissenting factions.

In the next two chapters, I will demonstrate that even though these revolutionaries all

faced the same challenge, their distinct assumptions regarding the nature of humanity,

knowledge, government, and society rendered their solutions vehemently opposed to one

another. In chapter two, I will discuss those revolutionaries who united rulers and ruled by

29

deriving the general good from the declarations of the masses. These thinkers diverged from one

another based upon whether they relied upon immersion within a particular type of experience,

or upon transcendence of particularity, to reveal the common interest. These divergent

epistemologies led to divergent institutions: those who relied upon immersion, namely the Anti-

Federalists, V.I. Lenin (in one sense), and Alexandra Kollontai, constructed institutions with the

goal of isolating and amplifying the proper communities; by contrast, those who turned to

transcendence, such as the Federalists, Luxemburg and Karl Kautsky, and Lenin (in another

sense), sought to institute popular sovereignty by elevating those capable of farsighted thought.

The denial of either of these strategies and the assumption that the rulers-ruled gap is un-

bridgeable leads, as we will see in the third chapter, to its own host of demands. Proposing an

objectively measurable good, as do Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin, leads to faith being placed

in the leadership to the exclusion of the mass voice; on the other hand, assuming that the people

are inherently unrepresentable, as does Thomas Jefferson, leads to a perpetual tension between

rulers and ruled that supports itself with the assumption that the people are attached enough to

the republican form to preserve it even through governmental rupture. These are the scattered

positions provoked by the challenge of the crowd, and by the deeply ambiguous but compelling

goal of popular sovereignty. In this manner, the problems of theory that lead to the discourse of

permanent revolution, on the one hand, and the observed historical problem of post-revolutionary

conflict, on the other, reinforce and reveal one another. By approaching these post-revolutionary

conflicts from the perspective of the shared challenge of the crowd, we locate the particular

factors and considerations that rendered revolutionaries’ historically concrete solutions to this

same abstract-conceptual problem so very different. Through such an investigation, not only do

30

we better understand our own history, but we are better able to ask where today’s revolutions and

post-revolutionary conflicts may lead.

31

2 Popular Sovereignty: Alternatives to the Crowd

As the proverbial dust settled on the revolutionary transfers of power in America and Russia,

leaders of each uprising grappled with defining the nature of the power they now held. In both

nations, sovereignty had been claimed in the name of the people; but, in the aftermath of

revolution, the people were defined most obviously in their capacity outside and in opposition to

the state – that is, as the arbitrary and unmediated crowd. To bridge this chasm and somehow

constitute the people into the government, revolutionary leaders were faced with the task of

constructing an institutionally mediated popular voice that could claim an advantage over the

crowd’s immediacy. That advantage lay in the hazy intersection between popular interest and

popular voice: the possibility of a governmental manifestation of the people’s will that

privileged, facilitated, and revealed the general good.

But despite the ideologies of republicanism and Marxism that had previously unified the

revolutionary coalitions, these leaders could not agree on how, precisely, one constructed such a

manifestation of popular sovereignty. Though faced with the same task and guided by the same

general principles, revolutionaries in the two cases held incompatible views as to where and how

the general good could be found. This led them to formulate distinctive concepts of popular

sovereignty, separated not by more or less adherence to the principle of democracy, but by

incommensurable understandings of what it meant for a people to rule themselves. From the

point of view of each thinker or group discussed here, other formulations were dangerously, and

perhaps counter-revolutionarily, missing the point. Though leaders themselves did not argue in

these terms, we, by considering the challenge of the crowd, can locate the grounds upon which

they disagree: each believed that, because others’ formulations bring no guarantee of privileging

the general good, they could not provide a manifestation of the popular voice with any advantage

32

over that of the crowd, and thus the legitimacy of the new government was in doubt. In other

words, each group saw others’ ideas as missing the essential criterion of true popular

sovereignty: they left the people vulnerable to their own fallibility, rather than providing for true-

self government by allowing citizens’ best, wisest, and truest selves to rule.

In this chapter, I will examine such conflicts in both revolutions, demonstrating their

adherence to this overall analysis. Though I consider the cases in succession, cross-references

will be made throughout. In America, I will focus upon the Anti-Federalist/Federalist ratification

debates between 1787 and 1790. Here, the Federalists strictly identified popular sovereignty with

the rule of reason, and put forth a process of institutional filtration by which individual

particularities were balanced and transcended into true popular sovereignty, separate from the

pernicious influence of faction and passion. By contrast, the Anti-Federalists viewed the

particular interests of citizens as closely associated with communities, turning to immersion

within a small and homogeneous republic to locate the good of all. Turning to Russia, I will first

discuss the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly in favor of the Soviets, contrasting Kautsky

and Luxemburg to Lenin as representing opposing conceptions of how one isolates, encourages,

and tracks the voice of the universal class. Next, I will address Lenin’s views of the Bolshevik

Party and the Workers’ Opposition, demonstrating that they represent diverging views of how

one compensates for the fallibility of the proletariat. These views, centered as they are around

immersion versus filtration, echo the ideas of Anti-Federalism and Federalism respectively,

indicating a surprising parallel across seemingly disparate cases.

The American Case: Federalists, Anti-Federalists, and the 1787 Constitution

33

We may enter the American ratification debate by examining the role played by the states vis a

vis the people in each group’s assessment of the Constitution-making process. This comparison

sets up a question: why did the Anti-Federalists, often assumed to be more populist or

majoritarian than the Federalists,44 repudiate popular ratification in favor of the states? Despite

populist-sounding fears of the “lordly and high-minded” “harpies of power” who would “possess

a language and manners different from yours,” the Anti-Federalists railed against the

Constitution’s focus upon individuals rather than the state governments.45 For them, the

Convention had bypassed and undermined the sovereign states, forging “the ropes and chains of

consolidation” by drawing the people into a process in which they had no place.46 The

Pennsylvania Minority spoke suspiciously of the now-revered preamble phrase “We the people,”

noting disapprovingly that it was written in “the style of a compact between individuals entering

into a state of society, and not that of a confederation of states.”47 Patrick Henry attacked the

same phrase, arguing in the Virginia Convention that “The question turns, Sir, on that poor little

thing – the expression, We, the people, instead of the States of America.”48 Later in the same

speech, he elaborated upon the ineligibility of the Constitution’s appeal to the people:

The assent of the people in their collective capacity is not necessary to the formation of a Federal Government. The people have no right to enter into leagues, alliances, or confederations: They are not the proper agents for this purpose: States and sovereign powers are the only proper agents for this kind of Government.49

44 See Charles A. Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (New York: The Free Press, 1986), entire, especially 292, 295, 309-10, 314-5, 324, 325; Wood, The Creation, 516; Kenyon, Men of Little Faith, 57, 80. 45 Pennsylvania Minority, 253; John DeWitt III, 315; Cato V, 318. Wood, The Creation, 526. 46 Patrick Henry, Speech of June 5, 1788, 208. 47 Pennsylvania Minority, 246. 48 Henry, Speech of June 5, 199. 49 Ibid., 207.

34

With such statements, the Anti-Federalists presented a worldview in which state governments

were the vessels of the politics of union, with the influence of the people upon the process of

Constitutional formation limited and translated by the legitimate sovereignties of the states.

Much of Anti-Federalist criticism, therefore, rested upon the necessity of recognizing as

legitimate an entity separate from, though theoretically constructed by, the people in their

unmediated capacity.50

By contrast, the Federalists – in what Gordon Wood describes as a rhetorical strategy that

helped fuel a transformation in republican ideology – appealed conspicuously to the ultimate

sovereignty of the people themselves, over and above the derived authority of the states.51 In

almost the same statement as the above-quoted Anti-Federalists, but with very different

inflection, Madison (as “Publius”) proudly proclaimed that “Instead of reporting a plan requiring

the confirmation OF THE LEGISLATURES OF ALL THE STATES, [the delegates] have

reported a plan which is to be confirmed by the PEOPLE.”52 For Madison, the needs of the

population transcended state sovereignty, for “the safety and happiness of society are the objects

at which all political institutions aim and to which all institutions must be sacrificed.”53 It made

little sense from this viewpoint to erect the general government upon the derivative authority of

the states rather than the original and transcendent authority of the population themselves, both

conceptually (because “In free Governments the rulers are the servants, and the people their

superiors and sovereigns”) and pragmatically (as “the great fabric to be raised would be more

50 Pennsylvania Minority, 242-6; Federal Farmer 1, 264; Federal Farmer 2, 265-7; John DeWitt III, 312-3; Melancton Smith, Speech of June 20, 1788, 341. Alpheus Thomas Mason, “The Constitutional Convention,” in The Confederation and the Constitution: The Critical Issues, ed. Gordon S. Wood (Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1973), 38-9, 52-3; Wood, The Creation, 485-6, 520, 526-31, 534. 51 Wood, The Creation, 530-5. Federalist 40 (Madison), 245; Federalist 49 (Madison), 310-11. 52 Federalist 40 (Madison), 247. 53 Federalist 43, 276. See Federalist 45 as well (Madison), and Federalist 40 (Madison), 245.

35

stable and durable, if it should rest on the solid foundation of the people themselves, than if it

should stand merely on the pillars of the legislatures”).54 James Wilson emphasized states’

constructed and transient nature in the Philadelphia Convention, asking, “Can we forget for

whom we are forming a Government? Is it for men, or for the imaginary beings called States?”55

For the Federalists, then, in their search for a better vehicle of union, the sovereignty of the states

caved far more easily to the sovereignty of the people in their unmediated capacity than it did for

the Anti-Federalists.

To understand this dispute over the extent of states’ legitimacy, we must examine the role

that it played in the larger ratification-era conflict over the meaning of popular sovereignty.

Within the context of their solutions to the problem of the crowd, these different emphases that

Federalists and Anti-Federalists placed upon the role of the states are sensible consequences of

each group’s theory of the general good. I will argue that, for the Anti-Federalists, general was

derived from particular by convening governments in communities where particular naturally

aligned with general. For them, representation was ideally structured to mirror, as closely as

possible, the actual distribution of interests within the society; these interests’ harmonious

interaction was ensured by properly structured government set upon an organically united

community, and knowledge of the common good was obtained through immersion within these

communities themselves rather than abstracting from them. By contrast, the Federalists saw no

such homogeneity. Taking a more atomistic perspective on society, they asserted the existence of

faction, self-interest, and conflict within every community, no matter how small. In this view, the

general good was revealed not through embracing sympathy, but by transcending it, with

54 Madison, Notes on the Debates, 371, Madison quoting Franklin; Madison, Notes on the Debates, 41, Madison quoting himself. Alpheus Thomas Mason agrees, writing that “ratification by the people firmly imbued the government with popular sovereignty”: Mason, The Constitutional Convention, 53. 55 Quoted in Mason, The Constitutional Convention, 47.

36

detached and farsighted wisdom allowing one to distill the general from the range of competing,

selfish, blinded particularities. In this manner, Federalists’ and Anti-Federalists’ competing

conceptions of post-revolutionary government divided over, not the importance of the people’s

voice, but what this voice meant and where it was found.

The Anti-Federalists: Small Territories, Mirror Representation, and Communal

Shared Fate

The conflict over general and particular between Federalists and Anti-Federalists largely took

place in the arena of representation. While both groups shared a sense of the necessity of

representation, divided government, and checks and balances, they differed most profoundly in

terms of how the people were to be drawn into this structure: that is, how to create representation

that gave governmental popular sovereignty an advantage over the crowd by linking the popular

voice to the general good. Despite the looseness of the Anti-Federalist group, lacking even an

obvious standard-bearer such as “Publius,” their objections to the Constitution indicated and

implied a coherent vision of what popular sovereignty meant and required.56 For the Anti-

Federalists, being in a position to pursue the general good was a matter of placement within a

community homogeneous enough to sustain republican government. Such community formed

the basis of political consensus.

To demonstrate this, I will begin with a central Anti-Federalist criticism that was

discussed earlier: the tendency of the proposed Constitution toward consolidation rather than

confederation, creating a power-swelled federal sovereignty which was expected to “in its vortex

[swallow] up every other Government upon the Continent.”57 Linking what they saw as the

56 On the disunity of the Anti-Federalists, see Wood, The Creation, 485-7. 57 John DeWitt III, 313.

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destruction of the states to revolutionary betrayal itself, Anti-Federalists railed against “This

overturn of all individual governments…in this total dereliction of those sentiments which

animated us in 1775.”58 Even above the condemnation, mentioned above, that the Constitution

undercut the legitimate state authorities, the Anti-Federalists believed that a republic on the scale

of the American nation simply would not work. No amount of good administration, virtue, or

interest-balancing could be counted upon to protect freedom in the general government, for its

problem was intrinsic: “one consolidated government…from the nature of things will be an iron-

handed despotism.”59 “It is the opinion of the most celebrated writers on government,” they

wrote, “and confirmed by universal experience, that a very extensive territory cannot be

governed on the principles of freedom, otherwise than by a confederation of republics.”60 Several

reasons were given for this. The nation, they argued, was simply too big for laws emanating from

the capital to be obeyed voluntarily or regularly, and thus “they must be executed on the

principles of fear and force in the extremes”; moreover, its size defied accountability, as “it is

scarcely possible, in a very large republic, to call [officials and representatives] to account for

their misconduct, or to prevent their abuse of power.”61 There were also accusations that too few

men were being entrusted with too much power, and the fall of the Roman Republic served as an

explicit and metaphorical reminder of the fate of governments that removed themselves from

popular proximity.62 The common origin of all of these fears and condemnations was the fact

58 John DeWitt II, 195-6. 59 Pennsylvania Minority, 242. See also Cato III, 14-5; An Old Whig, “An Old Whig IV,” in Federalists and Antifederalists: The Debate over the Ratification of the Constitution, ed. John P. Kaminski and Richard Leffer (Madison, WI: Madison House, 1998), 18; Kenyon, Men of Little Faith, 58-9, 80, 165; Wood, The Creation, 527. 60 Pennsylvania Minority 242. Very similar quote in Federal Farmer I, 264. See also Cato III, 15. 61 Federal Farmer 2, 266, and see also Cato III, 16; Brutus I, 279, and see also Federal Farmer 2, 268-9. 62 For example, Pennsylvania Minority (248): “Thus, it appears that the liberties, happiness, interests, and great concerns of the whole United States, may be dependent upon the integrity, virtue, wisdom, and knowledge of twenty-five or twenty-six men.” See also Brutus I, 279; Brutus VI, 283; Brutus XII, 299; Cato V, 318-20. Even the

38

that the largeness of the nation rendered the Anti-Federalists’ definition of representation

impossible, and thus precluded the true rendering of the popular voice into the general

government.

The problem with federal representation for the Anti-Federalists was twofold: first, its

lack of diversity given its necessarily small numbers; and second, its physical removal from the

population, leading to independence from citizens. Melancton Smith matter-of-factly

summarized the Anti-Federalist position on June 21, 1788:

The idea that naturally suggests itself to our minds, when we speak of representatives is, that they resemble those they represent; they should be a true picture of the people; possess the knowledge of their circumstances and their wants; sympathize in all their distresses, and be disposed to seek their true interests.63

For the Anti-Federalists, in other words, a representative body needed to mirror its population,

“so constituted as to be capable of understanding the true interests of the society for which it

acts” by possessing “the same interests, feelings, opinions, and views, which the people

themselves would possess, were they all assembled.”64 The general good, that is, was accessed

through immersion within the literal experiences and sentiments of citizens. For a representative

body to be capable of such immersion, it was necessary for “every order of men in the

community…[to] have a share in it”: for “professional men, merchants, traders, farmers,

mechanics, et cetera, to bring a just proportion of their best informed men respectively into the

legislature.”65 But the Anti-Federalists were certain that such “a representation, possessing the

sentiments, and of integrity, to declare the minds of the people” could hardly be manifested by a

Anti-Federalists’ chosen pseudonyms, notably Brutus and Cato, explicitly reference Rome; see also Henry, Speech of June 5, 201; Brutus I, 276; Cato V, 319; Brutus X, 287. 63 Melancton Smith, Speech of June 21, 1788, 342. 64 Brutus IV 325; Pennsylvania Minority 247, and almost the exact same quote in Federal Farmer 2, 265. See also Kenyon, Men of Little Faith, 61; Isaac Kramnick, “The ‘Great National Discussion’: The Discourse of Politics in 1787,” William and Mary Quarterly XLV no. 1 (January 1988), 14. 65 Federal Farmer 2, 265. See also Wood, The Creation, 491.

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body with a maximum representatives-to-citizens ration of 1:30,000.66 “Where is the people in

this House of Representatives?” asked “John DeWitt”:

Can this Assembly be said to contain the sense of the people? – Do they resemble the people in any one single feature? – …have you a right to send one of your townsmen…? – Have you a right to send one from your county? Have you a right to send more than one for every thirty thousand of you? Can he be presumed knowing to [sic] your different, peculiar situations…?67

“DeWitt”’s argument is saturated with the tight association between interest, community, and

representation that the Anti-Federalists relied upon in order to derive the general good from the

voice of the population.68 The features of the people that it was most important to draw into

government derived from experiential life within local communities, and for the Anti-Federalists,

damningly, at the federal level it was simply “not possible to collect a set of representatives, who

are acquainted with all parts of the continent.”69

It was not small numbers alone that prevented federal representatives from acting as a

“faithful Mirror”: their situations also removed, in the Anti-Federalists’ view, the need or ability

to purposefully identify with local particularities.70 Even those who gave the most leeway to the

good intentions of the future representatives were concerned that their physical separation from

their constituents, sheltered in the District of Columbia that “Cato” was certain “would be the

asylum of the base, idle, avaricious and ambitious,”71 would make it difficult for them to

66 Brutus I, 277. 67 John DeWitt III, 315. See also Wood, The Creation, 522. 68 See Kenyon, Men of Little Faith, 61-3. 69 Melancton Smith, Speech of June 27, 1788, 355. For further Anti-Federalist comment upon national heterogeneity and the unfeasibility of representation at the federal level, see Luther Martin, “Luther Martin’s Genuine Information,” in Federalists and Antifederalists: The Debate over the Ratification of the Constitution, ed. John P. Kaminski and Richard Leffer (Madison, WI: Madison House, 1998), 41-2; George Mason, “Speech in the Virginia Convention,” in Federalists and Antifederalists: The Debate over the Ratification of the Constitution, ed. John P. Kaminski and Richard Leffer (Madison, WI: Madison House, 1998), 42-3; Kenyon, Men of Little Faith, 83; Wood, The Creation, 491-2, 515, 527. See also Cato III, 16-7, for a specific reference to how the presence of Southern aristocracy would destroy national community. 70 John DeWitt III, 316. 71 Cato V, 317-8.

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understand the situations, capabilities, and troubles of those back at home, and anticipated that

the distance between many regions and the capital would limit communication.72 “DeWitt”

expected that during the House’s two-year term, members would, “however well

disposed…become strangers to the very people choosing them.”73 Melancton Smith insisted that

“It is a truth, capable of demonstration, that the nearer the representative is to his constituent, the

more attached and dependent he will be,” and that long removal from their original communities

would hardly help representatives maintain “a knowledge of the circumstances and ability of the

people in general, a discernment how the burdens imposed will bear upon the different

classes.”74

Added to this was, for many of the Anti-Federalists, the fear that the Constitution would

privilege an aristocratic, wealthy, and educated class. Not only did such men have different

interests and experiences than the remainder of society, but what Anti-Federalists saw as their

inevitable dominance over the political system would further dislodge the kinship between rulers

and ruled through which knowledge of the general good arose. The Anti-Federalists felt that

“The weakness of the representation, tends but too certainly to confer on the rich and well-born,

all honours”: despite America’s supposed classlessness, men gifted by their creator with good

“birth, education, talents and wealth…will command a superior degree of respect – and if the

government is so constituted as to admit but few to exercise the power of it, it will, according to

the natural course of things, be in their hands.”75 With this prediction, the Anti-Federalists

warned that “From the mode of their election and appointment [the national legislatures] will 72 Pennsylvania Minority, 247, 253-4; Brutus I, 279; Federal Farmer II, 265-6, 268-9; Brutus XVI, 334; Smith, Speech of June 27, 355-6. Importantly, this relates closely to the arguments against “virtual representation” made during the revolution itself. For just one example, see Thomas Paine, “Common Sense,” in Thomas Paine: Rights of Man, Common Sense, and Other Political Writings, ed. Mark Philip (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 7. 73 John DeWitt III, 315. 74 Smith, Speech of June 25, 355; Smith, Speech of June 21, 343 75 Brutus IV, 329; Smith, Speech of June 21, 343. See also Kenyon, Men of Little Faith, 62.

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have no congenial feelings with the people” because their circumstances meant that they were

“not obliged to use the pains and labour to procure property as the other.”76 This was worsened

by the lack of annual elections or enforced office rotation, another prominent Anti-Federalist

complaint.77

All of these factors, in short, contrived to destroy the close and truly personal relationship

between representatives and citizens that the Anti-Federalists saw as necessary to free

government. On the one side, representatives would “not be viewed by the people as part of

themselves, but as a body distinct from them,” because “they will have no persons immediately

of their choice so near them, of their neighbours and of their own rank in life, that they feel

themselves secure in trusting their interests in their hands.”78 On the other, the few natural

aristocrats that the Constitution was to privilege “cannot have that sympathy with their

constituents which is necessary to connect them closely to their interest.”79 With these

considerations of representation in mind, we can already see how state governments would be

seen as superior to federal ones because of their ability to better embody the Anti-Federalist

definition of representation. For the Anti-Federalists, state governments “have a near connection,

and their members an immediate intercourse with the people,” rather than an “unnatural

separation” from them.80 “Brutus” praised “the state legislature, where the people are not only

nominally but substantially represented,” and the Pennsylvania Minority argued that “In the

76 Pennsylvania Minority, 253; Federal Farmer I, 262; Smith, Speech of June 21, 344. See also Centinel III, 189: “[the proposed government] will give full scope to the magnificent designs of the well-born; a government where tyranny may glut its vengeance on the low-born.” Though such rhetoric was prominent, Wood asserts that Anti-Federalists and Federalists were about equally wealthy: Wood, The Creation, 483-4. 77 Centinel I, 231; Pennsylvania Minority, 248; Cato V, 319-20; Brutus I, 279; John DeWitt III, 313-5; Brutus XVI, 334; Smith, Speech of June 25, 350; Madison, Notes of Debates, 107, quoting future Anti-Federalist Elbridge Gerry. Kenyon, Men of Little Faith, 73-4. 78 Brutus IV, 328. 79 Smith, Speech of June 21, 345. 80 Federal Farmer 2, 267. On the importance of small states to Anti-Federalist theory, see Wood, The Creation, 499-500, 520.

