Governments exist in tension with humanity’s impulses, permitting some while inhibiting others. Humanity’s drive for material gain is authority’s great preoccupation: what is the optimal balance between the cultivation and the exploitation of this impulse? what purposes and whose interests are to be served by the exploitation? For substantially all of human history these questions were answered by monarchical whim; and instances of what we would now call enlightened governance occurred as randomly as talent and foresight occur in aristocratic families. The determinants of mutually beneficial social relations were nonetheless established in periods leading up to modern empires.

All the empires of history dissolved as their fibers weakened to a point of inadequacy for defense of their wealth against acquisition by hardy barbarians. One of history’s few anomalies occurred when Europe’s most recent imperial dynasties began to crumble, and a genuinely new form of social organization pressed against mere anarchy to fill the power vacuum. Capitalism’s elements had been established in the Dutch and British overseas trading companies. Republics, bequeathed to Europe from classical antiquity, had found exemplars in Renaissance city-states. And the premise of self-organizing systems, postulated in Newton’s revolutionary understanding of cosmology, was then achieving highly visible realization in the machinery constituting a nascent industrial revolution. The possibility of governance by and for a self-regulating population, engaged in the enlightened disposition of private property, was at hand.

This possibility remains contingent. It has been the object of one revolution after another, traversing Europe from London to Petersburg, from 1642 to 1917. And every throwing-off of an ancient regime has quickly resulted in chaos that was only brought into order by a military dictator. One of the few enduring exceptions to this pattern is of course the United States, which occasioned Edmund Burke’s formulation of modernity’s political problem, viz.: that the American Revolution should not degenerate into the French.

The American Revolution was of course not a revolution in the sense of anything’s having ‘revolved’: the people who were in charge at the outset of hostilities were also in charge after the hostilities has ceased. They had, most significantly, established the strenuously-established rights of freeborn Englishmen at the edge of a rich continent remote from the grasp of continental dynasties — thus assembling the reagents necessary for an undiluted efflorescence of the capitalist impulse.