The revolution for society

Abstract

This chapter reinterprets the relationship between the concept of popular sovereignty, the origins of the American Revolution and the onset of the revolutionary era in the Atlantic world. It draws upon and modifies R.R. Palmer’s classic thesis that there was a shared struggle for political equality and popular sovereignty across the Atlantic world in the later eighteenth century, constituting an ‘Age of the Democratic Revolution’. The chapter transforms Palmer’s thesis by examining popular sovereignty in the context of the British imperial crisis following the Seven Years’ War. Conceptions of popular sovereignty advanced in the unfolding imperial crisis were meant to defend and extend civil society in the face of the centralising and militarising British imperial state. In this context, the ‘democratic revolution’ that began in British North America during the 1760s and 1770s should be seen as a defence not only of increased political participation but also of collective social freedom. The chapter concludes by contending that a more expansive understanding of arguments for popular sovereignty as arguments for social freedom – for the supremacy of civil society over the state – can serve as the basis for reinterpreting the Atlantic revolutionary epoch as a whole.