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government of this state…the members of the legislature are taken from among the people, and

their interests and welfare are so inseparably connected with those of their constituents, that they

can derive no advantage from oppressive laws and taxes.”81 In other words, the state

governments did not suffer from the problems that the Anti-Federalists found with representation

at the national level. This meant that they were far better able to translate the voice of the people

into a republican administration, thereby blurring the lines between rulers and ruled and

challenging the representative claim of the crowd. This gave the state governments the

legitimacy, populism, and knowledge of the general good which, to the Anti-Federalists, the

Constitutional government would necessarily lack.

However, it is critical to note that this advantage of state government did not derive

simply from its better imitation of, and greater submission to, the people in their unmediated

capacity. Instead, the state governments were better because their particular style of closeness to

the people allowed them to manifest the type of representation that accessed the general good.

Melancton Smith’s speeches at the New York ratifying convention are a useful microcosm of

this subtle distinction. On June 21st, 1788, Smith appealed to the superiority of state governments

because, in their legislatures, the people had “full and fair representation.”82 Four days later,

however, he decried the governing abilities of the population: “I know that the impulses of the

multitude are inconsistent with systematic government. The people are frequently incompetent to

deliberate discussion, and subject to errors and imprudencies.”83 But, for Smith, these capricious

multitudes were not the same as the legislatures that gave them full and fair representation.

Instead, “The state legislatures were select bodies of men, chosen for their superior wisdom, and

81 Brutus IV, 330; Pennsylvania Minority, 253. 82 Smith, Speech of June 21, 347. 83 Smith, Speech of June 25, 352. For further comment upon the Anti-Federalists’ distrust of unmediated majorities, see Kenyon, Men of Little Faith, 77-80, 83, 85.

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so organized as to be capable of calm and regular conduct.”84 For Smith and his fellows, then,

the state legislatures were lauded not because they precisely imitated the people, but because

they were the solution to the dilemma between the incompetence of the unmediated populace and

the despotism of the separated federal government: the solution, in other words, to the problem

of the crowd.

The reason that the state legislatures were able to attain this superiority to the crowd

derives from the Anti-Federalists’ understanding of how the general good was accessed, which is

the foundation of their dispute with the Federalists. The Anti-Federalists found the largeness of

the United States problematic not simply because of the distance and population size it entailed,

but because of what they saw as its insurmountable heterogeneity. The “Different laws, customs,

and opinions” of the several states, constantly clashing, would “prevent such conclusion as will

promote the public good.”85 For the Anti-Federalists, this public good could only be relied upon

in homogeneous communities. According to “Brutus,” “In a republic, the manners, sentiments,

and interests of the people should be similar. If this be not the case, there will be a constant

clashing of opinions; and the representatives of one part will be continually striving against those

of the other.”86 This implies that the possibility of consensus and the resolution of interests is

related to the proper structure of a community: the Anti-Federalists viewed the common good not

as a balancing of partial and passionate demands, but as the tangible and accessible – to those

with a moderate degree of wisdom and character – intersection of local interests whose

circumstances, and thus fates, were largely shared. For them, “Individuals entering into society

become one body, and that body ought to be animated by one mind,” which was

84 Smith, Speech of June 25, 352 85 Federal Farmer I, 264; Brutus I 277. On this theme, see Kenyon, Men of Little Faith, 82. 86 Brutus I, 277. See also Wood, The Creation, 499-501.

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“impracticable…in a consolidated government.”87 “Brutus,” in his fourth essay, integrated all of

the Anti-Federalist critiques and concepts thus:

The great art, therefore, in forming a good constitution, appears to be this, so to frame it, as that those to whom the power is committed shall be subject to the same feelings, and aim at the same objects as the people so, who transfer to them their authority. There is no possible way to effect this but by an equal, full and fair representation; this, therefore, is the great desideratum in politics.88

In other words, the general interest lives locally; it comes from immersion within, rather than

removal from, the everyday interests of particular communities and orders within those

communities, which work together in a relatively harmonious whole. And while it was

impossible for the nation to function as such a community due to its “heterogeneous and

discordant principles,” the Anti-Federalists had no such qualms about the states. Thus, a locally-

based, mirror-style system of representation, in which men of character were chosen from each

rank of the community to speak for those who shared their experiences, was the best way to

elevate the governmental popular voice above that of the crowd – not by imitating it, but by

translating particular interests into a communal, purposely inclusive, and rights-based

government. As Melancton Smith asked, “Can the best men make laws for a people of whom

they are entirely ignorant?”89 For him, the answer and implications were entirely clear; but it was

precisely these assumptions that the Federalists challenged with their own solution to the

problem of the crowd.

87 Smith, Speech of June 20, 341. Smith himself had a rather interesting take on this particular Anti-Federalist argument, identifying the common good more closely with the good of a particular group – the yeomanry – instead of as shared between all orders of society. (See page 345.) This adaptation of the Anti-Federalist argument is, interestingly, closer to the Marxist and Leninist view of the proletariat as the universal class than the mainstream Anti-Federalism or the Federalism, a topic that will be considered later in this chapter. 88 Brutus IV, 325. 89 Smith, Speech of June 27, 355.

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The Federalist Extraction of Wisdom from Faction

Despite differences between them, some of which would sharpen into outright political

opposition in a little over a decade, and their own various qualms regarding the Constitution,

those who wrote and spoke in favor of ratification used and constructed a cohesive ideology that

solved the problem of the crowd on an entirely different basis than did that of the Anti-

Federalists.90 Elaborated most extensively in the Federalist Papers of Madison, Hamilton, and

Jay, writing as “Publius,” Federalism relied upon the pervasiveness of faction and the separation

between reason and passion to inextricably unite popular sovereignty with the dominance of

wisdom and deliberation. Though the Federalists had the same goal as their Anti-Federalist rivals

– to establish a manifestation of the popular voice that facilitated the rule of the common good –

their distinct assumptions led them to construct a divergent ideal of representation: one in which

representatives must transcend, rather than mirror, the local sympathies of their constituents.

As essentially a propagandistic response, though a highly educated one, to the Anti-

Federalist campaign, the Federalist Papers put forth several refutations of individual Anti-

Federalist points. The authors emphasized the continued role of the States in the proposed

Constitution, calling the distinction between “consolidation” and “confederacy” so emphasized

by the Anti-Federalists “arbitrary…supported by neither principle nor precedent.”91 They

admitted that “As it is essential to liberty that the government in general should have a common

interest with the people, so it is particularly essential that the [House of Representatives] should

have an immediate dependence on, and an intimate sympathy with, the people,” but denied the

Anti-Federalist claim that this was only secured through annual elections, for “No man will

90 For example, Alexander Hamilton was none too pleased with republicanism itself during the Constitutional Convention: see Madison, Notes of Debates, 196, 589. See also Mason, The Constitutional Convention, 51, on Madison’s feeling that the Constitution was insufficiently nationalizing. 91 Federalist 9 (Hamilton), 70. See also Federalist 39 (Madison), 239-43, and Federalist 45 (Madison), 285-90.

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subject himself to the ridicule of pretending that any natural connection subsists between the sun

or the seasons, and the period within which human virtue can bear the temptations of power.”92

They dealt similarly with Anti-Federalist criticism of the House’s size, arguing that “the ratio

between the representatives and the people ought not to be the same where the latter are very

numerous as where they are very few.”93 What makes these debates more profound than “The

House is too small” versus “No it isn’t” is the concept of popular sovereignty that underpinned

each position. The issue most relevant for our purposes here, then, is the Federalist critique of

mirror representation and the understandings of human nature and general good upon which it

rested.

Federalism put forth a dual critique of the ideal of mirror representation: its impossibility

and its undesirability. The impossibility critique was most prominently formulated by Hamilton

in Federalist 35-6. For Hamilton, “an actual representation of all classes of the people, by

persons of each class” was “impracticable and…unnecessary.”94 It was impracticable because

people would not choose to vote for members of their own class, electing instead “those in whom

they have most confidence; whether those happen to be men of large fortunes, or of moderate

property, or of no property at all.”95 He even implied that the mirror ideal may be restrictive,

asserting that “strong minds in every walk of life” ought to have the opportunity to acquire “the

tribute due to their merit, not only from the classes to which they particularly belong, but from

the society in general.”96 Hamilton thus anticipated that under any free system, including the new

Constitution, the people would largely be represented by “landholders, merchants, and men of

92 Federalist 52 (Madison), 324; Federalist 53 (Madison), 327-8. 93 Federalist 55 (Madison), 339. 94 Federalist 35 (Hamilton), 210. 95 Ibid., 211. 96 Federalist 36 (Hamilton), 213.

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the learned professions,” but he found in this no cause for concern.97 For Hamilton, there was no

reason that class-based or occupational ties should prove most important in determining the

identity of one’s proper representative. He saw instead commonalities in interest between the

manufacturer and the merchant who was his “natural patron and friend” and by whom “their

interests can be more effectually promoted,” seeing no reason to submit this merchant-

manufacturer tie to that between “the carpenter and the blacksmith, and the linen manufacturer or

stocking weaver,” simply because the latter were presented as members of the same order of

society.98 He also identified “the learned professions” as having “no distinct interest in society,”

and “the landed interest” as “perfectly united, from the wealthiest landlord down to the poorest

tenant.”99 In other words, Hamilton saw society as both more united and more divided than did

the Anti-Federalists, using both the unity of large swaths of society (merchants with

manufacturers, all landowners with each other, and academics with anyone and everyone) and

the possibility of disagreements within them (as noted, between different types of manufacturers)

to challenge the idea that people’s interests would somehow be furthered by electing men from

what were deemed to be their own stations in life, implying instead that interest and

representation traveled in less external and concrete channels.100

For the Federalists, these ideal channels were based instead upon wisdom: seeking one’s

ideal representative by focusing upon external aspects was a chimera, distracting one from the

actual goal of electing “Inquisitive and enlightened statesmen” with “those acquired

endowments, without which, in a deliberative assembly, the greatest natural abilities are for the

97 Federalist 35 (Hamilton), 212. 98 Federalist 35 (Hamilton), 210; Federalist 36 (Hamilton), 214. 99 Federalist 35 (Hamilton), 211. 100 For a similar perspective, but focused more around the homogeneity assumed by Hamilton and its relation to classical republicanism, see Wood, The Creation, 496.

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most part useless.”101 These representatives would hardly be unsympathetic to the needs of the

population, as they were tied to them by electoral dependency and “the necessity of being bound

himself, and his posterity, by the laws to which he gives his assent,” but, because they were

chosen for their abilities rather than their stations, would have the advantage of the

enlightenment and integrity toward which the people’s free choice naturally tends.102 This idea of

wisdom as superior to immersion as an epistemological source of the general good found its

most profound (and famous) rendering in the Federalist treatment of faction, exemplified in

Madison’s work as “Publius.” If the Anti-Federalists focused upon ensuring that the territory to

be governed was small enough such that the common interest was almost wholly accessible via

the concrete, shared interests of its individual citizens, the Federalists denied that any community

could be small enough to reach such a level of homogeneity and consensus.103 Federalist writings

are rife with references to the constant disagreements among men and the pernicious and

persistent ability of passion to confound reason. Political truth, though objectively clear like

mathematics, was constantly obscured by “the passions and prejudices of the reasoner” as he

“yield[ed] to some untoward bias.”104 Disagreement was “sown in the nature of man”: even

“where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have

been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts.”105 In

sum, “There are endless diversities in the opinions of men,” regardless of the homogeneity of

101 Federalist 36 (Hamilton), 215; Federalist 35 (Hamilton), 210. See also Federalist 57 (Madison), 348; Wood, The Creation, 479-83. 102 Federalist 35 (Hamilton), 212. See also Federalist 62 (Madison), 378; Federalist 64 (Jay), 389-90; Wood, The Creation, 510-12. 103 Historians generally see Madison in particular as undergoing an ideological transformation, reaching this viewpoint by 1787 at the latest. See Ketcham, Introduction, 4-5; Corwin, The Progress, 34-5; Wood, The Creation, 472-4, 501-5, 606-7. Also, note Letter from Madison to Jefferson, October 24, 1787, quoted in Federalists and Antifederalists: The Debate over the Ratification of the Constitution, ed. John P. Kaminski and Richard Leffer (Madison, WI: Madison House, 1998), 200-3. 104 Federalist 31 (Hamilton), 190. See also Federalist 15 (Hamilton), 100-8, in which Hamilton blames similar qualities for the persistence of anti-ratification arguments which he feels have been thoroughly disproved. 105 Federalist 10 (Madison), 73, 73-4.

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their circumstances.106 Simple aggregation and deliberation could not solve the problem: passion

was escaped and consensus reached no better, and perhaps even worse, in assemblies, because of

their “propensity…to yield to the impulse of sudden and violent passions, and to be seduced by

factious leaders into intemperate and pernicious resolutions.”107 Thus, for the Federalists, the

aligning of concrete interests and communal sympathies that formed a cornerstone of the Anti-

Federalist project would have little influence upon whether policy actually pursued the common

good, because men were fallible, divided, and vulnerable to the delusions of passion.108 This

division and irrationality did not lead merely to frustrating disagreement, but to oppression,

especially when a majority was animated and united by a spirit of self-interest that led it to,

intentionally or unwittingly, “sacrifice to its ruling passion or interest both the public good and

the rights of other citizens.”109 This concept of “majority tyranny” was perhaps the Federalists’

main fear: without deviating from republican principles, they had to somehow “guard one part of

society against the injustice of the other part.”110

But how could this be done? Clearly, unlike from the Anti-Federalist perspective, the

answer could not lie in immersing one’s self as much as was possible within a unified

community. The Anti-Federalists were able to believe that, if the republican state were properly

constituted, the common good would look roughly the same from all angles, minimally distorted

by the fallible, subjective lenses through which each citizen viewed the communal future. But for

the Federalists, such distortion was constant and pervasive. Individual experiences, instead of

106 Federalist 22 (Hamilton), 146. See also James Madison, “Vices of the Political System of the United States,” in The Mind of the Founder: Sources of the Political Thought of James Madison, ed. Martin Myers (Indianapolis and New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1973), 89-90. 107 Federalist 62 (“Probably Madison”), 377. 108 See Federalist 10 (Madison), 73: “As long as the reason of man continues fallible…different opinions will be formed. As long as the connection subsists between his reasons and his self-love, his opinions and his passions will have a reciprocal influence on each other; and the former will be objects to which the latter will attach themselves.” 109 Federalist 10 (Madison), 75. 110 Federalist 51 (Madison), 320. See also Corwin, The Progress, 17-23, 34-5; Wood, The Creation, 409-13, 463-7, 474-6, 502, 509, 517-8.

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aligning with the common good, simply fractured it in the eyes of citizens and policymakers,

giving passion, manipulation, and selfishness fair play. This set up the dreaded situation of

people acting as their own judges, as Madison lamented:

No man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause, because his interest would certainly bias his judgment, and, not improbably, corrupt his integrity. With equal, nay with greater reason, a body of men are unfit to be both judges and parties at the same time…Justice ought to hold the balance between them. Yet [in a popular system] the parties are, and must be, themselves the judges.111

In attempting to privilege the general amid all these conflicting particulars, then, the Federalists

faced a seemingly paradoxical problem: how to seek, as disinterestedly as possible, the common

good, in a nation that was supposed to be governed by “the sense of the majority,” but where no

one could be wholly trusted to be infallibly virtuous and wise?112 In other words, how could one

construct a middle way between the tyranny of an all-powerful few and the tyranny of a deluded

many, a system of government which incorporated the wisdom of the people but not their

mistakes?

The Federalist solution to this problem was the exact opposite of the Anti-Federalists’:

construct a large republic, and use representation to filter, rather than mirror, the population.113

The large republic and the ideal of wisdom-based representation were mutually reinforcing

goals. In a large, diverse, and populous territory, it is “less probable that a majority of the whole

will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive

exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to…act in unison with each other.”114 This

meant that both representatives and citizens would be less vulnerable to the consequences of 111 Federalist 10 (Madison), 74. 112 Federalist 22 (Hamilton), 142. 113 Kramnick, The Great National Discussion, 14, uses these terms in noting the groups’ different representational theories. 114 Federalist 10 (Madison), 78. See also Federalist 51 (Madison), 322; Francis Corbin, “Speech in the Virginia Convention,” in Federalists and Anti-Federalists: The Debate over the Ratification of the Constitution, ed. John P. Kaminski and Richard Leffer (Madison, WI: Madison House, 1998), 35; Madison, Vices of the Political System, 91.

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passion, regardless of their own characters. The large nation also served to improve the quality of

representation itself, both because “in so great a number a fit representative would be most likely

to be found,” and because these statesmen – subject to oversight, of course, by voters or other

branches – would be furthered in their ability to “safeguard [citizens] against the tyranny of their

own passions” by the enlarged perspective that a large and multifaceted citizenry would force

upon them.115 The effect of this type of representation was thus

to refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country…Under such a regulation, it may well happen that the public voice, pronounced by the representatives of the people, will be more consonant to the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves.116

But this quote by Madison provokes a possible counterargument: does this focus upon filtration,

elevation, and the transcendence of immediate passions in favor of wisdom, especially in order to

serve the unchanging laws of justice, cause the Federalists to lose track of the sovereignty of the

people? Is there not a discrepancy between the populism of the Anti-Federalists, who took such

pains to represent individuals as they existed within the contexts of their daily lives, and the

supposed populism of this ideology, where the proposed solution to the problem of the crowd

was the “total exclusion of the people, in their collective capacity” from the political process

except as the origin and beneficiary of all power?117 Did the Federalists not secure their idea of

the common good by detracting from the role of the people themselves – in other words, note the

115 Federalist 57 (Madison), 351-2; Federalist 63 (“Probably Madison”), 383. See also Federalist 35 (Hamilton), 212: “is the man whose situation leads to extensive inquiry and information less likely to be a competent judge of their nature, extent, and foundation than one whose observation does not travel beyond the circle of his neighbors and acquaintances?”; Wood, The Creation, 507-8. 116 Federalist 10 (Madison), 76-7. Emphasis added. 117 Federalist 63 (“Probably Madison”), 385. Original quote in italics. For the people as the source of all power, see Federalist 15 (Hamilton), 105; Federalist 22 (Hamilton), 148; Federalist 39 (Madison), 236-7; Federalist 43 (Madison), 276; Federalist 46 (Madison), 291; Federalist 62 (“Probably Madison”), 378; Wood, The Creation, 530-5, 542-7.

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conflicting concerns of the common good and democracy, and decide to privilege the former by

limiting the latter?

This was the stance taken by many Anti-Federalists, and implied by some historians

since.118 But within the Federalist worldview, their own scheme of representation was not only

the most sustainable, but also the truest possible manifestation of popular sovereignty. The

reason is a deep-seated division between passion and reason, implied in Madison’s quote above

as well as his previously noted reference to the “tyranny of their own passions.” Federalist

ideology was built upon the idea, prevalent in the Enlightenment era, that one’s passions were

not one’s truest self: if one was not ruled by one’s reason, one was not truly free.119 The Anti-

Federalists, on the other hand, foregrounded no such claim in their focus on proximity,

homogeneity, and the context of local sympathies in bringing the general good into accessible

alignment. The “people” upon which they focused lived in concrete contexts, and their voice was

best accessed by the alignment of external characteristics – and the shared experiences they

signified – between rulers and ruled. But for the Federalists, as individual self-governance was

only possible when reason reigned, so, too, was governance on the level of a republic. “The

propensity of all single and numerous assemblies to yield to the impulse of sudden and violent

passions, and to be seduced by factious leaders into intemperate and pernicious resolutions,” was

not only a problem because it violated the dictates of justice as an external standard of right, but

118 Though his stance is more nuanced, this is not far from the view espoused by Gordon Wood in Creation, especially 491, 516-7. Frank presents this as the viewpoint of Sheldon Wolin and his fellows, Constituent Moments, 30. Arguing against such a construal is Kenyon, Men of Little Faith, 57-8, 80-1. 119 See Corwin, The Progress, 16; Morton White, The Philosophy of the American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 10-16; Locke, Two Treatises, 270-2, 284, 305-9, 351. An interesting counterpoint to this appears in Adams’s arguments incorporating the passion for distinction into the foundations of civic life. For more, see John Adams, “Thoughts on Government: Applicable to the Present State of the American Colonies,” in The Political Writings of John Adams, ed. George W. Carey (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 2000), 288; John Adams, “Discourses on Davila,” in the same volume, 307-28.

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because adherence to justice was identical to true self-government.120 Because justice was only

evident to reason, and reason represented the triumph of the true self over tyrannical passion, an

unjust assembly or population was not engaging in popular sovereignty. The “cool and deliberate

sense of the community,” which “will, in all free governments, ultimately prevail,” then had to

be separate from the “irregular passion” which could lead the people to “call for measures which

they themselves will afterwards be most ready to lament and condemn.”121 This is why, for the

Federalists, “The republican principle demands that the deliberate sense of the community

should govern the conduct of those to whom they intrust [sic] the management of their affairs;

but it does not require an unqualified complaisance to every sudden breeze of passion, or to

every transient impulse...”: because the “deliberate” will of the people, aimed at the general

good, was the only one that could possibly be the product of their more free, enlightened, and

true selves.122 Thus, we see the Federalist solution to the problem of the crowd. The union of

general and particular came only from the method of governmental construction that favored the

reason-based transcendence of particular circumstances and misleading, shackling passions. The

level of popular sovereignty came not from external similarities between representatives and

citizens, but from the degree to which the governmental structure favored popular wisdom rather

than passion: for “it is the reason, alone, of the public, that ought to control and regulate the

government. The passions ought to be controlled and regulated by the government.”123

Popular Sovereignty Debated: What (and Whom) Can We Believe?

120 Federalist 62 (“Probably Madison”), 377. 121 Federalist 63 (“Probably Madison”), 382. 122 Federalist 71 (Hamilton), 430. 123 Federalist 49 (Madison), 314.

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Viewed in this light, the American ratification debate reveals that the ideal of “popular

sovereignty” is essentially mutable: its content and consequences depend upon epistemological

assumptions regarding how fallible humans can know and act upon their common good. The

Federalists and Anti-Federalists attempted to bridge the rulers-ruled gap in starkly opposing

ways, each with its set of cautions and assumptions. Neither can be considered obviously right

without choosing, and proving, where it is best to place one’s faith: in order to render the

governmental manifestation of the people superior to the voice of the crowd, we must believe

either in the ability of wisdom to transcend particularity and access an abstract commonality, as

the Federalists did, or in the existence of an accessible general good within homogeneous

communities which are locatable geographically, as did the Anti-Federalists. The difference

between them comes down to questions whose answers are far from obvious: is faction

persistent, or is it not? Do compromise and filtration represent the rule of reason over passion, or

the attempt to fold essentially heterogeneous communities into a single sovereignty riddled with

difference? Why should rational man be man’s truest self, and how can we even be certain that

the federal constitution will elevate wisdom – but, on the other hand, why should we anticipate

homogeneity of interest within geographical communities, when individuals’ lives, minds, and

goals are so utterly different even within neighborhoods and families?

