Discussion Starter: Revolutions social and political

What is the most important community that we belong too? It is the nation, under the jurisdiction of our government, because that is what most drastically affects us. Both the American and French Revolutions postulate specific requisites and virtues for governance, based on the acknowledgement of total equality of the people; liberty; rule by the people; specific unalienable or sacred rights; life, liberty, and property; and general authority emanating from the general will.

Proper and necessary governance is revealed by prior cases of the failures of governments to care for the people, enabling citizens and revolutionaries to delineate their preferred form of government. The Declaration of Independence enumerates some of these failures and “abuses and usurpations” of the community, not limited to: refusing to pass necessary laws, repeatedly dissolving the House of Representatives, deprived citizens of trial by jury, and imposed taxes without consent. Similarities are present in the failure of the French government to provide for the people, including preventing the third estate from access to high positions in government; denying the general will of the significant bulk of the population; sending inaccurate representatives from the third estate to the Estates General; and preventing any social mobility by creating a time limit before the third estate can move upward in status. In both communities, there are flagrant, egregious abuses of power and usurpations of power that unfairly burden and harm the majority of the population.

The government is the most important community because it is the only group that is able to impose such drastic consequences on a people—aforementioned unlimited suffering and disdain or alleviated living and ease from beneficial policy and ruling. The two revolutions brought about and total change in their communities: they supplanted distant, avaricious elites with egalitarian centered regimes. The new regimes were intended to establish communities with distinct virtues and morals that benefitted all the people, at the expense of no single class or group. They were idealized, radical conceptions at the time that emphasized total change in form of the communities—both the composition of the society and the leadership. Both demanded recognition of equality and liberty in the government. Specifically, Joseph Sieyes emphasized inclusion of the third estate in both society and government and the importance of egalitarian opportunity; American revolutionaries focused on the establishment of a more perfect authority that heavily enunciated the power and rights of the people. Both changes to respective communities were direct causations of their repressive prior governments. For this reason, France experienced a drastic sociological change and the American colonies a drastic change in the peoples’ rights.

The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen mentions that “law is an expression of the will of the community,” something critical noticeably lacking in the previous French government—in place of “will of the community” was the will of the elite minority, instigating a complete restructuring. The high value on popular sovereignty and legally mandated equality emerged from the conspicuous lack thereof, demonstrating that these rights are fundamental, and a community will not be placated until they are granted. In the same way, the American colonies lacked and then attained individual rights.  The violent, unforgettable revolutions necessary to arrive at these changes ingrain the significance of the government as the most important community.