The Interplay of Individualism and Historicism in the American Revolution

What seems irreconcilable with the French Revolution—historicism and individualism, in that case identified respectively with societal privileges and rights, now naturally belong to the same family: constitutionalism, understood as the doctrine of priority rights and therefore the limits to government security purposes.

Individualistic natural law and historicism in America share a common path, essentially because they have to fight the same enemy: statism, i.e., the European synthesis, which also applies to England, joining power to make laws and sovereign power. The union for the opposite perspective of the American revolutionaries means valuing the legislator's position, and not a specific public authority authorized by the constitution, but rather a synthesis of the whole collective experience, which inevitably inclines to consider rights and freedoms as fruits and products rather than as a necessary budget of the work itself.

Naturally, historicism and individualism have joined forces to found the American doctrine of rights, which is not without consequences, in the sense that either will be aimed at the very moment in which they are attached, to change their meaning.

One thing to note is that Americans, with their revolution, would not completely repudiate the medieval British tradition of the Glorious Revolution, which offered protection of rights and freedoms. Another point is to deny any solution of continuity; several arguments supporting the revolution were made wholly and exclusively for the purpose of restoring the nascent British constitution, with its baggage of rights and freedoms.

The American Revolution, on the contrary, is based on the traditional belief that the constitution must change profoundly; it becomes meaningless if it is not to degenerate eventually into parliamentary omnipotence. In particular, it is necessary for the constitution to strengthen its security capacity, dissociated from its usual undifferentiated identification with a heritage of existing principles in multiple texts, issued at different times, and stated in practice or jurisprudence. The constitution for Americans should correspond to an organic text that the sovereign constituent body wanted, and as such may indeed be opposed to rulers who have acted unlawfully, that is, contrary to the constitution.

The individual elements undergo a thorough review in the American revolutionary culture of rights and freedoms. This first of its theoretical and historical roots later in the course of the French Revolution appreciated the contribution offered by the modern state to the cause of human rights.