This is not to say, of course, that there is no overlap between Federalists’ and Anti-

Federalists’ conceptions: the Federalists acknowledged the need for some sympathy between

representatives and constituents, and the Anti-Federalists assumed a certain degree of wisdom in

their representatives. But in the main, their focuses were distinct and opposing, which leads us to

the acknowledgment that the Federalists’ and Anti-Federalists’ shared task – to raise the prized

banner of “popular sovereignty” – provoked different institutional conceptions, each necessitated

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by its own logic but undercut by its own unique weaknesses. Both sides held to a stubborn faith

in the capacity of fallible humans for self-government that was free and just: they believed that a

bridge across the rulers-ruled gap could be built. This faith drove them to seek the pillars upon

which their bridges could rest. We are left to decide for ourselves which of these bridges we

expect to stand. In any case, centuries later, we find the Federalists and Anti-Federalists shouting

from opposite banks: each claimed, based upon his epistemological and psychological

assumptions, that only his solution could marry the people and their state. It is along this same

river that we find the Russian revolutionaries: taking up, in their own way, the mantle of the

Anti-Federalist focus upon the alignment of interests, but critically questioning the possibility of

knowing one’s interests at all.

The Russian Case: The Universal Class, the Vanguard, and the Soviet Government

Exactly one hundred and thirty years after the Constitutional Convention, the year 1917 saw

Russia thrown from relatively underdeveloped, peasant-based absolutism into an industry-based

ideology that claimed to herald the future of mankind. In many respects, the post-revolutionary

situation in Russia was radically different from that in America. Russia’s transformation was

occurring in a post-industrial world and in the throes of the First World War, and it was not a war

of independence; the spectacle of the French Revolution had deeply affected the discourse of

politics and revolution, while the Americans had acted within Enlightenment thought and the

experience of colonial self-government.124 Moreover, the October Revolution, the aftermath of

124 On the role of France, see, for example, Kerensky’s use of it as a cautionary tale in his response to Lenin’s speech at the First Congress of Soviets, 1917, quoted in Richard Sakwa, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 41; similarly, Karl Kautsky, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1964), 57, 96-7.

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which will be the focus here, was Russia’s second revolution in a year.* Nevertheless, despite

these differences in circumstance, the American and Russian revolutionaries faced the same

post-revolutionary problem: how to translate the people – who nursed, according to Lenin, a

healthy resentment of the government after living for centuries under a state which was “an

organ for oppression and robbery of the people” – into the government itself, with a voice

superior to that of the crowd because it privileged the general interest.125 I will demonstrate this

shared task, and the divergent responses it provoked, by focusing upon two debates that occurred

in the first four years following the October Revolution. The first debate, that of the Constituent

Assembly versus the Soviets, raises the question of the universality of democratic forms,

especially relevant here in terms of accessing and amplifying the voice of the working class with

its unique access to the general good. The arguments of Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg will

be contrasted to Lenin’s defense of the Soviets as a higher form of democracy. The manner in

which each professes a different understanding of what democracy implies demonstrates not only

the importance of the crowd-challenge as a touchstone of conflict, but the dangers of interpreting

this moment in Bolshevik history as a simple denial of democracy without acknowledging the

role of the general good in legitimating post-revolutionary popular sovereignty. The latter

conflict, between the Party and the Workers’ Opposition, focused not upon accessing the voice

of the universal class, but upon refining it in the face of pre-communist human fallibility. Lenin

will again be placed against Alexandra Kollontai, in her 1921 pamphlet for the Workers’

Opposition, as representing divergent views regarding the relationship between the everyday

* The relationship between the February and October Revolutions is a significant question in itself, and is one of the more interesting idiosyncrasies of the Bolshevik takeover. However, as the purpose of this work is to establish that concept within the contexts of the American and Russian cases, I work here only with post-October Russia, simply because its longevity makes it easier to study to the same degree as the American case. The February-October transition is also complicated by the sharpness of concrete issues like peace and land, rendering it intriguing for further research, but not ideal for immediate study. 125 Lenin, The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government, 446.

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experiences of the working class, the farsightedness of the Party, and the derivation of proper

economic policy. Though both advocated for the importance of class-based understanding, they

differed in terms of the institutional contexts in which they felt such understanding could

flourish. The analysis of these two debates will form the body of this section; they will be

preceded, however, by an assessment of the role of Marxism throughout the Russian case.

Marxism and the Proletariat as Universal Class

The tradition of Marxism, though interpreted differently by each player in these debates,

nevertheless provided a loosely shared framework within which conflicts over the relationship

between the particular and the general occurred.* Because it foregrounded the method of

accessing the general good more explicitly than did eighteenth-century republicanism, Marxism

deserves its own preface before we examine the conflicting interpretations that arose following

the Russian Revolution. As mentioned in the first chapter, Marxism was occupied, on a large

scale, with the resolution of the general-particular problem. One of Marx’s major tools in

accomplishing this final synthesis was the universal class, the industrial proletariat, whose

immediate, personal, experience-based interest he identified with the interest of all. For Marx,

because large-scale historical transformations were driven by dialectically generated class

revolutions, the “positive transcendence of private property as the appropriation of human

life…the positive transcendence of all estrangement” required a class whose particular interests

were, in fact, universal.126 This class was the proletariat, a class with “radical chains…a class

which is the dissolution of all classes, a sphere of society which has a universal character

* Marxism is, of course, a broad tradition, but my concern here is with the points that were widely shared from Marx and Engels through Lenin and Trotsky. 126 Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, 85. See also Marx, Contribution to the Critique, 62-5; Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, 82-5, 99-100; Marx, The German Ideology, 151-4, 157, 162-6, 168-70, 174, 191-3, 196, 200; Marx and Engels, Manifesto, 473-5, 478-84, 489, 490-1; Marx, Critique of the Gotha, 532.

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because its sufferings are universal, and which does not claim a particular redress because the

wrong which is done to it is not a particular wrong but wrong in general.”127 This universality

arose from the decidedly concrete circumstances of economic organization. The proletariat, as

the industrial labor force, was the only class whose existence was not predicated upon exploiting

other classes by alienating them from the means of production.128 Therefore, only proletarians’

interests lay in destroying oppression itself: in dismantling the economic and political order and

socializing the productive forces such that exploitation was no longer necessary or possible.129

When the proletariat, as other classes had throughout history, overtook the state in pursuit of its

own emancipation, it would undertake the emancipation of all mankind, for its interests – due to

its material status as the antithesis to society’s thesis – drove it to destroy the material basis of

authority and coercion, that is, to pursue the common good.130

The implications of this will be critical in both this chapter and the next. The material

foundation of the proletariat’s universality closely linked economic and political goals: in

Marxism, there could be no freedom, democracy, or self-government while the state persisted,

and that state was necessitated by the class struggle, which derived from the nation’s (and

world’s) economic situation.131 Full political success was impossible, therefore, without

economic transformation. For Marx and his followers, then, all non-proletarian forms of

127 Marx, Contribution to the Critique, 64. 128 Ibid.; Marx, The German Ideology, 162, 173-4, 179, 190-3; Marx and Engels, Manifesto, 478-81, 482 (“The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive forces of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation”); Marx, Critique of the Gotha, 532. 129 Marx, Contribution to the Critique, 63-5; Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, 82, 84; Marx, The German Ideology, 166, 168, 173-4, 192-3, 197-200; Marx and Engels, Manifesto, 482, 491. 130 On each class’s takeover of the state, see Marx, Contribution to the Critique, 62; Marx, the German Ideology, 151-4, 163, 164-9, 174, 194-6; Marx and Engels, Manifesto, 473-5, 478, 482, 489-91. For Lenin’s perspective, see Lenin, State and Revolution, 327-8. 131 Marx, On the Jewish Question, 30-6, 39-40, 42-3, 46; Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, 86; Marx, The German Ideology, 149-69, 172-5, 188, 193, 195, 197-200; Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 490-1. See Lenin, The State and Revolution, 314: “The state only exists where there are class antagonisms and class struggle,” as well as pages 314-7 in general.

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“democracy” inexcusably obscured and prolonged alienation and struggle by emancipating a

metaphysical entity called the “citizen” and leaving the real man in the chains of the factory.132

This is why it was essential to privilege the universal class: because only the pursuit of its

concrete interests in the economic realm would accomplish the emancipation of all.

This role of the universal class, however, nevertheless left open the challenge faced by

the Americans: through what institutional forms could the people become more truly popular

than in their unmediated capacity as the crowd? As were the men of Federalism and Anti-

Federalism, Marxist men, too, even proletarians, were fallible. It was unclear whether

proletarians and workers automatically understood their own interests, or if they needed to be

taught; if they did need to be taught, who could teach them; and even if they knew their interest,

would they act upon it without incitement or guidance, or act in a productive way?133 In other

words, the identification of a particular situation, and the interest that it generated, with the

comprehension of the common good begged the further question of precisely how interest arose

from experience and how one discerned the best method to advance that interest. Moreover, the

possibility of proletarian fallibility, in the face of the necessity of economic transformation for 132 Marx, On the Jewish Question, 32, 39-41, 43-6; Marx, Contribution to the Critique, 60-2; Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, 86; Marx, the German Ideology, 160-1, 169-70, 187-8; Marx and Engels, Manifesto, 485. For a thorough consideration of capitalist labor and freedom, see Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, 70-81. 133 In addition to the discussions below, see Marx, After the Revolution, 543-4; Mary-Alice Waters, Introduction to Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, ed. Mary-Alice Waters (New York: Pathfinder Press, Inc., 1970), 19-24; Alix Holt, “Introduction to Chapter Five: Crisis in the Party: The Workers’ Opposition,” in Selected Writings of Alexandra Kollontai, trans. and ed. Alix Holt (London: Allison & Busby, 1977), 152-5; Ronald Tiersky, Ordinary Stalinism: Democratic Centralism and the Question of Communist Political Development (Boston: George Allen & Unwin, 1985), 14-33; Jonathan Harris, The Split in Stalin’s Secretariat, 1939-1948 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008), 1-2, 153-9; Sergei V. Iarov, “The Tenth Congress of the Communist Party and the Transition to NEP,” in A Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution, ed. Edward Acton, Vladimir Iu. Cherniaev, and William G. Rosenberg (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997), 119-20; Robert Service, “Lenin,” in A Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution, ed. Edward Acton, Vladimir Iu. Cherniaev, and William G. Rosenberg (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997), 157; Michael Waller, Democratic Centralism: An historical commentary (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1981), entire, especially 4-20, 26-30, 35-6, 40-1, 73-6; Robert Vincent Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution: Communist Opposition in Soviet Russia (Boulder, CO, and London: Westview Press, 1988), 123-29, 135. All of these sources note disputes regarding the relationship between knowledge and proletarian experience. Starr argues that Mao’s mass line was an attempt to tackle this issue: Starr, Continuing the Revolution, 145-56, 190-1.

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true political freedom, cast doubt upon the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which was,

as shown in chapter one, supposed to be the first truly majoritarian democracy in world history.

What did democracy mean, and how far could its demands extend, when even the experiences of

the universal class may not point it in the proper world-historical direction? These problems were

the Bolshevik version of the challenge of the crowd, the reactions to which are the focus of the

remainder of this chapter. In the aftermath of the seizure of power, the Bolshevik Party was left

to fracture over the same post-revolutionary question as the American Founding Fathers: how to

constitute the public voice into the government such that it will be truer and better than the voice

of the crowd, while maintaining the dictatorship of the proletariat’s claim to the highest form of

democracy yet?

Privileging the Universal Class: The Constituent Assembly and the Soviets

This question motivated one of the first disputes between formerly united revolutionaries

following the October Revolution: the conflict over the Constituent Assembly. The January 1918

dissolution of the Assembly by the Soviet-affiliated Bolshevik government inspired fierce

condemnations of Bolsheviks’ anti-democratic attitude, to which the Bolsheviks retorted that

democracy was not defined as a set of Western parliamentary institutions, and that, instead, the

Soviets formed a much more living and accurate embodiment of the will of the toiling masses.134

This debate thus turned directly upon definitions of democracy, with each group basing its

position upon assumptions regarding where the general good could be found. On the side of the 134 Robert Service, A History of Modern Russia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 74-5; Nikolai N. Smirnov, “The Constituent Assembly,” in A Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution, ed. Edward Acton, Vladimir Iu. Cherniaev, and William G. Rosenberg (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997), entire (especially 332, where he concludes that the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly spelled the end of democracy in Russia and the inevitable totalitarianism and isolation of the USSR); Lev Grigor’evich Protasov, “The All-Russian Constituent Assembly and the Democratic Alternative,” in Revolutionary Russia: New Approaches, ed. Rex A. Wade (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), entire, especially 244, where he presents the Assembly as the “unrealized democratic alternative to the Bolshevik regime.”

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Assembly, I will examine German Marxists Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Kautsky, before turning

to Lenin’s defense of the Soviets.* Political enemies for most of their lives, but in accord

regarding the Assembly’s necessity, Luxemburg and Kautsky assumed, at least in these writings,

the importance of democracy as such in the transition to socialism. It is this “as such” to which

Lenin retorted, arguing that only the Soviets could amplify the popular voice which held an

advantage over the crowd: the voice of the workers, whose experiences allowed them to discern

and seek the general good.

Both Luxemburg and Kautsky, though their critiques differed, relied upon relatively

universalistic definitions of democracy and its components. In condemning the Bolsheviks’

actions as undemocratic, they implied that the popular will, even the working-class will that

reflects the general good, could be revealed in a representative body with fixed electoral terms,

party lists, and the support of traditional “bourgeois” rights. Their arguments are most notable

here for the fact that they did not explicitly define democracy, especially in regard to the class

struggle. By emphasizing the importance of democracy and then implicitly equating democracy

with the parliamentary form of the Constituent Assembly, Luxemburg and Kautsky allowed

Lenin to elevate the Soviets as an alternative form of democracy that better combined popular

participation with popular good, and therefore better contradicted the crowd’s claim to

sovereignty. Kautsky, in his 1918 pamphlet The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, argued that

democracy precedes, transcends, and facilitates socialism, which is “inseparably connected with

democracy.”135 He saw class-based restrictions on suffrage as “an absurdity” and as “narrowing

the outlook of the proletariat,” arguing instead that the industrial working class, when it was truly

* Though Luxemburg was, in fact, Polish, she wrote the works I will consider here while imprisoned in Germany, where she lived nearly half her life and undertook much of her mature revolutionary work. See Waters, Introduction, 1-6. 135 Kautsky, The Dictatorship, 6; 6-7, 19-20, 23, 28-41, 54-5, 76-7, 86-7, 89, 131, 134, 149.

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the majority, would dominate democratic systems without need for coercion; Marx’s dictatorship

of the proletariat, he claimed, required universal democracy.136 As well as linking the Constituent

Assembly to a democratic archetype, this implied that class consciousness derived from

awareness of a larger societal context of interests and relationships, available only in an inclusive

assembly, and not necessarily from the experiences of the workers alone.137 Kautsky concluded

from this assessment that the goal of Communist parties ought to be protecting democracy

wherever it appears, for “socialism without democracy is unthinkable.”138 Though Luxemburg

scoffed at Kautsky’s universalism and his opposition of dictatorship and democracy, her critique

followed similar lines.139* While, unlike Kautsky, she implied at times that anti-democratic

measures against non-proletarian classes would be tenable, she also sometimes joined him in

criticizing the lack of universal suffrage, and joined him wholeheartedly in accusing Trotsky and

Lenin of “eliminat[ing] democracy as such.”140 For Luxemburg, it seems, despite her lifelong

radicalism, the dictatorship of the proletariat would be manifested in a traditional democratic

system protected by a socialist party, for that party would preserve “the most important

democratic guarantees of a healthy public life and of the political activity of the laboring masses:

freedom of the press, the rights of association and assembly,” with a degree of fidelity

impossible under capitalism because “the ruling class…[knows] how to influence…results by all

136 Ibid., 28, 29; 9-11, 19-20, 28-30, 45, 47, 76, 96-7. 137 Ibid., 29-30. 138 Ibid., 6-7; 5, 8-10, 45-7, 88-97, 149. 139 See Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution, 33: “this industrious man (Kautsky)…has torn one hold after another in the fabric of socialism. It is a labor from which socialism emerges riddled like a sieve, without a whole spot left in it.” See also 76-9. * I speak here of Luxemburg’s 1918 manuscript from prison regarding the Russian Revolution. Despite the informational issues that she had there and her later reconsideration of this position on the Constituent Assembly, Luxemburg’s position here was a part of the discourse on the issue and displays the characteristics that make it useful to our account; moreover, tragically, the remainder of her life was too short for her to produce an in-depth account of her changed perspectives. (Waters, Introduction, 12, 24-5, 29.) 140 Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution, 62; 35, 48-9, 56-71, 74-5, 77-9.

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sorts of means.”141 In thus arguing, Luxemburg implied that such “bourgeois rights” did not

intrinsically cause man to alienate his power to the illusory public sphere, but could, in the

proper context, help to truly translate individual agency into government.142 Luxemburg also, in

responding to an argument of Trotsky’s, asserted that there was no significant separation inherent

between the will of the masses and its representative institution; instead, “the living fluid of the

popular mood continuously flows around the representative bodies, penetrates them, guides

them.”143 In sum, her reaction against the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly implied, as did

Kautsky’s, a worldview in which the general interest can be satisfactorily accessed through

aggregated, universally elected, stable parliamentary institutions, as long as political rights are

protected; and, moreover, in which such democracy facilitates the realization of the general

interest by allowing for the “unobstructed, effervescing life” that “brings to light creative force

[and] itself corrects all mistaken attempts.”144

In defense of the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly – which he and his fellow

Bolsheviks had vociferously supported before October – Lenin offered no rejection of the

importance of mass participation or even representative institutions.145 In fact, he asserted that

the search for superior democracy formed the basis of the Party’s decision to dissolve the

Assembly. In addition to the feeble argument that the Assembly’s electoral lists were out of date,

refuted concisely by Luxemburg’s assertion that the next step ought to have been to arrange new

elections, Lenin attacked the form of the Constituent Assembly itself as a manifestation of the

141 Ibid., 66-7; 51. 142 Cf. Marx, The German Ideology, 149-69, 200; Marx, On the Jewish Question, 39-46. 143 Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution, 60; 59-62. 144 Ibid., 70. 145 Lenin, State and Revolution, 342: “The way out of parliamentarism is not, of course, the abolition of representative institutions and the elective principle, but the conversion of the representative institutions from talking shops into ‘working’ bodies.” On Bolshevik support for the Constituent Assembly, see Lenin, April Theses (The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution), 299; Lenin, Theses on the Constituent Assembly, 418.

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bourgeois state that could never embody nor serve the all-important working classes.146 For

Lenin, typical forms of parliamentary democracy accompanied bourgeois economic domination

for the same reason that all state institutions were formed by any class: “to serve it.”147

Entrenched, consciously or unconsciously, in the class struggle, the bourgeoisie could do nothing

more than create a state which “freed” man as citizen in order to protect bourgeois-dominated

economic oppression, such that “In capitalist society…democracy is always hemmed in by the

narrow limits set by capitalist exploitation.”148 The bourgeois state’s celebrated equality, its very

capacity to draw all classes into political life and elevate to equal status men in their alienated

capacity as citizens (but not as real individuals engaging in labor), rendered bourgeois

democracy useless in the pursuit of real freedom.149 For Lenin, the overturn of the economic

system could never occur through aggregated participation in an alienated state set above the

people, requiring instead the pursuit of freedom for one’s whole person through the

transformation of economic life. Therefore, Lenin found it at best senseless and at worst

misleading to speak of “pure” democracy, which he called “the mendacious phrase of a liberal

who wants to fool the workers.”150 To reveal the will, needs, and future of the proletariat – which

was congruent with the general good because it would eventually transform and destroy the state

itself – it was necessary to construct a new form of proletarian, majority-controlled democracy “a

146 Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution, 59; Lenin, Draft Decree on the Dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, 6 January 1918, quoted in Sakwa, The Rise and Fall, 76-7; Lenin, Theses on the Constituent Assembly, 418-22; Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, 473: “The organ of what class was the Constituent Assembly of Russia?” 147 Lenin, State and Revolution, 317. See also Lenin, State and Revolution, 319-22, 372-5; Lenin, Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power, 405. 148 Lenin, State and Revolution, 372. See also Lenin’s injunction not to “consider the question of the Constituent Assembly from a formal, legal point of view, within the framework of ordinary bourgeois democracy and disregarding the class struggle and civil war,” in Theses on the Constituent, 421. 149 Lenin, Theses on the Constituent, 419, 420-1; Lenin, Fright at the Fall, 424-6; Lenin, The Chief Task of Our Day, 435; Lenin, The Immediate Tasks, 440-1; Lenin, The Dictatorship, 489-91. Smirnov’s remark that the Constituent Assembly, during its one meeting, was full of mortal enemies unwilling to compromise could support Lenin’s assessment here. See Smirnov, The Constituent Assembly, 331. 150 Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution, 467; 462, 465, 467-76. Lenin, State and Revolution, 371-4; Lenin, Theses on the Constituent, 421.

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million times more democratic than any bourgeois democracy,” after “first abolishing, destroying

the state machine created by the bourgeoisie for themselves.”151

If traditional, “bourgeois” democracy was insufficient to reveal the general good, not

only within the context of capitalism, but even after socialist revolution, what form did Lenin’s

superior democracy take? A first aspect is that participation within it was limited to the working

and peasant classes.152 However, as much as one may want to view this limitation as inherently

incompatible with popular sovereignty, one must consider it within Lenin’s particular method of

solving the particular-general challenge of the crowd.* As was established in the prior section,

Bolshevik ideology held that only the proletariat, as the universal class, was brought by its

situation to comprehend the need for the construction of communism. For Lenin, the notion that

universal suffrage, at least at present, could reveal “the will of the majority of the working

people” was simply false: the presence of the bourgeoisie in democratic bodies would only

entrench the bourgeoisie as an entity and maintain the system of exploitative relations that

prevented the construction of true freedom.153 The proletariat could learn nothing of the common

good from sitting in a chamber with other classes, but could pursue it only through abolishing

them: the impulses of the bourgeoisie were toward exploitation, alienation, and oppression, and

151 Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution, 471; Lenin, State and Revolution, 328. See also Lenin, The Dual Power, 302-3; Lenin, April Theses, 297; Lenin, Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder, 598-9. 152 Party Program of 1919, quoted in Sakwa, The Rise and Fall, 97. Nikolai N. Smirnov, “The Soviets,” in A Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution, ed. Edward Acton, Vladimir Iu. Cherniaev, and William G. Rosenberg (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997), 435; Protasov, The All-Russian Constituent Assembly, 252. * One must, as well, acknowledge the parallel with the American exclusion of women, African-Americans, Native Americans, and, for many, the propertyless, which will reappear in the third chapter. 153 Lenin, State and Revolution, 319-20. See also Lenin, State and Revolution, 327-8; Lenin, Draft Decree on the Dissolution, quoted in Sakwa, the Rise and Fall, 76-7; Lenin, April Theses, 297; Lenin, The Dual Power, 303-4; Lenin, Enemies of the People, 305-6; Lenin, Can the Bolsheviks Retain, 399; Lenin, Theses on the Constituent, 420; Lenin, The Tasks of the Youth, 668. Cf. Marx, After the Revolution, 545: “such a thing as a whole people in the present sense of the word is a fantasy.” Protasov reinforces this point, though he meant to support the Constituent Assembly, by stating that the Assembly “posed the threat of drowning the social bulwark of bolshevism – the urban working class and soldiers of the old army – in a sea of peasant votes” (Protasov, The All-Russian Constituent Assembly, 253).

