La révolution américaine et les infortunes de la vertu

Abstract

How much importance should be given to "republican virtue " in the American revolution? American historiographic debate on the subject is not conclusive. For some historians, the founding fathers' main motivation was their personal financial interest ; for others, the revolution and its constitutional fulfilment were mere coincidences or fortunate opportunities. And for others still, it was all a question of ideas, "revolutionary ideology" being the restoration, in the Age of Enlightenment, of a humanist language inherited from the Italian Renaissance and reinterpreted by the British revolutionary tradition. But it would be too easy to assert that the American revolution signalled the end of a "classic era " of politics. Homo civicus, taken with ancient virtues, was also a homo œconomicus acting in the name of the fundamental values of nascent liberalism and the protestant ethic. The founders of the American Republic were indeed " extraordinary men " in the sense given to that phrase by Rousseau in the Social Contract, as they took on the right, in violation of the authority conferred to them, to invent new rules for society.