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could have nothing to do with real popular sovereignty. Purely proletarian democracy, by

contrast, though it was inferior to the “truly complete democracy…without any exceptions

whatever” that would be established (and then begin to wither away) with communism, was

nevertheless a significant improvement upon the institutions of the past: it was a “democracy for

the people, for the majority,” focusing itself unblinkingly upon the masses who alone were

poised to grasp the general good.154 There was no universal democracy without communism,

only the choice of which class to privilege in order to get there; and, in Lenin’s mind, while

parliamentary democracy privileged the few exploiters, proletarian democracy elevated both the

majority and the sole group whose interests identified with interests of all.

As for the precise institutional form of proletariat-controlled democracy, Lenin saw no

reason to innovate further than the Soviets.* For him, “only workers’ Soviets, not parliament, can

be the instrument enabling the proletariat to achieve its aims.”155 The Soviets’ very novelty,

especially because they were constructed “on the direct initiative of the people from below, and

not on a law enacted by a centralised state power,” rendered them almost axiomatically better

than bourgeois democracy; they represented a firm break with “the kind of power…that

generally exists in the parliamentary bourgeois-democratic republics of the usual type.”156 Rather

than being set above the people both coercively and metaphysically, as a separate caste of rulers

154 Lenin, State and Revolution, 321-2, 368-9, 374. See also Lenin, State and Revolution, 315, 321-3, 328, 334, 339-46, 360-1, 366-74, 381; Lenin, April Theses, 297; Lenin, The Dual Power, 303; Lenin, Theses on the Constituent, 418; Lenin, The Immediate Tasks, 457; Lenin, Left-Wing Communism, 573; Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution, 462, 468-74. * In the case of Russia, that is; Lenin felt that the dictatorship of the proletariat could and would take a variety of different forms. See Lenin, State and Revolution, 335. 155 Lenin, Left-Wing Communism, 598-9. See also Lenin, State and Revolution, 326-7, 341-3; “To the Citizens of Russia (Decree of October 25, 1917),” In The Lenin Anthology, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1975), 417; Lenin, April Theses, 297; Lenin, The Dual Power, 301-3; Lenin, Can the Bolsheviks Retain, 399; Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution, 470-4. 156 Lenin, The Dual Power, 301-2. See also Lenin, Speech to the First Congress of Soviets, quoted in Sakwa, The Rise and Fall, 40; Lenin, Speech to the Soviets on October 25-6, 1917, quoted in Sakwa, The Rise and Fall, 55. On the Soviets’ mass-created novelty, see Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1994), 33.

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and as a forum where free citizens perpetuated the exploitation of real individuals, the Soviets

allowed for both a minimum of alienation and the withering away of the state that would lead to

true freedom:

since the majority of the people itself suppresses its oppressors, a ‘special force’ for suppression is no longer necessary! In this sense, the state begins to wither away. Instead of the special institutions of a privileged minority (privileged officialdom, the chiefs of the standing army), the majority itself can directly fulfil [sic] all these functions, and the more the functions of state power are performed by the people as a whole, the less need there is for the existence of this power.157

Thus, the very form of the Soviet state already rendered the general good more accessible than it

could be under bourgeois democracy, for “the bourgeois state does not ‘wither away’” and

therefore could never facilitate ideal stateless existence.158 Moreover, the Soviets were

institutionally better-suited to translate the class-conscious will of the workers into the

government: the election of and ability to recall all personnel at any time ensured that the

government was never a separate caste and rendered its expression of the popular will as

dynamic as was the situation of the proletariat itself.159 With the working-class composition and

constant permeability of Soviet administration, Lenin and the Bolsheviks sought to prevent the

Soviets from transforming into a removed, alienating state by drawing “the whole of the poor

into the practical work of administration.”160 The Soviets were a “working” body, “vest[ing] in

157 Lenin, State and Revolution, 340. See also Lenin, State and Revolution, 314-7, 327, 341, 345, 366, 374, 382-95; Lenin, Can the Bolsheviks Retain, 399-400. Cf. Marx, The German Ideology, 197: “The illusory community, in which individuals have up till now combined, always took on an independent existence in relation to them, and was at the same time, since it was the combination of one class over against another, not only a completely illusory community, but a new fetter as well.” 158 Lenin, State and Revolution, 322. See also Lenin, State and Revolution, 326, 328, 342-4; Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution, 467-8, 470. 159 Lenin, Can the Bolsheviks Retain, 399-400. See also Lenin, State and Revolution, 341-4; Lenin, The Dual Power, 302; Smirnov, The Soviets, 430-1. Smirnov also notes here the manner in which these direct democratic measures were, in practice, often limited, at least after the first blush of Soviet power. 160 Lenin, The Immediate Tasks, 457; Lenin, State and Revolution, 394-5; Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution, 470. See also Lenin, State and Revolution, 384-9; Lenin, Can the Bolsheviks Retain, 401-2; Lenin, The Immediate Tasks, 449, 457; Party Program of 1919, quoted in Sakwa, The Rise and Fall, 97; and Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution, 470: “Under bourgeois democracy the capitalists, by thousands of tricks…drive the people away from administrative

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the people’s elected representatives both legislative and executive functions,” which Lenin saw

as both preventing deception because “the parliamentarians themselves…have to execute their

own law, have themselves to test the results achieved in reality” and as further blurring the gap

between rulers and ruled:

Under socialism much of ‘primitive’ democracy will inevitably be revived, since, for the first time in the history of civilised society, the mass of the population will rise to taking an independent part, not only in voting and elections, but also in the everyday administration of the state. Under socialism all will govern in turn and will soon become accustomed to no one governing.161

In sum, then, the Soviets were, for Lenin, “the only possible revolutionary government, which

directly expresses the mind and will of the majority of the workers and peasants.”162 They

“reflected and expressed the moods and changes of opinions of [the oppressed] ever so much

more quickly, fully, and faithfully than any other institution.”163 The Soviets were the highest

form of democracy because they, and no other, located and magnified the long-hidden voice of

the working classes, which was the only voice which spoke to the common good and thus the

only voice that could rival that of the crowd. Lenin’s dispute with critics like Kautsky and

Luxemburg turned upon their divergent methods of deriving the general good: they disagreed as

to whether an advantage over the crowd could be gained through deliberation in a representative

forum whose membership was universal, or whether it was instead essential to suppress classes

whose impulses were axiomatically pathological. Lenin’s solution, we have seen, was the latter.

A further challenge arose, however, in addressing dissent and fallibility within the class whose

voice the Soviets sought to embody.

work…The Soviet government is the first in the world…to enlist the people, specifically the exploited people, in the work of administration.” 161 Lenin, The State and Revolution, 343-4. 162 Lenin, The Dual Power, 303. See also a very similar quote in the April Theses, 297. 163 Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution, 474.

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Responses to the Fallibility of the Proletariat: The Party and the Workers’ Opposition

If the two views above presented two methods of isolating and magnifying the working-class

voice, the following conflict – between the Workers’ Opposition, represented by Alexandra

Kollontai, and the Bolshevik Party’s democratic centralism, formulated most prominently by

Lenin – was grounded in divergent ideas of how to ensure that proletarian democracy privileged

the class-conscious sector of the laboring classes, that is, those who were aware of their interests

(and thereby the general interest). The participants in this discussion grappled with the

relationship between interest and knowledge – knowledge of both that interest itself and of the

proper tactics for its realization – and formulated opposing conclusions which have striking

parallels to the American concepts of immersion versus filtration. I will begin by presenting

Lenin’s formulation of the role of the Bolshevik Party, demonstrating the relevance of the

challenge of the crowd to his ideas of the Party’s identity and purpose as the integrator of mass

sentiments with farsighted leadership. I will then turn to the critiques presented by Kollontai in

her pamphlet on the Workers’ Opposition (1921), based upon the trade unions’ superior class

credentials and the relationship between proximity and economic innovation.

Lenin presented the Party as an institution designed to blur the gap between rulers and

ruled by privileging the population’s wisest selves. For him, popular sovereignty could not be

achieved simply by isolating the voice of the working masses – though this was an important

first step – because they were shackled by “insufficient class-consciousness and organisation”:

their perception of their true interests, the interests of all, was distorted by the context of

capitalism and struggle.164 Due to the manner in which Lenin associated communism and human

164 Lenin, The Dual Power, 302. See also Lenin, The Dual Power, 302-4; Lenin, Left-Wing Communism, 568-73; Lenin, April Theses, 296. This is also implied in Lenin, The Immediate Tasks, 439-55, and in Lenin, Left-Wing

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emancipation, rule by such a deluded group in its unmediated form could neither constitute nor

facilitate freedom and self-government. Instead, both popular sovereignty and concrete progress

toward communism were achievable only by “clarifying proletarian minds, by emancipating

them from the influence of the bourgeoisie.”165 Lenin’s challenge of the crowd thus grew from a

strong but incomplete relationship between experience and knowledge: the general interest was

still a product of class consciousness, but it was not automatically derived from the experience of

being a worker, and thus could not be found simply by properly framing the working class as a

political group as the Anti-Federalists framed their homogeneous communities. Thus, immersion

and proximity, though they played a role in Lenin’s bridge across the rulers-ruled gap, could not

build it on their own.

In addition, Lenin required, like the Federalists, a degree of filtration. His popular

sovereignty demanded an institutional manifestation which, in order to let the people’s true

selves govern and facilitate the conditions for their own complete emancipation, privileged and

amplified class-conscious thought. Such an institution allowed knowledge of the general good to

crystallize into a unified expression of the people’s sovereign voice, for the class-conscious

sector and voice of the workers “forge[d] the wills of millions and hundreds of millions of people

– disunited, and scattered over the territory of a huge country – into a single will, without which

defeat is inevitable.”166 The filter of class-consciousness, in other words, was the only way to

resolve the general-particular dilemma that could privilege the government above the voice of

Communism, 577, 582, 593-4, 609: “the broad masses (who are still, for the most part, apathetic, inert, dormant, habit-ridden, and unawakened)”. See also Service, A History, 143; Robert Service, “The Bolshevik Party,” in A Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution, 1914-1921, ed. Edward Acton, Vladimir Iu. Cherniaev, and William G. Rosenberg (Bloomington, & Indianapolis): Indiana University Press, 1997), 232; Christopher Read, “Bolshevik Cultural Policy,” in A Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution, 1914-1921, ed. Edward Acton, Vladimir Iu. Cherniaev, and William G. Rosenberg (Bloomington, & Indianapolis): Indiana University Press, 1997), 491. 165 Lenin, The Dual Power, 304. See also Lenin, Left-Wing Communism, 602. 166 Lenin, The Tasks of the Youth Leagues, 665. See also Lenin, Left-Wing Communism, 552-3; Lenin, The Chief Task, 435. For evidence that working-class thoughts and sentiments were indeed disunited in the post-revolutionary period, see Service, A History, 89-90.

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the crowd, unifying particular experiences into the general good. To form this filter, Lenin

required an organization which would isolate, privilege, and integrate the class-conscious

sentiments of the working masses such that their truest and wisest selves could rule.167 For him,

this was the Bolshevik Party. Despite Lenin’s vehement and consistent praise of the Soviets, he

saw Party members as “the people’s political leaders,” those members of the Soviet system who

were able to see the large picture of social organization and progress and were secure in their

grasp of the general interest.168 As the Party had orchestrated the revolution, its visionary

credentials were solid, and therefore all who realized the truth of the Bolshevik vision had

incentive to seek membership in order to become a part of the communist project.169 Lenin

summed up the party role at the Tenth Party Congress (partially in response to challenges like

Kollontai’s):

only the political party of the working class, i.e., the Communist Party, is capable of uniting, training and organising a vanguard of the proletariat and of the whole mass of the working people that alone will be capable of…guiding all the united activities of the whole of the proletariat, i.e., of leading it politically, and through it, the whole mass of the working people. Without this the dictatorship of the proletariat is impossible.170

The Party, as a collection of the most class-conscious elements of the working class, was

positioned to guide and mediate that class’s raw pronouncements, acting as a farsighted

extension of its invaluable immediacy. For Lenin, this was the only way in which the general

167 Lenin, Left-Wing Communism, 579-82; “Resolution on The Syndicalist and Anarchist Deviation in Our Party,” in The Lenin Anthology, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1975), 498. 168 Lenin, The Immediate Tasks, 439; 440-1. For the role of compromise and tactic in this, see Lenin, Left-Wing Communism, 587-93; for the divergence between leaders’ and workers’ grasp of revolutionary theory, see Service, A History, 92-4. 169 Lenin, Left-Wing Communism, 553-7, 569-73, 593-4; Lenin, The Immediate Tasks, 439-41; Draft Resolution on the Syndicalist, 498. Service, A History, 148-9. 170 Draft Resolution on the Syndicalist, 498. For why the trade unions were insufficient – a topic of bitter controversy in 1919-22 – see Lenin, Left-Wing Communism, 572-5.

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good could be united with popular participation, such that the people could begin to conquer

their alienation in the day-to-day work of constructing socialism.

The idea of the Bolshevik Party as the manifestation of true popular sovereignty may

seem alien to Western sensibilities,* but it is important to note that the Party of the years

immediately following the revolution was not the monolithic hierarchy topped by septuagenarian

cronies associated with the later Soviet period.171 Lenin’s thought was, indeed, marked by a

focus upon organization and discipline, but historical accounts differ widely as to what this

meant and how strictly he was able to enforce such an ethos upon his fellows.172 We do know

that the party of Lenin was in many ways a mass party, with a membership of 611,000 in 1920,

and was governed by the principles of democratic centralism.173 This ideal of non-representative,

* For example, Robert Service casts the Party’s self-image as unfounded in “The Soviet State,” in A Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution, ed. Edward Acton, Vladimir Iu. Cherniaev, and William G. Rosenberg (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997), 304: “What is more, their general doctrines inclined them to envisage the party – their separate party! – as a prime agency of victorious socialist revolution.” 171 Service, A History, 83; Edward Acton, Rethinking the Russian Revolution (London: Arnold, 1998), 25, 104-5; Service, The Bolshevik Party, 233-5, 237; Robert V. Daniels, “The Communist Opposition: From Brest-Litovsk to the Tenth Party Congress,” in A Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution, ed. Edward Acton, Vladimir Iu. Cherniaev, and William G. Rosenberg (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997), 245-6; Daniels, The Conscience, entire, including explicitly 3-4. 172 Tiersky, Ordinary Stalinism, 14-5; Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power (USA: W.W. Norton & Company, 1976), xxi; Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, 30-1, 42-3, 65; Acton, Rethinking the Russian Revolution, 196-9, 205; Service, The Soviet State, 312-3; Service, Lenin, 150=3, 155-6, 158; Service, The Bolshevik Party, 231. Daniels’ thesis in The Conscience of the Revolution is that “Leninism,” as a centralized and ruthlessly pragmatic organizational approach, defeated Leftism within the Bolshevik party with tragic consequences; the strictures of his argument, however, require him at times to assert that Lenin himself deviated from the principles of Leninism. See 4-6, 10-11, 22, 29-30, 33-4, 35-7, 51-3, 62, 70-2, 78-9, 114-5, 151-3. 173 Figure from Lenin, Left-Wing Communism, 571. Service, A History, 140; Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, 42-3, 52; Service, The Bolshevik Party, 239-40, 235: “The Bolshevik Party was a mass party.” (Lower on the same page, however, Service writes that “The Bolshevik leaders and activists were not democrats by principled choice. They were masters of factional manipulation.”) On the Bolsheviks’ decentralized style of administration immediately following October, see Ronald Kowalski, The Russian Revolution, 1917-1921 (London: Routledge, 1997), 155-7; Service, A History, 9, 69; Service, The Soviet State, 308; Lenin, Communism and the New Economic Policy, 530-1. Iarov, The Tenth Congress, 127, calls the post-revolutionary situation “anarchy.” The transformation of the Bolshevik Party (or whether its true colors were obvious all along) is the subject of much literature and debate. For a sample of perspectives, see Service, A History, 98-100, 110-11, 117-9, 123-4, 152; Service, The Soviet State, 312-3; Service, The Bolshevik Party, 235-42; Daniels, The Communist Opposition, 246-7; Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, 65; Kowalski, The Russian Revolution, 198-9, 205; Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution, entire, especially 111: “The concentration of power in the hands of smaller and more efficient bodies was irresistibly natural.”

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yet both participatory and unified, party organization was meant to encourage (at least early on)

debate and creativity within the party, monitored by the proven revolutionaries at the top.174 The

mutability of democratic centralism as a theory is important to mention: over the course of

Soviet history, democratic centralism grew from an initial loosely-formulated desire to meld

democratic procedure with unified action in a “dialectical unity of centralism and democracy,”

almost a microcosm of the crowd problem itself.175 Interpretations of the meaning of this varied

between those who focused on tension between those two elements and those who focused upon

their harmony, in a direct reflection of the trouble of bridging the rulers-ruled gap; the early

Bolsheviks, however, were confident in the ability of traditional democratic procedures within

the party to coexist with and support the decision-making power of the enlarged perspectives at

the body’s head.176 In such a structure of informational and electoral flow, “class-consciousness”

plays a role almost analogous, at a high level of abstraction, to that of “virtue” or “wisdom” for

the Americans. In both Federalism (and somewhat Anti-Federalism) and Leninism, the general

interest was revealed only through a certain type of thought, which was not provided entirely by

experience or context and which political institutions must privilege in order to render their

instantiations of the popular voice superior to that of the crowd. This is how, for Lenin,

separating the sovereignty of the party from that of the masses was “ridiculous and childish

nonsense, something like discussing whether a man’s left leg or right arm is of greater use to

him”: the party was the masses, speaking through the institutional structure that amplified their

best selves.177

174 Waller, Democratic Centralism, 8, 12, 33-4, 54, 75-6; Service, The Bolshevik Party, 233-7. 175 Quote from Waller, Democratic Centralism, 13. On this topic, see the entirety of that volume, especially 6-7, 29-30, 49, 63, 133; Tiersky, Ordinary Stalinism, 17-22; Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution, 11-2. 176 Waller, Democratic Centralism, 4, 17-20, 63, 73-4; Service, A History, 85-6. 177 Lenin, Left-Wing Communism, 573.

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The challenge to this construal of the Party put forth by Kollontai’s 1921 pamphlet on the

Workers’ Opposition came, interestingly, on many of the same terms as Lenin’s formulation. In

the end, however, it relied upon the epistemological role of immersion and proximity rather than

filtration and farsightedness. Kollontai’s pamphlet called for a wide and predominating role in

organizing the new economy to be played by the trade unions and the on-the-ground workers

they represented.178 Her first argument in favor of this approach was to challenge the Party’s

class credentials: for Kollontai, the Party’s entanglement with the state meant that “The

economic backwardness of Russia and the domination of the peasantry within its

boundaries…inevitably detract the practical policy of our party from the clear-cut class

direction, consistent in principle and theory.”179 She feared that the Party’s attachment to “Soviet

state institutions” was transforming its policy into “nothing else but an adaptation of our

directing centres to the heterogeneous and irreconcilable interests of a socially different, mixed,

population”: that is, simply reproducing society’s contradictions in the political sphere, rather

than following the one class that could abolish them.180

In thus raising the same concerns that led Lenin to condemn the Constituent Assembly,

Kollontai proposed two solutions: to prune Party membership such that it became “a workers’

party,” and to pass primary control of economic activity and innovation to the trade unions.181

For Kollontai, it was essential that “Purely class organs, directly connected by vital ties with the

industries,” not “the Soviet machine,” should “develop the creative powers in the sphere of

178 Alexandra Kollontai, “The Workers’ Opposition,” in Selected Writings of Alexandra Kollontai, trans. and ed. Alix Holt (London: Allison & Busby, 1977), 160, 162, 165, 168, 171-6, 187, 199; Holt, Introduction to Chapter Five, 151, 153-4; Daniels, The Communist Opposition, 248-9; Daniels, The Conscience, 125. 179 Kollontai, The Workers’ Opposition, 163. Emphasis in original. Iarov, The Tenth Congress, 116-8, claims that this argument hit moderately close to reality but lacked nuance or sophistication. 180 Kollontai, The Workers’ Opposition, 167. 181 Ibid., 193, 194; 162, 173.

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economic reconstruction.”182 For her, as for Lenin, it was critical that the working class be the

source of political and economic policy; for both, as well, the class’s most class-conscious sector

needed to play a leading role. Both, therefore, located their general interest in the particular

interests of a certain group, and combated that group’s fallibility by privileging a guiding

organization of the most class-conscious members within a network of participatory

organizations. They differed, however, as to where this most class-conscious sector could be

found. For Kollontai, the epistemological source of the proper course of society was daily

experience in the factories themselves. The workers, not experts or revolutionary theorists, were

the only ones who could know how to improve and direct the economy: “Only those who are

directly bound to industry can introduce into it animating innovations.”183 For Kollontai, only

“the requirements of a class,” not the calculations of intelligent revolutionaries, could transform

the economy, and the time had come for “individual geniuses of the past” to submit to “That

class…which is organically bound with newly-developing, painfully-born forms of production of

a more productive and perfect system of economy.”184

Lenin and Kollontai’s dispute was thus firmly epistemological. Lenin saw class-

consciousness and the knowledge of proper policy arising from the filtration of everyday mass

experience from the bottom through the expertise and unshakeable revolutionary conviction of

those at the top. For Lenin, to leave the construction of socialism to the trade unions was to

abandon the masses, half-freed, to confusion, limited by institutions that did nothing to unite

workers’ declarations with the general good. His position required doubt in the workers’ ability

to manage the economy either from individual factories or through the trade unions, as well as

faith in the existence of class-consciousness as a concept and the ability of the elective (at least

182 Ibid., 162. Emphasis in original. 183 Ibid., 160. Emphasis in original. 184 Ibid., 174, 176.

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initially) hierarchy of democratic centralism to properly filter – as in Federalism, though using

very different institutions – the invaluable impulses of the masses into a united will of consensus

and truth.185 For Kollontai, on the other hand, this formulation did nothing to solve the problem

of the crowd, because she believed that the general good necessary to elevate the government

above the unmediated people lived somewhere else entirely. In the vein of the Anti-Federalists,

though once again in a wholly different institutional context, Kollontai structured her

government with the goal of properly framing a “community” (the workers), immersion in which

provided one with the experiences necessary to reveal the proper course of action. For her,

farsightedness was largely beside the point, because the knowledge that would turn the inchoate

declarations of the divided masses into true self-government for the good of all lived most fully

in the proximal, immediate, and experiential world of work itself.186 Despite the myriad of

differences between the two situations, then, the same choice of filtration versus proximity was

just as relevant after the Russian Revolution of 1917 as it was after the American Revolution of

1776. Where could the people’s wisest, most self-governing selves be found – in their immediate

experiences in the factories, or in the “multiple collective experience,” as Trotsky put it, and

political farsightedness represented by the revolutionaries at the head of the Party?187 Both

prongs of this dilemma bring, in the American case, their own set of troubles, and require of their

would-be adherents a distinct portion of faith in a particular understanding of how the general

good of a nation arises from the declarations of its people. Neither, in other words, is an obvious

encapsulation of true popular sovereignty.

185 As Daniels says in making a less direct point than I, Leninism incorporated a great deal of “faith in the party as an institution” (Daniels, The Conscience, 149). 186 Daniels’ take, in The Conscience, 128, is that “[Kollontai’s] thinking could well represent man’s highest ascent toward faith in the proletariat.” 187 Leon Trotsky, “The New Course,” in The New Course and The Struggle for the New Course, ed. Max Schachtman (Ann Arbor: Ann Arbor Paperbacks, 1965), 25.

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In conclusion, it is proper to note that this debate between Lenin and Kollontai fits into a

larger pattern of Marxist disputes, starting even before 1905 and drawing in Communist leaders

worldwide, as to how direct the relationship was between class and class consciousness.188

Leaders’ positions on this epistemological issue determined their understandings of the nature of

the revolutionary party, the structure of post-revolutionary institutions, and their stances on

reformism: in short, their interpretations of popular sovereignty. Through this all-important

question of how class experiences related to class-consciousness, the crowd-challenge forced its

way into the Marxist ranks, leading eventually to bitter disputes, as we have seen, regarding the

proper legacy of the October Revolution. As with the American case, therefore, a common task

led to intensely divergent results. While all leaders saw themselves, or at least presented

themselves, as creating popular sovereignty – bridging the rulers-ruled gap by institutionalizing

the manifestation of the popular voice which allowed the people to enunciate their own good –

their different ideas of where the general good lived and how it could be amplified caused them

to see others’ constructions as anti-democratic, anarchic, or simply missing the point. In this,

they attempted qualitatively different projects, each attempting to hoist the elusive and mutable

banner of popular sovereignty as they comprehended it. In the foregoing analysis, I have

indicated the epistemological assumptions regarding the derivation of the common good upon

which we must focus in order to best understand the distinctions between these post-

revolutionary approaches. This central role of epistemology will be seized upon in the next

188 For example, Osinskii speaking for the Democratic Centralist Opposition at the 9th Party Congress (March 1920), quoted in Sakwa, The Rise and Fall, 102-3. See also Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, 81, 88, 94; Acton, Rethinking the Russian Revolution, 191-2. On the trade-union debates in particular: Service, A History, 121-2; Kowalski, The Russian Revolution, 155-7; Iarov, The Tenth Congress, 115; Daniels, The Communist Opposition, 248-9; Daniels, The Conscience, 81-5, 120-35; and on the conflicts between the trade unions and the factory committees, which also form an interesting microcosm of the clash between immersion and filtration, see Steve Smith, “Factory Committees,” in A Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution, ed. Edward Acton, Vladimir Iu. Cherniaev, and William G. Rosenberg (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997), especially 353-7, and Diane P. Koenker, “The Trade Unions,” in the same volume, 449-54.

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chapter, in which we move beyond those who attempted to solve the challenge of the crowd to

those who purposefully stood outside of it.

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3 The Crowd Problem Left Un-Solved: Epistemological Separation in Stalin, Trotsky, and

Jefferson In the preceding chapter I examined mutually exclusive visions of popular sovereignty, whose

divergent institutional forms grew from revolutionaries’ distinct understandings of where and

how the general good can be found. In this chapter, I will now amplify the role of epistemology

in solving the challenge of the crowd in order to engage with revolutionaries who broke with the

project of bridging the rulers-ruled gap and disputed the feasibility of such unity. While those

considered in chapter two could not fully erase the tension between constituted and constituent

power, the institutions for which they advocated reflected the desire to blur that dichotomy by

deriving the general good from the people themselves. The revolutionary thinkers I will consider

in this chapter, however – Leon Trotsky, Joseph Stalin, and Thomas Jefferson – were led by their

epistemologies to de-couple knowledge of the general good from the declarations of the people

themselves, which inspired an ontological disunity between people and state. This disunity

required each theorist to institutionally and systemically contain the competing poles of rulers

and ruled, general good and popular participation, entirely un-bridged. In this manner, Trotsky,

Stalin, and Jefferson both changed the stakes of post-revolutionary debate and made their own

controversial claims regarding the feasibility of certain types of popular sovereignty.

I will frame this discussion in terms of political epistemology before proceeding to Stalin,

Trotsky, and Jefferson themselves, in order to ground the analysis of each and clarify how their

projects differed from those of the thinkers considered in chapter two. There are at least three

types of epistemology possible in politics, that is, three manners of deriving the general good.

First, there is the epistemological structure which supports a solution to the challenge of the

crowd, taken up by all of the authors considered in chapter two, in which knowledge of the

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common interest is generated through some form of mass participation, creating an ontological

union between popular declaration and popular good. The conflicts described in chapter two all

centered around the words “some form” in the previous sentence. A few corollaries come with

this conception. In such epistemologies, factions and dissent, though they may be considered a

“disease,” do not present an existential threat to the system unless they interfere with the proper

functioning of the system’s decision procedure.189 Further, an important note, mostly for

foreshadowing purposes, is that this category of political epistemology includes some

interpretations of democratic centralism that rely upon a dialectical interaction between center

and masses, understood as two opposing forces, to produce the desired knowledge or forward

progress.190 Dialectical theories like this can fall into this first epistemological category if they

assume that the general good is not yet fully known, but is instead produced through the

progressive unity of opposites. This epistemological situation, in which dialectical opposition is a

process of mutual discovery, implies the confounding of the rulers-ruled gap because popular

declaration and knowledge of popular benefit still arise from the same source. Other types of

dialectical opposition, however, can represent a process of raising mass consciousness in which

the masses are not involved in generating the knowledge requisite to structure their own lives,

and thus their declaration and the general good are never ontologically unified. We will be able

to briefly touch upon the elision between these two dialectical forms near the end of the

discussion of Trotsky, in considering the shifts in Lenin’s thought amid the exigencies of the

early Soviet period.

189 See, for example, Federalist 10 (Madison), entire, especially 73 and 79, where he calls faction a “disease”; and Waller, Democratic Centralism, 20, 40-1, who uses the terminology of illness and health to describe Lenin’s attitude toward factions in a striking parallel to Madison’s language. 190 For a discussion of such theories, see Waller, Democratic Centralism, 17-20.

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These considerations already indicate the second possible form of political epistemology:

in which it is assumed that the general good is objectively true and externally known, and that

the people will (only) come to understand it with sufficient enlightenment.* In this

epistemological conception, dissent is nearly always pernicious; as it does not play a role in

discovering the truth (for the truth is either already known or is externally accessible), it can

instead easily be blamed for leading people astray or hindering decisive action to secure the

externally ascertainable common interest.191 This formulation will be illustrated in this chapter

by Leon Trotsky, in the context of his dialogue with Josef Stalin. Stalin is only moderately

interesting for us here, as one expects him to be antidemocratic and theoretically simplistic, but a

confirmation of his epistemological separation of participation and welfare contributes to the

understanding of his relationship to preceding Soviet leaders. Moreover, his presence in this

discussion helps us to understand the project of Trotsky, who tries, but ultimately fails, to

differentiate himself from such authoritarianism. For Trotsky, the early stages of revolution

presented a situation in which the general good was simply inaccessible to most of the

population, and therefore had to be instituted from above. At the end of the discussion of

Trotsky, I will use this type of political epistemology as a springboard from which to consider

the role of an objectively known general good in dividing rulers and ruled in America as well,

considering how assumptions regarding the level of mass knowledge and the existence of an

obvious good – often conditioned by crisis – modulate the level of faith that leaders hold in the

* With the word “enlightenment,” I do not intend a certain kind of knowledge or reason, but rather imply the concepts of knowledge, understanding, or consciousness that each case and thinker saw as facilitating the grasping of truth. 191 See, for example, the “Resolution on Party Unity,” in The Lenin Anthology, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1975) 500: “the unity and cohesion of the ranks of the party, the guarantee of complete mutual confidence among Party members and truly harmonious work that really embodies the unanimity of will of the vanguard of the proletariat, are particularly essential at the present time…”

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feasibility of an epistemological-ontological union between the two halves of popular

sovereignty.

The third type of possible epistemology introduces, but does not completely cover, the

discussion of Thomas Jefferson with which this chapter will conclude. This epistemology

assumes the common good to be objectively true and externally known, but also assumes that the

people already know it and are generally motivated to act upon it. Here, the existence of dissent,

at least in large quantities, disproves this entire conceptualization. When this assessment holds,

though, giving decision-making power to the unmediated crowd brings significantly less danger

than it normally would. This was the assumption of Jefferson in regard to the form of republican

government and the importance of natural rights, which he depended upon the people to uphold

and defend through and despite the continued governmental rupture that he advocated.192 Such

an epistemology allowed Jefferson to proffer a tension-based solution to the challenge of the

crowd, a non-solution-solution in which the crowd retained wholesale its representative claim

and the general good was accessed not through the blurring of rulers and ruled, but through

conflict between them. I will approach this point through an account of Jefferson’s reaction to

Shays’s Rebellion and how that reaction differed starkly from others’, arguing that Jefferson’s

nonchalance toward rebellion was enabled by both his continued separation between the people

and the state and his epistemological confidence in the preservation of the republican form

through unmediated decision-making. This type of epistemology relates only, however, to the

overall form of government in Jefferson’s theory, and not to its daily administration. Much of the

discussion of Jefferson, therefore, will focus also upon his unique derivation of the general good

192 Ralph Ketcham notes that Jefferson drew confidence in the people’s republican abilities from their experiences with self-government: Ketcham, Introduction, 3. Ari Helo makes a similar point: Ari Helo, “Jefferson’s Conception of Republican Government,” in The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Jefferson, ed. Frank Shuffleton (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009) 39. This is also how Waller interprets Lenin’s increased focus upon party democracy following the 1905 revolution: Waller, Democratic Centralism, 22-9.

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through a tension between interests (on the part of the people) and knowledge (on the part of the

government), in which his post-revolutionary institutional formation maintained the rulers-ruled

gap to hold the government on the correct course through conflict rather than through unity. In

this, Jefferson conceptualized the interaction between participation and welfare in a way that left

the challenge of the crowd unsolved, leading to his own type of permanent revolution that rested

its stability and success upon faith in the resolution of interests and adherence to republicanism.

These three epistemologies underpin the conflicting approaches that can be taken toward

the challenge of the crowd on a level larger than that considered in chapter two. Each

epistemological assumption described above conditions the formation of institutions meant to

either unite or reconcile the general good with popular participation, and each approach has

different corollaries and consequences. Through this chapter’s examination of thinkers who stand

outside the mainstream approach considered in the previous chapter, we can view post-

revolutionary conflict as provoked by the challenge of the crowd with a wider lens, and, in turn,

see where these more iconoclastic thinkers must place their faith for their systems to be

theoretically viable. In addition, as all of these thinkers provide slightly later reflections upon the

prospects of post-revolutionary government, we can see them as possibly indicating an important

trend of disillusionment with the possibility of providing a definite, institutional solution to the

challenge of the crowd. With this in mind, we turn now to a concrete examination of these

thinkers, knowing that the epistemology of each both shaped their individual accounts and

distinguished them from their fellows who advocated for a bridge across the rulers-ruled gap.

Trotsky: Exclusive Knowledge in the Permanent Revolution

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We begin with Trotsky’s rival, Stalin, whose authoritarian regime, and the understanding

of the general good upon which he based it, provided an extreme anti-solution-solution to the

crowd problem. It is unsurprising that Stalin relied upon an epistemology in which popular

participation was largely unnecessary: the Soviet system in Stalin’s days, though hardly

monolithic or universally effective, was top-down, authoritarian, and prone to brutality.193

Decision-making occurred in an entanglement of party and state, formal and informal structures,

governed by the Party Ustav (regulations), informal routine, and the relationships between

various leadership factions.194 Stalin – echoing, it is true, a theme of Bolshevik thought –

declared that “the existence of factions is incompatible with the unity and discipline of the

Party,” and backed this up with force: the regime executed three quarters of a million citizens in

the Great Terror of 1937-8.195 Within the cocoon of secrecy, metaphor, ritual, and blatant

falsification that separated reality from rhetoric in that period, Stalin explained his and the

party’s dominance on the basis of superior knowledge of, and ability to act for, the general

good.196 For the Stalinist elite, the Party’s rectitude as purveyor of the general good was proven

by revolutionary, economic, and military success; therefore, it embodied the will of the most

class-conscious sector of the workers, which contained the good of humanity; thus, any failures

193 John Barber and Mark Harrison, The Soviet Home Front 1941-1945 (Essex, UK: Longman Group UK Limited, 1991), 11-3, 48-51, 54-6; J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov, The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-1939 (London: Yale University Press, 1999), 15-8, 34, 125, 188-9, 576. 194 Jana Howlett, Oleg Khlevniuk, Liudmila Kosheleva, & Larisa Rogovaia, The CPSU’s Top Bodies Under Stalin: Their Operational Records and Structure of Command (Toronto: Centre for Russian & East European Studies at the University of Toronto, 1996), entire, especially page 10: “According to Molotov, the Politburo always had a leading group…According to Khruschev’s memoirs, in the post-war period Stalin frequently made decisions without consulting anyone except one or two members of the Politburo…”; Harris, The Split, vii; 1936 Constitution of the USSR, Bucknell University, http://www.departments.bucknell.edu/russian/const/1936toc.html. Getty and Naumov, The Road to Terror, 256-7, discusses how verdicts were decided before the show trials of the 1930s even began. 195 Quote is from Joseph Stalin, The Theory and Practice of Leninism (London: Communist Party of Great Britain, 1925), 123; Figure is from Getty and Naumov, The Road to Terror, 1. See also Stalin, The Theory and Practice, 121-4. On unity, see Getty and Naumov, The Road to Terror, entire, e.g., 284-93, 545-6, 551-2, 555. 196 Joseph Stalin, Problems of Leninism (New York: International Publishers, 1935), 22, 31-3; Harris, The Split, 154, 156; Getty and Naumov, The Road to Terror, 545-6, 551-2, 555. On metaphor and language in Stalinism, see Getty and Naumov, The Road to Terror, 22, 58-9, 104-5, 230, 266-7, 308, 322, 480-2; on falsification and secrecy, Howlett et. al., The CPSU’s Top Bodies, 6-7, 11, 14-5.

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of or discontent with its policies had to be the result of sabotage and conspiracy.197 Though

Stalin insisted at times that he and the Party leadership learned from the masses of workers,

peasants, and rank-and-file party members, it is difficult to see how.198 Instead, Stalin felt that

the Party

cannot be a true Party if it limits itself to registering what the working masses feel and think, to following the spontaneous, every-day, politically-indifferent movements, if it cannot raise itself above the transient interests of the proletariat and arouse class consciousness in the masses. It ought to march at the head of the working class, to see farther than does the latter, to bring the proletariat under its influence, and not be dragged after it.199

In other words, then, the Party – which in all functional aspects meant the Politburo, which Stalin

dominated – had little need, in order to know and institute the general good, for the day-to-day

experiences of the working class.200

Here, Stalin provides a perfect example of an epistemological severance between the

declarations of the masses and the common interest that allowed him to prioritize the general

good over the political participation of the masses. With this, he stands outside the crowd

problem by allowing the rulers-ruled gap to remain intact. In contrast to the other Russian

revolutionaries’ emphasis upon the value of democratic participation in emancipating communist

man, Stalin gave little heed to it, focusing instead upon the more measurable aspects of socialism

197 Joseph Stalin, From Socialism to Communism in the Soviet Union (New York: International Publishers, date not listed), 36-7, 39-41; Stalin, Problems of Leninism, 40-4; Joseph Stalin, Mastering Bolshevism (New York: New Century Publishers, 1945), 3-4, 9, 13-4. Getty and Naumov, The Road to Terror, 11-2, 68-9, 273-4; Waller, Democratic Centralism, 139-42. This unbreakable circle of party correctness is well-presented by Gabor Tamas Rittersporn, “The omnipresent conspiracy: On Soviet imagery of politics and social relations in the 1930s,” in Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives, ed. J. Arch Getty and Roberta T. Manning (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), especially 105-7. 198 Joseph Stalin, “Speech at the First All-Union Conference of Stakhanovites,” in Three Speeches (London: Martin Lawrence Limited, 1935), 29; Stalin, Mastering Bolshevism, 41-4; Stalin, Problems of Leninism, 29-32, 34, 36-7, 58-9; Stalin, From Socialism to Communism, 36. 199 Stalin, The Theory and Practice, 111-2. 200 Ibid., 28-9, 98, 114-5, 118-9, 121, 128-9; Stalin, Problems of Leninism, 34; Getty and Naumov, The Road to Terror, 8-11.

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in the economic and military realms to demonstrate his policy’s progress toward communism.201

With the general interest thus defined, it was only necessary to turn to the accounting books and

the nation’s borders to see whether it was being pursued. Epistemologically, the general good

was accessible to the Party with little or no need to appeal to the proletariat. Though this gave

Stalin’s government the advantage over the crowd in terms of ability to procure the general

interest, it did not tackle the crowd problem as we have posed it: Stalin’s formulation had no

need to confound the rulers-ruled gap.

Trotsky: The Loophole in the Permanent Revolution

In differentiating himself from his rival, then, Trotsky’s task was to unite democracy and

economic transformation into a single inseparable manifestation of the popular voice, bridging

the rulers-ruled gap as did those considered in chapter two. In The Revolution Betrayed (1936),

his most thorough consideration of Stalin’s regime, Trotsky appears at times to do just that.

Among the targets of Trotsky’s ire were the “blind, violent, gambling” manner in which the

administration conceived of and executed its policies, the fact that “The entire effort of

Stalin…was…directed to freeing the party machine from the control of the rank-and-file

members of the party,” the way low-quality products were “branded with the gray label of

indifference,” and, with especial severity, the bloated and powerful bureaucracy that sat atop the

Soviet system of Stalin’s day.202 This system, lamented Trotsky, had quashed the once-seething

201 Joseph Stalin, On the Draft Constitution of the USSR (Moscow: Co-Operative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers in the USSR, 1936), 9-19; Stalin, From Socialism to Communism, 39, 50; Joseph Stalin, The October Revolution (New York: International Publishers, 1934), 46; Joseph Stalin, “Address to Graduates from the Red Army Academy,” in Three Speeches (London: Martin Lawrence Limited, 1935), 6-7; Stalin, Speech at the First,14-5; Joseph Stalin, Speech at the Nineteenth Party Congress (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1952), 8-9; Stalin, Mastering Bolshevism, 15-6; Getty and Naumov, The Road to Terror, 584; Barber and Harrison, The Soviet Home Front, 3-5. 202 Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, trans. Max Eastman (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 2004), 31, 74, 208. On page 104 Trotsky estimates the size of the bureaucratic stratum to be “numbered at five or six million.”

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democracy of Soviet society: “Of party democracy there remained only recollections in the

memory of older generations. And together with it had disappeared the democracy of the soviets,

the trade unions…Above each and every one of them there reigns an unlimited hierarchy of party

secretaries.”203* This bureaucracy, “which has not the slightest intention of ‘dying away’” as the

truly proletarian state must, held sway over the Soviet future as an “uncontrolled force

dominating the masses.”204 Democratic forms were exercised in vain, for “The fate of the

president of the collective farm, of the party organizer, of the lower order of co-operator, like

that of the highest bosses, does not in the least depend upon so-called ‘electors.’”205 In so lording

over this dark reality, “As a conscious political force,” Trotsky concluded, “the bureaucracy has

betrayed the revolution.”206

In addition to condemning Stalin’s bureaucratic authoritarianism, Trotsky seems to have

made some attempts to incorporate mass participation into his own positive vision for the Soviet

state. He began by identifying democratic participation, to a certain degree, with the content of

the general good itself. For Trotsky, the preponderance of bureaucratic over democratic forms

was identical to an incomplete realization of the dictatorship of the proletariat: adherence to the

proper course of historical transformation required democratic possession and slow withering of

203 Ibid., 78; see also 72-80. * Trotsky’s own tense relationship with democracy throughout his life is much-documented and important, but subsidiary here to the content of his debate with Stalin. For various perspectives on Trosky, see Service, A History, 104-6, 156; Vladimir Iu. Cherniaev, “Trotsky,” in A Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution, ed. Edward Acton, Vladimir Iu. Cherniaev, and William G. Rosenberg (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997), 189, 191-3; Daniels, The Communist Opposition, 247-8, 252; Daniels, The Conscience, 104-7, 109, 122: “Trotsky, who was the most ardent of all centralizers to appear during the first decade of the Soviet regime…” Service calls him “the most arrogant and self-preening of Bolsheviks” in The Bolshevik Party, 243. 204 Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, 38, 40; see also 45-8, 57, 65-6, 71-4, 79-86, 97, 102-7, 119, 144-5, 168-9, 187-90, 206-10, 214-6. 205 Ibid., 105. 206 Ibid., 190. See also 228: “Friendship for the Soviet bureaucracy is not friendship for the proletarian revolution, but, on the contrary, insurance against it.”

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the state, and without it, the general good remained distant.207 In a seemingly blanket defense of

popular participation, Trotsky asserted that “Soviet democracy is not the demand of an abstract

policy, still less an abstract moral. It has become a life-and-death need of the country.”208

Moreover, especially when Trotsky was focused upon the plodding inaccuracy of the

bureaucratic mode of thought, he echoed thinkers like Luxemburg and Kollontai in emphasizing

the essential creativity of the masses. This, if truly essential to and tenable within his theory,

would place the epistemological origins of the general good in the experience of the working

class in a manner in which Stalin’s theory did not. In a seemingly clear statement, Trotsky

insisted that

Bureaucratic autocracy must give place to Soviet democracy. A restoration of the right of criticism, and a genuine freedom of elections, are necessary conditions for the further development of the country…Free discussion of economic problems will decrease the overhead expense of bureaucratic mistakes and zigzags…209

This assessment implies that the information provided by participatory democracy was essential

to plotting the correct course into the socialist future. Trotsky also linked “a democracy of

producers and consumers, freedom of criticism and initiative” to the attainment of proper quality

in production; defended the role of the universal class by arguing that the proletariat remains “the

sole class interested right up to the end in the victory of socialism”; and saw “real participation in

leadership of the interested masses themselves, a thing which is unthinkable without Soviet

democracy,” as essential to the success of economic planning, in all of this seeming to insist

upon bridging the rulers-ruled chasm by turning to the people themselves to reveal the common

207 Ibid., 2, 38-40, 42, 50, 180, 183, 191-2, 208 (“The socialist culture will flourish only in proportion to the dying away of the state”), 214. 208 Ibid., 208. 209 Ibid., 218.

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good.210 There are certainly pro-democratic salvos, then, in Trotsky’s work, accompanied by

some implications of a possible twofold method of uniting general good and popular

participation in a true bridge across the rulers-ruled gap: first, the inclusion of participation itself

within the general good; and second, the need for mass creativity to generate the knowledge

requisite to reach communism.

But how deep do these methods of unification reach, and can they withstand Trotsky’s

analysis of social forces in the Soviet Union? Though Trotsky’s motives alone cannot render his

ideas un-democratic – however many reasons he may have had for scoring cheap points against

Stalin – his theory of permanent revolution does. Even with the most charitable reading,

Trotsky’s theory cannot admit an epistemological connection between the working class and the

general good in the first stages of proletarian revolution in a backward state, because the

economic tasks to be performed in these first years do not fit the interests of any social class. The

problem begins with the cornerstone of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution: that, despite

Russia’s failure to meet the standard of abundance that was “The material premise of

communism,” the proletarian revolution could not wait for such circumstances.211 Trotsky is

unclear, however, as to precisely what makes the resulting state proletarian, save, perhaps, the

ideology of its leaders and their class origins: indeed, following Lenin, Trotsky characterized this

situation as a “bourgeois state without a bourgeoisie.”212 It is left to implication, then, to reveal

how such a state must be managed.

210 Ibid., 208, 197, 51. 211 Ibid., 35; 5, 16. See also Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution, xxvii, xxx, xxxiii-xl, 28-31, 34, 66, 87-90, 96-7, 124-8, 151-5; Trotsky, “Thirty-Five Years After,” in Leon Trotsky on the Paris Commune (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970), 12-3, 16-8. 212 Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, 41-2. In his 1906 work on the Paris Commune, Trotsky seems to focus almost entirely upon the class origins of leaders and administrators to render the post-revolutionary state proletarian. See Trotsky, Thirty-Five Years After, 13: “Paris entered into the regime of the dictatorship of the proletariat not because it proclaimed the republic, but because out of ninety representatives it elected seventy-two representatives of the workers and stood under the protection of the proletarian guard.”

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A first component is clear: such a state requires a bureaucracy. The lack of abundance in

backward circumstances, for Trotsky, meant that distribution was unable to proceed “based upon

solidarity and the harmonious satisfaction of all needs,” as it would under socialism; instead, the

persistence of “the struggle of each against all” preserved privilege and antagonism even despite

the nominal liquidation of classes.213 Because it is the role of bureaucracy to manage “sharp

antagonisms,” bureaucratic cadres inevitably arose from “the iron necessity to give birth to and

support a privileged minority” in order to distribute limited resources and manage the privilege

necessary to grow the economy.214 This bureaucracy, however, does not appear to have been

controllable by democratic means.* For Trotsky, Lenin’s “merely political measures…election

and recall at any time…active control by the masses, etc.,” were maladjusted to a situation in

which the international strength of capitalism prolonged the conditions of want and struggle

along the road to socialist transformation.215 All remedies came back, instead, to the level of

economic production. The heart of Trotsky’s disagreement with Stalin over management in the

time of want hinged upon instating – from the top down – policies (such as NEP and gradual but

immediate industrialization and collectivization) that Trotsky believed would integrate society

and allow the bureaucracy to dissolve, versus policies (like delayed and then frenetic

industrialization and collectivization) which, according to Trotsky, furthered privilege and thus

213 Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution, 2, 41; 38-48, 81-6, 92-3, 178-80, 184, 208. 214 Ibid., 38, 42. See also 44: “So long as even a modest ‘Ford’ remains the privilege of a minority, there survive all the relations and customs proper to a bourgeois society. And together with them there remains the guardian of inequality, the state.” And 85: “The basis of bureaucratic rule is the poverty of society in objects of consumption, with the resulting struggle of all against all.” * Though this discussion focuses on Trotsky’s post-exile dialogue with Stalinism, this same theme appears in his 1923 pamphlet The New Course, where Trotsky trumpeted a new stage in party history in which increased party democracy was essential to defeating bureaucratism and furthering the revolution (12-3, 15-9, 22-3, 89-95). In that pamphlet, though Trotsky seems to have placed more faith in the participatory measures that he cast as inadequate in 1936 (11-38), chapter 4 (39-46) anchored the bureaucracy wholly in society’s heterogeneity, calling for policies that properly address the scissors crisis in order to save the workers’ state. The separateness of these two different “tracks” of analysis perhaps foreshadows the turn that Trotsky took toward economic solutions in The Revolution Betrayed 215 Ibid., 45.

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the role of the bureaucracy itself.216 This firmly economically-based theory presented an

alternative to Stalin’s viewpoint that nevertheless relied, like Stalin, upon a general good

anchored in the concrete, measurable realm of economic transformation, a goal separate from the

experiences and opinions of the masses.

This picture of separated participation and welfare is reinforced when we examine

Trotsky’s defenses of the limitations of democracy that occurred during the early 1920s. By

Trotsky’s account, even while Lenin retained Party leadership and the bureaucracy had not yet

begun to feel its independence, “The power of the democratic Soviets proved cramping, even

unendurable, when the task of the day was to accommodate those privileged groups whose

existence was necessary for defense, for industry, for technique and science.”217 And, with

Trotsky’s concept of the permanent revolution in mind, how could they not have? There is no

reason, by Trotsky’s account, that the interests of the working class should align with the

interests of society when the latter requires the performance of bourgeois tasks, that is, when

there is a “bourgeois state without a bourgeoisie.”218 Trotsky admitted that this was the case in

the early Soviet Union, when the Party’s assessment of the situation upheld the creation of some

private property as essential to economic development: “Those deprived of property are not

inclined to create and defend it. The majority cannot concern itself with the privileges of the

minority.”219 Whether these bourgeois tasks are performed well or poorly, furthering the

revolution or hindering it, they cannot be discerned by the working class, because they are

distinct from its immediate interests (nor even by the bourgeoisie, because they are already

beginning to destroy capitalism); instead, by default, they require the leadership of a small group

216 Ibid., 17-34, especially the description of his and Stalin’s divergent approaches to the scissors crisis on pages 20-3. 217 Ibid., 46. 218 Ibid., 41-2. 219 Ibid., 42.

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of revolutionary leaders concentrated at the head of the Party. In other words, the role of

working-class interests as the embodiment of the common good is moot when the tasks to be

performed are not within the purview of any class at all. No swath of the masses can be relied

upon to provide the information necessary for the economic transformation that ensures true

political freedom for all. Thus, we see an un-democratic lacuna logically necessitated by

Trotsky’s theory: permanent revolution requires the proletariat to take power in nations with a

weak bourgeoisie, but the resulting economic situation requires, in order to progress toward

communism, the conception and execution of policies that simply do not align with the needs

and wishes conditioned by workers’ experiences. The material conditions of the revolution,

therefore, sever the epistemological connection between popular participation and popular

benefit that would bridge the gap between rulers and ruled.

At most, then, Trotsky can provide an important informational and intrinsic role for mass

participation, but only after the completion of an economic transformation that is both

unavoidable and unavoidably top-down. The creativity and freedom that Trotsky demands,

especially in The Revolution Betrayed’s latter pages, seem geared toward a further

transformation of the Soviet Union, one that would respond either to the context of world

revolution (lessening economic burdens) or an internal political revolution (which could use

Stalin’s economic gains to somewhat tame the bureaucracy).220 But in the immediate post-

revolutionary moment, the people, even the proletariat, cannot be relied upon to produce the

material conditions of their own autonomy. This idea of a future epistemological faith in the

masses’ creativity and knowledge of their own good is not necessarily just for show, as it fits

with Trotsky’s pre-revolutionary writings which rely upon the “force of…class weight…to move

along the correct path” and “[suggest] to [the proletariat] the correct policy in the sphere of the 220 Ibid., 190-2, 208-19.

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economy,” as well as with post-Civil-War demands for a “new course” incorporating mass

participation to combat bureaucratization and provide essential innovation following the securing

of state power.221 Trotsky was not, however, clear in The Revolution Betrayed on whether the

transformation to more democratic forms that he demanded could occur at once (in 1936), or

only after further development, or whether it was altogether impossible without the arrival of the

world revolution.222 Moreover, Trotsky did not clarify who would decide when this moment had

arrived, implying that it was left to the leaders to evaluate their own economic policies and

properly manage the slow demise of the bureaucracy which they themselves helped to lead. In

any case, even this vaguely defined future bridge between rulers and ruled remained, for the

moment, uncrossable. With his materialistic formulation of bureaucratic dominance and defeat,

Trotsky implied that unity between the two halves of popular sovereignty, in conditions of

poverty, simply could not exist. The people did not know the general interest yet, and needed to

be led until they could begin to speak.

We may use the implications that this has for Trotsky’s own theory to consider the

general requirements of such an approach to the challenge of the crowd. The manner in which

Trotsky responds to the epistemological separation between the general good and popular

participation, by privileging the informed voice of the leadership, places the spotlight upon the

manner in which Trotsky proposes to hold that leadership to the proper course. It is not simply

that Trotsky has more faith in institutions than the thinkers considered in chapter two; indeed, his

221 Trotsky, Thirty-Five Years After, 12-3; Trotsky, The New Course, entire, e.g. 11-3, 15, 23, 28-33, 35-8, 41, 45-6. 222 Exhortations to democratization occur both in the present tense (Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, 67, 78, 86, 145, 168, 190, 208, 217) and in connection to future events or undercut by present circumstances (178, 214-6, 218-9, 225-8). Perhaps the answer, which is not truly an answer, comes in The New Course, 22-3: “In the last analysis, the question will be resolved by…the course of the revolution in Europe and the rapidity of our economic development. But to reject fatalistically all responsibility for these objective factors would be a mistake…In the same revolutionary situation, and in the same international conditions, the party will resist the tendencies of disorganization more or resist them less to the extent that it is more or less conscious of the dangers and that it combats these dangers with more or less vigor.”

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inescapably emphasized characterization of the bureaucracy as a pernicious social force in itself

is central to his critique of Stalin.223 Though Trotsky’s approach thus reveals the role of

institutions themselves as distinct entities, he simultaneously must fall back upon the ability of

the top leadership of the party to control this social force of the bureaucracy and direct it toward

the general good. Trotsky’s account indicated two possible ways in which the bureaucratic

authoritarianism of Stalin’s era could be, or could have been, avoided, both of which required the

party leadership to be able to direct the administrative apparatus toward a knowable and

achievable general good while at the same time readying that apparatus for its own gradual

dissolution. First, as discussed, Trotsky indicated that his Left Opposition faction, were it able to

retain power, would have executed from above economic policies that simultaneously lessened

the bureaucracy’s materialistic basis and paved the way for socialism by properly managing

privilege.224 Set upon anchoring everything in social forces, however, Trotsky also cast doubt

upon whether such a scenario could ever have happened, attributing the bureaucracy’s ascent to

power through Stalin and his circle to the delayed world revolution and the inevitable post-

power-seizure apathy that invites Thermidorean reaction.225 The future solution to this that

Trotsky presented relied on a type of political revolution (possibly dependent upon the

international revolution) which would immediately begin to lessen the role of the bureaucracy,

but, because of the continued presence of privilege and antagonism as the economy developed,

could not logically eliminate it without contradicting the rest of Trotsky’s argument.226 In both

cases, therefore – the hypothetical reign of the Left Opposition, and the future political

223 For a very clear example, see Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, 209: “If the new state had no other interests than the interests of society, the dying away of the function of compulsion would gradually acquire a painless character. But the state is not pure spirit. Specific functions have created specific organs.” See also Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, 47, 70-4, 80-6, 101-7, 187-8, 208; Trotsky, The New Course, 35-8. 224 Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, 17-34, 66, 211-3. 225 Ibid., 45-7, 68-71, 80, 144-5, 214-9, 220-4. 226 Ibid., 190, 214-9.

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revolution – the successful attainment of Trotsky’s goals relied upon leaders’ ability to properly

manage the bureaucracy, both epistemologically (in terms of knowing the correct policies) and

practically (by restraining the caste mentality of the cadres). While the solutions to the crowd-

problem considered in chapter two required institutions to be controllable enough through

political measures to act as loyal megaphones for the wisest possible popular voice, Trotsky’s

emphasis upon the independence of these institutions and their infidelity to their purposes threw

the responsibility for controlling bureaucratization to the select few who were able to understand

all.

The Objectively Measurable General Good: Implications in Both Cases

As a coda to this examination of Trotsky, we may scrutinize the role of the objectively

measurable general good as an aspect of revolutionary theory that can decouple the two halves of

popular sovereignty. As mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, the epistemological, and

thus practical and ontological, separation between goals of democratization and other aspects of

the common good is not a foregone conclusion. This is despite the fact that it is often treated as

such: especially in histories of the early Bolshevik years, the existence of political and economic

crises in itself is often used to explain the Party’s limitation of democracy in order to achieve

concrete ends.227 But the ability to separate welfare from participation in practice requires a

situation qualitatively different, epistemologically, from a situation in which declaration and

benefit are understood to be mutually dependent on an epistemological level. The prioritization

227 This is the approach of both Waller and the historians whose work he discusses in Waller, Democratic Centralism, 54-5, 58, 60, 141-2. It also appears in Iarov, The Tenth Congress, 117-8; Service, The Bolshevik Party, 238-42; Daniels, The Communist Opposition, 253; Service, The Soviet State, 313. Arendt assumes a similar separability, though it is entrenched in her definition of freedom, in describing Lenin in On Revolution, 56, and again on 265. Moreover, the Bolsheviks themselves, as well as Luxemburg, presented their Civil-War-era measures as dictated by necessity: Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution, 28-30, 35-6, 78-9; Trotsky, The New Course, 16-7, 19; Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, 16-8, 42, 45, 73-4, 200-1.

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of economic over political goals based upon an assessment of what is and is not possible

necessitates a particular epistemological claim: that the general good exists and is known, but

that the masses are not necessary, and cannot be counted upon, to know it. For example, in cases

of war or attack, the need for military defense may appear so obvious that mass participation

appears hardly necessary to ratify it and too slow and/or ill-informed to direct it.228 If the general

good is assumed to be available only through some form of mass participation, however, then

economic and political goals are logically inseparable. Thus, the central point here is that crisis

in itself does not directly facilitate the separation between the general good and popular

participation that can lead, as it did with Stalin and Trotsky, to a de-prioritization of the latter.

Instead, crisis matters because it interacts with the epistemologies that we have been tracing as

the basis of different groups’ approaches to the challenge of the crowd.

We see, then, that the existence of a general good that is assumed to be objectively and

externally known can facilitate the separation between participation and benefit that underpins

the separation between rulers and ruled which in turn causes leaders to stand outside the

traditional spectrum of solutions to the crowd problem. In such theories, the two halves of

popular sovereignty cannot be united: the people can rule either through their best interests (but

not their participation), or against them. At first, this appears to highlight a uniquely weak aspect

of Marxism as a revolutionary ideology, at least in terms of solving the problem of the crowd

with a combination of democracy and welfare. Marxism, even outside its Leninist variety, is

explicitly and forcefully based in economics, requiring not only political changes, but the utter

reconstruction of the economic realm before the truly ideal form of popular sovereignty can be

reached. The bureaucratic, complex process of economic management, the success of which can

228 For example, Lincoln’s infamous suspension of Habeas Corpus during the American Civil War: Abraham Lincoln, “Proclamation Suspending the Writ of Habeas Corpus,” TeachingAmericanHistory.org, http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=425

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be evaluated by external circumstances, may provide an opening – as in the theories of Stalin and

Trotsky – for the general good to sever itself from the need for information from the masses and

become an object to be attained by correct leader-developed policy.229 Indeed, this may have

happened in the Soviet Union well before Stalin’s ascent: protesting workers in Moscow

complained as early as 1918 that the revolution was “sinking,” with the Soviets as “anti-worker

and anti-revolutionary” “puppets of the Party”; and the Tenth Party Congress of 1921 limited the

available forms of free discussion within the party in favor of “unity and cohesion,” with the

Lenin-penned response to opposition groups blaming class enemies for dissent in a manner

reminiscent of Stalin.230 This last manifestation of late Leninism points to a related weak point in

Marxism: positing a single, fallible class as the possessor of the general good may leave an

opening for reversing the association between the working class and their interests. If the general

good can be externally ascertained, then that knowledge can be used to exclusively define the

group capable of class consciousness and of furthering the good of all. Instead of viewing the

general good as a product of participation, generated from the bottom up and inaccessible

without the information and devotion to socialism provided by the class-conscious workers, the

already-known general good becomes an instrument used from above to define who the class-

conscious workers are. This represents the elision between mutual-discovery democratic

centralism and top-down democratic centralism that I mentioned in the introduction to this

chapter. With this transformation in its epistemological derivation, the general good emancipates

229 For a similar point, see Dunn, Modern Revolutions, 9-11. 230 Letter from protesting workers in Moscow to St. Petersburg, 1918, quoted in Sakwa, 88-9; Draft Resolution on Party Unity, 100. See also Declaration of the Twenty-Two, quoted in Sakwa, 138; Appeal of the Workers’ Truth Group, quoted in Sakwa, 139-40; Platform of the 46, quoted in Sakwa, 158-9; Resolution on the Syndicalist, 497; Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution, 88; Kowalski, The Russian Revolution, 161; Service, The Soviet State, 304; Iarov, The Tenth Congress, 119-22; Daniels, The Conscience, 143-7, 162-3.

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itself from, and begins to squeeze out, popular participation, severing the two halves of popular

sovereignty and leaving rulers and ruled separate.

Perhaps surprisingly, however, the American case is not free from such issues in itself. It

is an open question how close the Marxist idea of class-consciousness is to the position of wise

and virtuous men in both of the American construals. Virtue and wisdom were widely linked

with appreciation for the republican form of government, and the American people’s

“enlightened” status was used to support claims that they would therefore defend the rights seen

as a staple of their welfare – rights incontrovertibly sanctioned, in many theories, by God

himself, or simply seen as “self-evident.”231 One must also consider that the American

revolutionaries were hardly unanimous supporters of universal suffrage. Even aside from their

exclusion of women, African-American slaves, and Native Americans, many of the Founding

Fathers, Federalists and Anti-Federalists alike, acquiesced to or promoted the limitation of

suffrage to the propertied, as they were the ones with a stake in the society.232 In terms of the

epistemological derivation of the general good, this closely parallels the role of the

economically-based common interest in Marxism that was just discussed: property was assumed

to be a component of the general good, one of the natural rights of man, and the propertyless

were excluded from politics by many of the Founding generation on the grounds of their

231 “The Declaration of Independence,” in The Federalist Papers, ed. Clinton Rossiter (New York: Signet Classics, 2003), 528-9; James Wilson, “Speech in the Pennsylvania Ratifying Convention,” in Federalists and Antifederalists: The Debate over the Ratification of the Constitution, ed. John P. Kaminski and Richard Leffer (Madison, WI: Madison House, 1998), 20; John Adams, “Letters Upon Interesting Subjects Respecting the Revolution in America,” in The Political Writings of John Adams, ed. George W. Carey (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2000), 593; Federalist 3 (Jay), 36; Federalist 39 (Madison), 236; Federalist 43 (Madison), 276; Federalist 51 (Madison), 321; Federalist 55 (Madison), 341; Henry, Speech of June 5, 203; Corwin, The Progress, 24-6; White, The Philosophy, 10-15; Wood, The Creation, 4-10. 232 White, The Philosophy, 50-1; Ketcham, Introduction, 9; Madison, Notes of Debates, 376-403. For a protest against specific limitations, though rendered in vague language, see “Additions Proposed By the Virginia Convention: A Proposed Bill of Rights (June 27, 1788),” in The Anti-Federalist Papers, ed. Ralph Ketcham (New York: Signet Classics, 2003), 220: “all men having sufficient evidence of permanent common interest with, and attachment to, the community, ought to have the right of suffrage…”

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presumed antipathy to the preservation of property as an essential right.233 The general good, in

other words, became an objective criterion whose acceptance was required of all those who

would make further decisions regarding the future of the nation. The rhetoric of the American

post-revolutionary era, moreover, was not free from references to the same types of economic

and military concerns upon which Stalin focused as the hallmarks of his regime’s success,

though they were certainly relied upon to a lesser degree. Hamilton, especially, focused in

several of the early Federalist Papers upon proving the essentiality of Union to the safety and

prosperity of the states, even before he and his fellow authors had broached in full their ideas

regarding representation, wisdom, and popular sovereignty.234 Finally, it is impossible to discuss

this idea of material foundations for political goals in the American case without mentioning

slavery, an axiomatically un-free system which was nevertheless represented within, rather than

abolished by, the post-revolutionary state.235 It is possible, though controversial, to even make

the argument that the American government was forced to rupture into the Civil War in order to 233 Federalist 54 (Madison), 336-7; Edmund Pendleton, “Speech at the Virginia Convention,” in Federalists and Antifederalists: The Debate over the Ratification of the Constitution, ed. John P. Kaminski and Richard Leffer (Madison, WI: Madison House, 1998), 216-7; James Madison, “Remarks on Mr. Jefferson’s Draught of a Constitution,” in The Mind of the Founder: Sources of the Political Thought of James Madison, ed. Martin Myers (Indianapolis and New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1973), 57-8; Federalist 85 (Hamilton), 521; Adams, Letter to Samuel Adams, 668. This was, infamously, seized upon by Charles Beard to argue that the Constitution was driven by economic concerns. Beard’s interpretation is at best tangential to the one put forth here: he did not consider the mutable definition of popular sovereignty, and instead described a populist struggle of debtors versus creditors rather than focusing upon the ideas they put forth. See Beard, An Economic Interpretation, 156-9, 292-325. For the role of this in the first party system, see Richard Buel, Jr., Securing the Revolution: Ideology in American Politics, 1798-1815 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1972), 1-27. 234 In the Federalist papers, see Federalist 2 (Jay), 32-3; Federalist 3 (Jay), 37-40; Federalist 7 (Hamilton), 58-9; Federalist 9 (Hamilton), 66; Federalist 11 (Hamilton), 85-6; Federalist 14 (Madison), 94; Federalist 26 (Hamilton), 165; Federalist 45 (Madison), 285. See also Randolph’s speech opening the Constitutional Convention, in Madison, Notes of Debates, 29. 235 The only mentions of slavery in the Federalist Papers are both from Madison, in Federalist 42 (pp. 262-3) and Federalist 54 (pp. 333-8), both half-apologizing for and half-defending the compromises in terms of the slave trade and representation (i.e., the three-fifths rule) that were made at the Convention. Melancton Smith attacked the three-fifths rule in his Speech of June 20, 340, and the Rhode Island Convention proposed an amendment demanding that slave importation be banned as soon as possible (“Amendments Proposed By The Rhode Island Convention, March 6, 1790,” in The Anti-Federalist Papers, ed. Ralph Ketcham (New York: Signet Classics, 2003), 226). It was debated and compromised upon at the Federal Convention (Madison, Notes of Debates, 465-72), with some members arguing that the slave trade was inconsistent with revolutionary principles, some asserting it was essential to the South’s finances, and others simply hoping to put off the controversial matter until later.

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coercively institute the material transformation that facilitated true republican autonomy, a

transformation impossible through Constitutional procedure.236 All of these factors indicate,

perhaps, a latent role for economic prerequisites for popular decision-making that may well have

been present in both cases, despite being far more explicit within the philosophy of Marxism.

The cases differed most significantly, then – though this limited difference had enormous

practical effect – in that the scope of the objectively derived general interest was significantly

wider and more developed in the Russian case.

Jefferson: Institutionalizing the Gap

From the Kremlin’s onion domes, we turn finally to the transformative year of 1787 in the newly

founded American republic, and to one of that era’s legends: Thomas Jefferson. But despite his

prominent role in American history, Jefferson was an infamous iconoclast whose thought admits,

even now, different interpretations and explanations. I will use the year 1787 and Jefferson’s

seemingly contradictory reactions to its two major events, Shays’s Rebellion (beginning in 1786)

and the Constitutional Convention, to trace an important thread in Jefferson’s thought: the

manner in which, like Trotsky, he challenged the possibility of institutionalizing the popular

voice in a manner that accesses the general good.237 This viewpoint preserves, rather than

bridges, the post-revolutionary gap between rulers and ruled, and thus it stands outside the full

scope of the challenge of the crowd, engaging with fellow revolutionaries on different grounds.

Rather than locating the general good on a bridge across rulers-ruled chasm, or on either side of

it, Jefferson anchored it in the tension between the two.

236 For various perspectives on this, see Kenneth M. Stampp, The Imperiled Union (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 192-243; Richard Sewell, A House Divided: Sectionalism & Civil War, 1848-1865 (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Pres, 1988), 5-13, 17, 37-8; William H. Freehling, The Road to Disunion, Volume 2 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 531-3. 237 On the timing of Shays’ Rebellion, see Wood, The Creation, 285.

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Shays’s Rebellion itself, reaching its climax in the winter of 1786-7 in Western

Massachusetts, was not an isolated event.238 Instead, as perhaps the most visible disturbance of

the Articles of Confederation era, it is a useful representation of the tensions of the time. The

inculcation of political suspicion that had come with the Revolution had infused a difficult

situation, filled with debt and barter, with talk of self-government and dilemmas over the

meaning of legitimacy and popular sovereignty.239 A long tradition of “extra-legislative action”

on the part of the populace, often riotous and born of centuries of weak, distant, and/or

unresponsive governments, had turned into a habitual form of political communication and

quasi-legal administration whose place in the new republic was troublingly unclear.240 But

whether it was a unique outburst or simply a dramatic manifestation of the troubles of its time,

the reactions that Shays’s Rebellion provoked, which differed greatly between Jefferson and his

fellow founders, help to encapsulate these revolutionaries’ divergent reactions to the post-

revolutionary problem of the crowd itself.

The Rebellion: The Crowd Problem Manifest

Most of the references to Shays’s Rebellion that appear in contemporary assessments of the

situation reveal a sense that something was distinctly and threateningly awry. Despite praise in

some circles of the government’s leniency upon the rebels, Shays’s, when it arose in letters and

238 This is the period considered in most depth by Robert A Feer in his thorough study, Shays’ Rebellion (New York & London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1988). 239 Andrew MacFarland Davis, The Shays Rebellion: A Political Aftermath (Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 1911), 3, 6, 14-5, 25; Wood, The Creation, 284-6, 325, 483; George Richards Minot, History of the Insurrections in Massachusetts in 1786 and of the Rebellion Consequent Thereon (New York: Da Capo Press, 1971) (Reprint of 1788 edition), 5-8, 12, 27-9; Feer, Shays’ Rebellion, 2, 16-7, 33-4, 222-3; Buel, Securing the Revolution, ix; Ketcham, Introduction, 2. This is central in Frank’s criticism of Arendt’s presentation of the American Revolution: Frank, Constituent Moments, 43-65. 240 Frank, Constituent Moments, 17-27, 45-66, 67-97; Wood, The Creation, 284-7, 320-43, 409; Minot, History of the Insurrections, 23-9; Feer, Shays’ Rebellion, 2, 16-7, 33-4.

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in the Convention debates, represented a fearful and challenging circumstance.241 Washington

was especially distressed, writing to Madison that “We are fast verging to anarcy [sic] and

confusion!” and that “the consequences of a lax, or inefficient government, are too obvious to be

dwelt on.”242 At the Constitutional Convention, Edmund Randolph referenced the rebellion in his

introduction of the Virginia plan as evidence that the Articles required revision, and future Anti-

Federalist Elbridge Gerry mentioned Shays’s twice, saying that “In Massts. it has been fully

confirmed by experience that [the people] are daily misled into the most baneful measures and

opinions.”243 The Rebellion was referenced six more times over the course of the debates,

including by Hamilton and Madison, for nine appearances total.244 Each time, its role as a

“disturbance” or “insurrection” was utilized to demonstrate the need for a particular type of

government in order to render such instances as bloodless and rare as possible.245

This does not yet, however, allow us to clarify Shays’s role in political thought. As

Richard Feer points out, the specter of Shays’s did not belong solely to one side of the debate:

some delegates used it to support State authority, others to call for a more energetic general

government, and Gerry even seemed to use it to reference both sides within the space of

weeks.246 Wood, in his account of the rebellion’s role, describes an additional ambiguity, seeing

Shays’s as something of a break from the growing dilemma of legislative tyranny, representing a

241 See Minot, History of the Insurrections, 192; Corwin, The Progress, 33-4. Buel also references fears of insurrection connected with the Articles of Confederation years as influential upon fiscal policy as a method of national stabilization immediately following ratification. See Buel, Securing the Revolution, 19. Wood notes the “consternation” that Shays’ provoked, but also the relief that derived from its role as a familiar abuse of republican liberty in the face of the confusing new concept of legislative tyranny: Wood, The Creation, 412-3, 465. 242 Washington to Madison, November 5, 1786, quoted in Feer, Shays’s Rebellion, 488. 243 Feer, 491-2; Madison, Notes of Debates, 28-30, 39. 244 Feer, Shays’s Rebellion, 496. 245 Ibid., 491-6. The Rebellion is also referenced in Cato III, 16. 246 Feer, Shays’ Rebellion, 492-3, 496-8.

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problem that belonged in a more familiar discourse.247 For Wood, the deepest trouble that

Shays’s Rebellion represented was revealed only when one realized that the state governments,

because of their increasingly evident democratic despotism, could not be trusted to protect liberty

from this manifestation of anarchy.248 Says Wood, “It fitted nicely into the traditional pattern of

political thinking…Yet Shays’s Rebellion was irrelevant to the major constitutional difficulty

experienced in the Confederation period – the problem of legal tyranny.”249 But the ambivalent

role of Shays’s in both of these able accounts can be clarified using the challenge of the crowd.

With the understanding that all post-revolutionary attempts at instituting popular sovereignty

face the challenge of not only constituting the people into their government, but of doing so in

such a way that the governmental voice will obtain an advantage over the unmediated voice of

the crowd, all of these problems become one: the problem of bridging the post-revolutionary gap

by institutionally facilitating the general good. In other words, both the existence of the rebellion

(demonstrating the gap between rulers and ruled) and the inadequacy of the state legislatures to

prevent licentious attitudes from prevailing (challenging the government’s adherence to the

general good) could be solved by locating the institutional construction of the popular voice that

represented not a distortion of the people, but their truest selves – the same construction, that is,

which would necessarily privilege the common good. Therefore, Shays’s and its context manifest

the post-revolutionary problem of the crowd itself. It was from this point in 1787 that the debates

over the proper solution to this problem – the diverging uses of Shays’s indicated by Feer, and

the ideologies discussed in chapter two – began.

Jefferson: The Non-Solution Solution

247 Wood, The Creation, 412. 248 Ibid., 412-3. 249 Ibid., 412.

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In contrast to this general sense of worry, Jefferson’s unperturbed, almost approving attitude

toward the Rebellion is infamous and striking. In letters from Paris as he watched the slow

coming of the French Revolution, Jefferson proclaimed that “a little rebellion now and then is a

good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.”250 Shays’s seemed

to come almost as a relief, for “God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion,”

and he had little patience for the worry of his peers: for Jefferson, Shays’s “has given more alarm

than I think it should have done,” for “If once [the people] become inattentive to the public

affairs, you and I, and Congress, and Assemblies, judges and governors shall all become

wolves.”251 But when he rhetorically asked, “can history produce an instance of rebellion so

honourably conducted?”, it was not because he felt the insurrection’s grievances to have been

accurate or its cause correct.252 Instead, he attributed it to “ignorance” and “misconceptions,”

asserting more than once that we should, regardless, “Let them take arms. The remedy is to set

them right as to facts, pardon & pacify them,” and cautioning, “Do not be too severe upon their

errors, but reclaim them by enlightening them.”253 It seems that the Rebellion was, then, not

praiseworthy because it was right or productive of truth in itself, but valuable simply because it

was a rebellion, “a medecine [sic] necessary for the sound health of government.”254 Jefferson

maintained this focus on rupture throughout his life, implying a governmental tendency toward

“degeneracy,” tyranny, and corruption (for “Every government degenerates when trusted to the

250 Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to James Madison, January 30, 1787,” in The Portable Thomas Jefferson, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 416. 251 Thomas Jefferson, “The ‘Tree of Liberty’ Letter” (Letter to William Smith, November 13, 1787), in “Sidebar: Thomas Jefferson, Radical and Racist,” in The Atlantic Monthly (October 1996), http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/96oct/obrien/blood.htm; Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to James Madison, December 20, 1787,” in The Portable Thomas Jefferson, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 431; Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to Edward Carrington, January 16, 1787,” in The Portable Thomas Jefferson, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 415. See also Daniel Sisson, The American Revolution of 1800 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), 89. 252 Jefferson, The ‘Tree of Liberty’ Letter. 253 Ibid.; Jefferson, Letter to Edward Carrington, 415. 254 Jefferson, Letter to James Madison, January 30, 1787, 417.

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rulers of the people alone”), though he increasingly turned in later years to means by which

violence could be lessened.255 Many of his more iconoclastic proposals, such as the ward system,

appeals to the people to regulate governmental abuses, and the generational dissolution and

reformation of government that he proposed in both 1789 and 1816, are variations upon this

theme.256 “I am not among those who fear the people,” Jefferson proclaimed; “the Will of the

majority, the Natural law of every society, is the only sure guardian of the rights of man.”257

This initially appears as though it may place Jefferson firmly upon the side of the crowd:

a majoritarian champion of the unmediated people, elevating them, especially as he solidified his

distaste for the European governments of “wolves and sheep,” above their necessarily imperfect

rulers.258 But his calls for “absolute acquiescence in the decisions of the majority” and “a little

rebellion now and then” seem to make little sense alongside his other main opinion expressed in

1787: his general support for the Constitution.259 “I approved from the first moment, of the great

mass of what is in the new constitution, the consolidation of the government, the organization

into Executive, legislative and judiciary, the subdivision of the legislative…” he wrote in 1789,

255 Ibid., 416-7; Thomas Jefferson, “Notes on the State of Virginia,” in The Portable Thomas Jefferson, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 198; Thomas Jefferson, “First Inaugural Address,” in The Portable Thomas Jefferson, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 293; Jefferson, Letter to James Madison, December 20, 1787, 429, 431; Jefferson, Letter to Benjamin Waring, 1801, quoted in Democracy, selected and arranged by Saul K. Padover (New York and London: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1939), 58. On the inevitability of corruption, Jefferson, Notes on the State, 165-6. See also Sisson, The American Revolution, 96, 100-118. 256 Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to John Adams, October 28, 1813,” in The Portable Thomas Jefferson, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 537-8; Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to James Madison, September 6, 1789,” in The Portable Thomas Jefferson, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 445-50; Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to Samuel Kercheval, July 12, 1816,” in The Portable Thomas Jefferson, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 559-61; Jefferson, Letter to J.W. Eppes, 1813, in Democracy, 24-5; Jefferson, Letter to T. Earle, 1823, in Democracy, 26. In Federalist 49, 310-4, Madison addresses Jefferson’s 1783 proposal that the people (of Virginia) be called upon to adjudicate disputes between branches of government. Helo, Jefferson’s Conception, 36. 257 Jefferson, Letter to Samuel Kercheval, 558; Jefferson, “Response to the Citizens of Albemarle,” in The Portable Thomas Jefferson, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), Feb 12 1790, 260. 258 Jefferson, Letter to Edward Carrington, 415. This is the argument of Ari Helo, Jefferson’s Conception, 37: “his statecraft represented an almost unconditional surrender to the temporally variable will of the people.” 259 Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, 293; Jefferson, Letter to James Madison, January 30, 1787, 416. Helo acknowledges Jefferson’s support of the Constitution, but explains it using the directness of the Convention and the presence of a Bill of Rights: Helo, Jefferson’s Conception, 40-1.

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and though at times he criticized certain facets, these critiques were not out of the ordinary,

largely surrounding the lack of term limits for the President and Senators.260 Though Jefferson

admitted that he was “not a friend to a very energetic government,” he approved of such non-

majoritarian components as the federal judiciary (at least initially),261 feared that “a house chosen

by [the people] will be very illy qualified to legislature [sic] for the Union,” and remarked that

“The tyranny of the legislatures is the most formidable dread at present, and will be for long

years.”262 Indeed, despite a few nostalgic references to the government-less life of the Native

Americans, Jefferson continued to see government as necessary, fearing the assumption of

authority into the hands of the post-revolutionary voluntary associations, and viewed its proper

structure and composition as important, especially the division of powers.263 This Jeffersonian

conundrum is perhaps best captured in a letter to Edmund Pendleton, eleven years before Shays’s

in August 1776, when he wrote on one page that “I have ever observed that a choice by the

people themselves is not generally distinguished for it’s [sic] wisdom,” but later asserted that “In 260 Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to Francis Hopkinson, March 13, 1789,” in The Portable Thomas Jefferson, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 436; Jefferson, Letter to James Madison, December 20, 1787, 429-33; Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to James Madison, March 15, 1789,” in The Portable Thomas Jefferson, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 438-40; Jefferson, Letter to Adams, 1787, in Democracy, 87; Jefferson, Letter to Madison, 1788, in Democracy, 87-8; Jefferson, Letter to Humphreys, 1789, in Democracy, 102: “The Constitution…is unquestionably the wisest ever yet presented to men.” 261 For his later change of heart, see Jefferson, Letter to Samuel Kercheval, 554, 556. 262 Jefferson, Letter to James Madison, December 20, 1787, 431; Jefferson, Letter to James Madison, March 15, 1789, 438; Jefferson, Letter to James Madison, December 20, 1787, 429. See also Jefferson, Letter to James Madison, March 15, 1789, 439-40; and for an earlier assertion of support for indirect Senatorial election, see Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to Edmund Pendleton, August 26, 1776,” in The Portable Thomas Jefferson, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 355-6. 263 Jefferson, Letter to F.W. Gilmer, 1816, quoted in Democracy, 59-60; Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, 293; Jefferson, Letter to D’Ivernois, 1795, in Democracy, 45. See also Wood, The Creation, 322; Sisson, The American Revolution, 98-9; Saul K Padover, Introduction to Democracy, by Thomas Jefferson, selected and arranged by Saul K. Padover (New York and London: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1939), 6-10. On the Native Americans, Jefferson, Letter to James Madison, January 30, 1787, 416; Jefferson, Letter to Rutledge, 1787, in Democracy, 39; Jefferson, Letter to Edward Carrington, 415. On the division of powers, see Jefferson, Notes on the State, 164: “An elective despotism was not the government we fought for; but one which should not only be founded on free principles, but in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among several bodies of magistracy…” Jefferson also supported the Federalist idea that large states were more effective at preventing the troubles of particularity and faction. See Jefferson, Letter to D’Ivernois, 1795, in Democracy, 45-6; Jefferson, Letter to Nathaniel Niles, 1801, in Democracy, 55; Jefferson, “Second Inaugural Address,” in The Portable Thomas Jefferson, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 318. He also remarked in 1787 that “The instability of our laws is really an immense evil”: Jefferson, Letter to James Madison, December 20, 1787, 432.

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general I believe the decisions of the people, in a body, will be more honest and more

disinterested than those of wealthy men.”264 How could Jefferson support both government and

its rupture, the division of powers and the sacredness of majority rule? How, in other words,

could he both idealize the crowd and feel the need to harness it – carefully manufacture good

government, and then batter it with rebellion and institutionalized dissolution?

This challenge presented by Jefferson is not new, and it has been used as a springboard

for excellent scholarship. One implication is the lingering tension between constituent and

constituted power, utilized well in Frank’s analysis of the American revolution’s legacy.265 In the

language of this work, Frank’s constituted/constituent tension can be seen as a forward-looking

addendum to the analysis provided here: as an ongoing contradiction inherent in any solution to

the crowd problem, because of the manner in which the unmediated voice, despite the

legitimization of the governmental manifestation of the people, retains its position prior to and

outside of government as a possible platform for undercutting, challenging, or transforming the

constituted formulation of popular sovereignty. There is, however, another implication of

Jefferson’s simultaneous celebration of and opposition to the crowd upon which theorists like

Frank do not focus: the question of how Jefferson’s ideas fare as a solution to the crowd problem

in themselves, and what they reveal regarding the demands and possibilities of popular

sovereignty. By viewing Jefferson’s ideas not only as reacting to a perpetual

constituted/constituent tension, but as proposing a method of constituting power itself in light of

the unique challenges of a post-revolutionary situation, we may understand Jefferson’s role in

these debates, and the seeming contradiction between the two portions of his theories described

above, as a response to the problem of the crowd that solves it by leaving it unsolved. That is,

264 Jefferson, Letter to Edmund Pendleton, 355, 356. 265 Frank, Constituent Moments, entire, especially 3-10, 19-27, 30-6, 237-53.

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Jefferson not only left intact the post-revolutionary gap between rulers and ruled, but left

unchallenged the authority of the crowd’s representative claim, trusting for the achievement of

the general good in neither the rulers or the ruled alone.

We may approach Jefferson’s preservation of the rulers-ruled gap by first considering

how that gap manifested itself in revolutionary and post-revolutionary America. As described

above, and as thoroughly analyzed in the work of Wood and Frank, the 1760s-1780s were the

scene of much activity by the “people out-of-doors,” with voluntary organizations an important

part of the political fabric and suspicion of power transferring with unsettling ease from the

Crown authorities to the elected state governments. In such an environment, “The people were

rapidly becoming a permutable force whose will could never be embodied by any representative

institution.”266 This dichotomy is not troubling for our analysis; in fact, it represents the

challenge of the crowd embodied. The departure from the ordinary method of solving this

problem, the gap-bridging techniques examined in chapter two, occurs when one attempts to

preserve and rely upon this gap itself. Wood writes that such ideas arose sporadically throughout

the 1780s, notably in the work of James Burgh, but it is Jefferson who provides the most

prominent example.267 The cornerstone of his conceptualization is the manner in which he leaves

the representational authority of the crowd intact, while nevertheless challenging its authority to

govern. He states this most clearly in a 1789 letter to Madison: no “form of government [is] so

perfectly contrived that the will of the majority [can] always be obtained fairly and without

impediment.”268 In other words, the representational, institutionalized voice of government,

however necessary, remains a distortion; the rulers-ruled gap cannot be bridged.

266 Wood, The Creation, 331; 330, 322-3. Frank, Constituent Moments, 3, 17, 26-7 (“the revolution’s principal point: that no governmental entity could ever fully embody the will of the people”), 31-3, 44, 69, 237-8, 249. 267 Wood, The Creation, 323. 268 Jefferson, Letter to James Madison, September 6, 1789, 449-50.

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The uniqueness and full implications of this viewpoint are brought home in the context of

Jefferson’s views on representation. As with many other issues, Jefferson here seems to

equivocate: he references the “really good and wise,” the “natural aristocracy,” and the need for

a republic “to be so extensive as that…on every particular question, a majority may be found in

its councils free from particular interests,” as did the Federalists; but the localism of his ward

system, his insistence that “the people…and not the rich, are our dependence for continued

freedom,” and his focus on “common sense” and fear of centralism and “rulers independent from

[the people]” resonate with the Anti-Federalist perspective.269 But Jefferson, as he himself

claimed, was neither a Federalist nor an Anti-Federalist at the time of ratification, because he

took neither side on the issue of representation.270 Rather than concerning himself with rendering

representative bodies faithful mirrors of the people’s external characteristics or institutionally

privileging the far-sighted and wise, Jefferson concentrated upon the level of popular control and

choice exercised upon the system at large. His “most earnest wish [was] to see the republican

element of popular control pushed to the maximum of its practicable exercise,” and he viewed

“the control of the people over the organs of their government” as “the measure of its

republicanism.”271 In light of this, Jefferson’s view of the function and meaning of representation

was simply that

experience has proved it safer, for the mass of individuals composing the society, to reserve to themselves personally the exercise of all rightful powers to which they are competent, and to delegate those to which they are not competent to deputies named, and removable for unfaithful conduct, by themselves immediately…being unqualified for the management of affairs requiring intelligence above the common level, yet

269 Quotes: Jefferson, Letter to John Adams, 535; Ibid., 534-5; Jefferson, Letter to D’Ivernois, 1795, in Democracy, 45; Jefferson, Letter to Hawkins, 1787, in Democracy, 39; Jefferson, Letter to Abigail Adams, 1804, in Democracy, 67. On the fear of centralism, Jefferson, Letter to Gideon Granger, 1800, in Democracy, 46-7. On the ward system, Jefferson, Letter to Samuel Kercheval, 560-1; Jefferson, Letter to John Adams, 537-8. 270 On being neither Federalist nor Anti-Federalist, see Jefferson, Letter to Francis Hopkinson, 453-6. 271 Jefferson, Letter to I.H. Tiffany, 1819, quoted in Democracy, 35; Jefferson, Letter to J. Taylor, 1816, quoted in Democracy, 63.

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competent judges of human character, they chose, for their management, representatives, some by themselves immediately, others by electors chosen by themselves.272

In other words, then, representatives were necessary not to embody the public mind, but simply

to assist it in any way the electors chose. Though wisdom and compassion would likely be

helpful qualities for representatives to display, Jefferson sought to institutionally privilege

neither; he did not use any particular characteristic to define the quality of representation, but

made the directness of delegation his primary concern. Unlike both Federalists and Anti-

Federalists, Jefferson ensured representatives’ commitment to the general good neither by setting

them within the correct patterns of communal interests nor by privileging those who would be

able to separate themselves from such interests, but through “direct and constant control by the

citizens” alone.273 The central point of distinction between Jefferson and his contemporaries is

that, while both Federalists and Anti-Federalists considered popular control important, they also

both extrapolated divergent ideas of what “truthful” representation meant: either inclusion of all

of the facets of a naturally harmonious community, or isolation of the people’s rational and

disinterested soul. For Jefferson, neither of these was the case nor the goal. He built his own

theory, instead, upon the necessity of immediate delegation in cases of simple incapacity or lack

of knowledge. This did not ontologically blur the line between the people and their

representatives in the same manner that the other formulations did, and thus it could not tackle

head-on the challenge of the crowd. But though this examination of Jefferson’s representational

theory illuminates why Jefferson saw the rulers-ruled gap as unbridgeable, because the

unequivocally truest representation of popular will lay in the unmediated majority outside of it, it

does not explain the original conundrum that we posed: how could Jefferson support both

272 Jefferson, Letter to Dupont de Nemours, 1816, in Democracy, 56. 273 Jefferson, Letter to J. Taylor, 1816, in Democracy, 62.

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government and the rebellion against it? Or, in what amounts to the same question, how could he

declare both that “justice is the fundamental law of society…the majority, oppressing an

individual, is guilty of a crime,” and that “the will of the Majority should always prevail”?274

How could he draw these two laws together, if not by viewing them, as the others did, as

necessarily entangled by one and the same institutional construction of the popular voice?

The answers to these questions, which are all subsumed under the heading of Jefferson’s

unique approach to the problem of the crowd, lie in Jefferson’s derivation of the general good.

This concept is twofold, relying at its core upon the maintenance of the very rulers-ruled gap

whose necessity we just established. The first layer, however, rests in Jefferson’s emphasis upon

education and virtue.275 The main remedy, indeed the only remedy, that Jefferson prescribed for

Shays’s Rebellion was to “set them right as to facts.”276 “The basis of our governments being the

opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right,” he declared, “and were it

left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers

without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”277 He displayed, then,

a great confidence that

In every country where man is free to think and to speak, differences of opinion will arise…but these differences when permitted, as in this happy country, to purify themselves by free discussion, are but as passing clouds…the elective franchise, if guarded as the act of our safety, will peacefully dissipate all combinations to subvert a Constitution dictated by the wisdom, and resting on the will of the people.278

274 Jefferson, Letter to Dupont de Nemours, 1816, in Democracy, 29; Jefferson, Letter to James Madison, December 20, 1787, 432. 275 White, The Philosophy, 137-40; Padover, Introduction, 10-11. For Jefferson’s conviction that people have a moral sense, see his Letter to Thomas Law, June 13, 1814, 541-3, and Opinion on the French Treaties, 269-70, 275; also, David N. Mayer, The Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1994), 323-4. 276 Jefferson, The ‘Tree of Liberty’ Letter. 277 Jefferson, Letter to Edward Carrington, 415. 278 Jefferson, Letter to Benjamin Waring, 1801, quoted in Democracy, 58.

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That is, for Jefferson, the character and knowledge of citizens pushed the discourse and actions

of the whole society toward justice and right; and improvements in those areas only allowed

systems of government to change for the better, for “as new discoveries are made, new truths

disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must

advance also, and keep pace with the times.”279 Education and virtue were thus important

components of the drawing-together of justice and popular control. Jefferson also necessarily

assumes here that they provide a baseline for the maintenance of a certain standard of right, for,

as Sisson points out, it is unlikely that Jefferson was prepared to let the people dissolve

themselves into an anti-republican form.280 In a manner almost reminiscent of Fanon, then,

increases in knowledge drew the pronouncements of the unmediated crowd ever closer to the

commands of those who knew best, and helped to reform the systems that controlled both.

Enlightenment could not, however, solve the entire problem. Nowhere did Jefferson indicate that

a proper allotment of reason and virtue could obviate the need for government altogether, at least

not once society had populated, complicated, and urbanized past the stage of the Native

Americans.281 This meant, first, that the crowd remained indefinitely unable to govern itself, and

second, that therefore the need remained to trust officials with power that inevitably corrupts and

tyrannizes if not kept carefully in check.282 Despite increases in knowledge and virtue, then,

279 Jefferson, Letter to Samuel Kercheval, 559. See also Jefferson, Notes on the State, 198, 211; Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, 291; Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to Thomas Law, June 13, 1814,” in The Portable Thomas Jefferson, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 541; Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to Elbridge Gerry, January 26, 1799,” in The Portable Thomas Jefferson, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 478-9; Frank, Constituent Moments, 69-72; Sisson, The American Revolution, 76, 100. 280 Sisson, The American Revolution, 96-9. 281 Cf. Jefferson, Letter to James Madison, January 30, 1787, 416: “It is a problem, not clear in my mind, that the 1st. condition [that of the Native Americans] is not the best. But I believe it to be inconsistent with any great degree of population. The second state [i.e., republicanism] has a great deal of good in it…” 282 Padover, Introduction, 8; Sisson, The American Revolution, 77-80, 86-7, 115. This is not so much advanced as an explicit statement by Jefferson as it is implied throughout his body of writing. See, for example, Jefferson, Letter to M. Page, 1795, in Democracy, 59: “I do not believe…that fourteen out of fifteen men are rogues…But I have always found that rogues would be uppermost…”; Jefferson, Letter to Edward Carrington, 415: “If once [the people] become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress, and

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neither the fallible crowd nor its imperfect representatives could be viewed as reliably

privileging the general good. From whence, then, was the common good obtained?

We have essentially already seen the answer. Jefferson’s general good arose from neither

side of the rulers-ruled gap, but from the tension between them. While all of the other

formulations considered incorporated the necessity of mutual checks between population and

government, they viewed the gap between them as confoundable and bridgeable, while Jefferson

located his common good squarely in the battleground between rulers and ruled. This viewpoint

is powerfully expressed in Jefferson’s letter to William Smith, November 13, 1787, in which he

penned the memorable lines: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the

blood of patriots & tyrants. It is it’s [sic] natural manure.”283 This is not only provocative

imagery, but also forms a direct metaphorical translation of Jefferson’s approach to the crowd

problem. The tree of liberty, the common good and the goal of government, takes root in a

battleground, watered with the blood of conflict. When the antagonism between rulers and ruled

dies out – whether it is literal battle or institutionalized dissolution – the tree shrivels and the

general good is lost. This is the same theme that appears in Jefferson’s reactions to Shays’s

Rebellion: insurrection is portrayed as a corrective, a medicine, a countervailing blow to the

inevitable degeneracy of the institutions to which we delegate power. For Jefferson, then, not

only is the rulers-ruled gap insuperable, but it is the very source of governmental fidelity to

principle and adherence to the wishes and needs of its citizens. As he wrote about the states, but

applies to individuals and their governments as well, “free government is founded in jealousy,

Assemblies, judges and governors shall all become wolves.”; Jefferson, “A Summary View of the Rights of British America,” in The Portable Thomas Jefferson, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 7: “bodies of men as well as individuals are susceptible to the spirit of tyranny.” 283 Jefferson, The ‘Tree of Liberty’ Letter.

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and not in confidence; it is jealousy and not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions, to

bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power”.284

There are, of course, many ways to interpret Jefferson’s thought; few thinkers, even (and

perhaps especially) great ones, present an unyielding theoretic line over the course of their lives.

But this reading of Jefferson offers a way to clarify not only the seeming contradictions in his

own thought, but his position in the post-revolutionary conflict of the early American republic. If

the ideas of Jefferson seem un-categorizable or iconoclastic – neither Federalist nor Anti-

Federalist at the time of ratification, both majoritarian and suspicious of the capabilities of the

majority, defiantly optimistic and yet constantly suspicious – it is because he entered the post-

revolutionary debate upon different grounds than his fellows. While they attempted to solve the

problem of the crowd by bridging the post-revolutionary gap, translating the wisest and best

form of the people into their government through the type of representation that they considered

most true, Jefferson preserved the dichotomy, keeping his government healthy through almost

dialectical tension.285 For him, every translation of the people is a distortion, and thus popular

sovereignty arises not in the institutionalization and improvement of the fallible popular voice,

but in the constant, rupture-filled control of the people over their governors – corruptible

servants but indispensable ones, with each group struggling against the other and thus holding

the entire nation upon the course toward the common good.

Doubt in Institutions, Faith in Knowledge

284 Jefferson, “The Kentucky Resolutions,” in The Portable Thomas Jefferson, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 287-8. 285 It should be noted that Sisson makes a much stronger claim than the one presented here regarding the dialectical pattern of Jefferson’s revolutionary theory. See Sisson, The American Revolution, 77-81.

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We may consider a few of the consequences of Jefferson’s position. First, it important to note

that Jefferson and Trotsky, the two main revolutionaries upon whom we have focused who leave

the rulers-ruled gap intact, shared a common focus upon the dangerous infidelity of institutions.

While others in both America and Russia viewed regular elections and various methods of mass

supervision as important to ensuring that leaders did not forget their responsibilities, they also

generally saw such measures as sufficient to control institutional inertia.286 Jefferson’s

governmental rejuvenation, on the other hand, required utter rupture with all institutionalized

practices, including electoral laws, judicial procedures, and all else that bound the majority aside

from the primary bond of nationhood.287 We may infer from the fact that this emphasis upon the

danger of institutions was shared by both Trotsky and Jefferson that an increased focus upon the

possible entropic and/or self-serving nature of institutions may be associated with an

epistemological and ontological severance between the people and the general good. This refers

back to the dilemmas faced by several of the theorists in the first chapter: institutionalizing the

means to an end incites that institution to immediately begin creating its own ends, distorting the

mission for which it was initially created.288 Trotsky and Jefferson, then, more than the other

theorists considered in this work, are better equipped to view the components of government

itself with caution.

286 See, for example, Federalist 52 (Madison), 324; Madison, Notes of Debates, 107, referencing Elbridge Gerry; Pennsylvania Minority, 253, 254; Kenyon, Men of Little Faith, 69-71; Lenin, State and Revolution, 339-46, 389; Lenin, Can the Bolsheviks Retain, 399-400; Lenin, The Immediate Tasks, 457-9; Resolution on Party Unity, 502. 287 See Thomas Jefferson, “Opinion on the French Treaties,” in The Portable Thomas Jefferson, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 269; Jefferson, Letter to James Madison, September 6, 1789, entire, especially 446, 449: “no society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law”; Jefferson, Letter to Samuel Kercheval, 560; Helo, Jefferson’s Conception, 44. 288 Starr uses Sartre’s paradox of institutionalization and praxis to describe Mao’s struggles (which he presents as genuine) with bureaucratization, an idea highly applicable here: for Sartre, people band together to pursue a common goal, but the self-asserting nature of their individual projects is undermined when they alienate their essentiality to the institution necessary to allow them to pursue that goal. See Starr, Continuing the Revolution, 130-4.

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But if Trotsky and Jefferson do not rest their theories of popular sovereignty upon the

ability of institutions to un-distortedly embody a voice that is both popular and true, they must

place their faith in other assumptions and expectations. We saw how, for Trotsky, the assumption

to which he turned was that leaders were able to both know the general good and control the

bureaucracy as a social force. For Jefferson, by contrast, optimism appeared in his treatment of

knowledge and its ability to unify competing interests. As we have just seen, Jefferson

constructed his concept of government around maintaining the general good through tension and

rupture between rulers and ruled, with neither trustworthy enough to hold power on its own. But

how could Jefferson assume that a generally correct course would arise from such a situation?

The answer lies in Jefferson’s confidence in the essential unity of all interests into a single

general good, accessible through knowledge on the part of both the people and the government.

Jefferson’s belief in the progress of virtue and reason through education and the spread of

enlightened discussion has already been mentioned; he displayed a faith in the accessibility of

both justice and the principles of good government to both the people themselves and their

rulers, asserting that such a quality was what made republican government, self-government,

possible at all.289 This undercurrent of association between knowledge, understanding of

government, and appreciation for justice is what likely allowed Jefferson to assume that

generational rupture and rebellion would not only preserve the republican form of government,

but would also improve it as humanity’s reason progressed. The role of knowledge was not only

on the side of the people, however, but also their rulers: Jefferson posited simple capability and

289 Kenyon, Men of Little Faith, 77; Sisson, The American Revolution, 96-7; Padover, Introduction, 10-11; Mayer, The Constitutional Thought, 328-9. Indeed, Jefferson cited none less than God Himself to support his confidence in mankind’s preparedness for self-government, writing that “I have no fear, but that the result of our experiment will be, that men may be trusted to govern themselves without a master. Could the contrary of this be proved, I should conclude, either that there is no God, or that he is a malevolent being.” (Jefferson, Letter to Hartley, 1787, in Democracy, 30.)

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understanding as the essential qualities of officials, to compensate for the facilities that the

people yet lack.290 Implicit in this characterization is, once again, the idea that the general good –

which seems, for Jefferson, to center largely around natural-law ideas such as liberty and

property – is a fixed and existing truth whose nuances become more discernable with the

increased acuity of one’s understanding.291

This emphasis upon wisdom and knowledge appears rather akin to the Federalist view,

for it implies a general good accessible more through the exercise of one’s reason than the

location of one’s experiences within the context of communal life. But Jefferson also places faith

in a concept closer to the beliefs of the Anti-Federalists in implying a possible separation

between interest and knowledge, whose balance is maintained through the rulers-ruled tension.

For Jefferson, leaders were necessary for their superior knowledge of the affairs of state, but it

was the people whose decisions were “In general…more honest and more disinterested.”292 He

focused upon the character of a people, condemning the “demoralized and depraved” of Rome,

as the base of government, and reasoned that “Man was created for social intercourse; but social

intercourse cannot be maintained without a sense of justice; then man must have been created

with a sense of justice.”293 With such sentiments, Jefferson conveyed an overarching belief that

the impulse of most was generally toward right, but that this impulse was thwarted by temptation

– which increases with power – and “being unqualified for the management of affairs requiring

290 Jefferson, Letter to James Madison, March 15, 1789, 438; Jefferson, Letter to John Adams, 534-5, 538; Jefferson, Letter to Dupont de Nemours, 1816, in Democracy, 55-6; Helo, Jefferson’s Conception, 42-4. 291 For example, Jefferson, Notes on the State, 211; Jefferson, Response to the Citizens, 260; Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, 291; Jefferson, Letter to Edward Carrington, 415; Jefferson, Letter to Samuel Kercheval, 559; Jefferson, Letter to Dupont de Nemours, 1816, in Democracy, 29. See also Helo, Jefferson’s Conception, 36-7, 39, 44. 292 Jefferson, Letter to Edmund Pendleton, 356. See also Jefferson, Letter to Edward Carrington, 414: “the good sense of the people will always be found to be the best army.” 293 Jefferson, Letter to Adams, 1819, quoted in Democracy, 36; Jefferson, Letter to F.W. Gilmer, quoted in Democracy, 59. See also Jefferson, Letter to Madison, December 20, 1787, 432; Jefferson, Letter to Benjamin Waring, 1801, in Democracy, 58; Jefferson, Letter to Judge Johnson, 1823, in Democracy, 69. Kenyon, Men of Little Faith, 77.

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intelligence above the common level.”294 The placement of correct sentiments, but inferior

understanding, in the people, and capability, but increased temptation, in their leaders, leads to a

situation in which the qualities necessary to know the general good and to pursue it faithfully lie

on opposite sides of the rulers-ruled gap. Jefferson, moreover, as we have discussed, saw the

combination of these sources of interest and knowledge as unfeasible, because the ontological

union of the people and their government was impossible. Thus, Jefferson united the knowledge

and righteousness necessary to secure the common interest through constant battle between, if

you will, the head and the heart of the nation: deriving the general good from persistent tension

between rulers and ruled, the success of which setup was guaranteed by the progress of reason

interacting with man’s inherent sense of justice.

Thus, we have seen how the edges of the crowd problem played out in these two nations.

Thomas Jefferson joins Leon Trotsky in facing the crowd problem by leaving it unsolved,

challenging the possibility or the benefit of bridging the rulers-ruled divide. For both Jefferson

and Trotsky, in very different ways, the gap was un-bridgeable. Trotsky maintained that the

voice of the proletariat, essential in progressing toward socialism, could not speak until

economic conditions were transformed, a process that could only be undertaken by visionary

leaders acting in the interests of the working class – but ultimately separately from it – until

bourgeois tasks were completed. For Jefferson, by contrast, the natural voice of the majority was

the truest representative of the people, with each institutional manifestation a distortion

necessitated by the fallibility of the crowd. In this mutually flawed context of rulers-ruled

separation, the common good was maintained, with better fidelity as reason progressed, through

consistent, jealous tension between governors and the unmediated people themselves. In the end,

294 Jefferson, Letter to Dupont de Nemours, 1816, in Democracy, 56. On the temptations of power, see Jefferson, Kentucky Resolutions, 287-8; Mayer, The Constitutional Thought, 320-1.

119

despite the richness of their individual ideas, the central role of these exceptions here is to

illustrate the depth of the rule. The problem of the crowd requires a delicate and difficult union

between the two halves of popular sovereignty, challenging the crowd’s unmediated authority

and allowing the people to speak back at themselves with the voice of wisdom and justice. In the

heated months and years that follow a revolution, we have seen that conflict erupts not only as to

how one may achieve this task, but also, in a few cases, whether it is an advisable venture at all.

120

Conclusion

I never expect to see a perfect work from imperfect man. – Alexander Hamilton295

History is made by men, but men do not always make history consciously, not even their own. –

Leon Trotsky296

On the edge of the Tyrrhenian Sea, in Tunis, the newly-named Bouazizi Square still plays host to

celebrations of Tunisia’s recent revolution.297 In Syria, where the old regime remains entrenched,

graffiti and bullets are deployed by both sides to claim the streets of Homs; and Egypt’s Tahrir

Square rings with discordant voices claiming to speak their revolution’s legacy.298 How will

these revolutions end? How will these spaces of revolution look in one hundred years – after a

century of life has bound them up with a new, perhaps contested, sense of normalcy?

In today’s pressing context of revolutionary upheaval, amid the uncertain battles for

nations’ futures, the challenge of the crowd provides fundamental insights. The conceptual

problems that surround post-revolutionary transition, which have been so profound as to incite

support for revolutions that press onward in perpetuity, center around defining and constructing

popular sovereignty in the face of the representative claim of the crowd. This challenge, inherent

in the nature of revolution itself, forces revolutionaries to embark upon a search – which some

even deem fruitless – for an institutionalized manifestation of the people which is more truly

popular than the people themselves. This paradoxical journey is riven with epistemological

dilemmas and points of bitter contention. Revolutionaries divide to produce concepts of popular

295 Federalist 85 (Hamilton), 523. 296 Trotsky, The New Course, 22. 297 Salman Shaikh, “Mohammed Bouazizi: A fruit seller’s legacy to the Arab people,” CNN.com, last modified December 17, 2011, http://www.cnn.com/2011/12/16/world/meast/bouazizi-arab-spring-tunisia/index.html. 298 Abigail Fielding-Smith, “Seven die as Syria shells town near Homs,” The Financial Times, last modified March 4, 2012, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b9849b72-660b-11e1-acea-00144feabdc0.html?ftcamp=published_links/rss/world_mideast/feed//product#axzz1oBZQqpxU; “Egypt’s Tahrir Square protesters tell their stories,” The BBC, last modified March 4, 2012, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-16724083.

121

sovereignty founded upon incompatible assumptions, none of which are obviously correct; they

argue for qualitative rather than quantitative differences in what popular rule means and requires,

and, as such, they view each other as blatantly betraying the revolution that they once helped to

shepherd together.

In our examination of the American and Russian cases, we have seen previously united

revolutionaries divide over the questions placed at the forefront of constituting the new

governmental power by the paradoxical ambiguity of post-revolutionary popular sovereignty.

Strikingly, we saw that both cases faced this same challenge and the same dilemmas that derive

from attempts to combat it: is the general good revealed through immersion within a particular

experiential context, or through farsighted transcendence of individual situations? What does

disunity mean in the search for the common good – and is it overcome through the isolation of a

naturally homogeneous group, such as a community or a class, or through the mediation of

inevitably countervailing interests? Are the people truly represented through a microcosm of

their characteristics, or by elevating particular, better attributes above others, whether economic

class background, the ability of reason to dominate passion, or a sense of class-consciousness?

Are there situations in which the general good is knowable without recourse to the declarations

of the masses? Do interests and knowledge derive from the same source? Can institutions

perform indefinitely as loyal vessels of the popular voice, or do they contain their own entropy,

distorting popular sovereignty even as they attempt to crystallize it into reality?

Divergent answers to these questions litter the pages of history with might-have-beens. It

is impossible to elevate a single individual or group as “right” without answering these dilemmas

for ourselves, and each possible resolution bears its own burden of caveats, dangers, and

assumptions. The divergences between revolutionaries’ answers to this firestorm of questions,

122

rather than different levels of commitment to the mutable concept of “popular sovereignty” itself,

underpinned the pitched post-revolutionary battles in both America and Russia. We have seen

the richness of their divergences and the fundamental assumptions that underpinned each

understanding of popular rule. We have seen, therefore, that the nature of post-revolutionary

conflict, and the meaning of popular sovereignty, is not simple: the problem of the crowd

provokes a multidimensional slew of difficult, divisive questions, all of which demand answers

in order to reconcile governmental authority with the unmediated claim of the crowd.

Thus, these debates – and the challenging, elusive, paradoxical task of post-revolutionary

transition itself – are both all about popular sovereignty, and not about popular sovereignty at all.

For though popular sovereignty is the catalyst of dissent and the motivating force behind

different conceptions of legitimate post-revolutionary power, it holds this role only because of its

deep-seated and provocative ambiguity. By examining revolutions, past and present, through the

lens of the challenge of the crowd, we learn both to look for popular sovereignty in post-

revolutionary conflict, and to look past it. We ask who, or what, revolutionaries thought the

people were: their reason or their passions, their experiences or their abstract knowledge, their

representatives or their village meetings or their rebellions. We see whether the epistemological-

ontological bridge between rulers and ruled stood firm, or whether it wavered in the current of

crisis or storms of faith in the people’s knowledge of justice. And we see each revolutionary, in

each case examined here and perhaps in all cases, struggling to bring his or her movement to a

successful close. We see them haunted by an image both beloved and feared: the image of the

people, unmediated, filling the streets, calling all government into doubt with the power and

magic of the crowd.

123

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