The ideas and events of 1776 came together to reshape the world
Star Tribune, January 12, 2000
By Katherine Kersten

The old millennium is now officially closed. We rang it out -- not only with fireworks but with list upon list of the greatest accomplishments of the last 100, or the last 1,000, years. Newspapers and magazines put forward candidates for "most important person," with Time proclaiming Einstein as Person of the Century, and Biography Magazine anointing Johann Gutenberg, inventor of movable type, as the millennium's most influential figure.

But among all these lists, I saw none that identified the most important year of the last 1,000--the one that most changed the shape of the world to come. History buffs might offer many candidates, from 1492, the year Christopher Columbus discovered the New World, to 1945, the year the Allies defeated Hitler.

But it's 1776 that gets my vote.

In the words of Bernard Bailyn, an eminent professor of history at Harvard, 1776 was "a year of extraordinary, world-transforming challenges in every sphere of life--in ideology, in politics, in government, in religion, in economics, in law, in the uses of military force, and in the basic principles of international relations." "In the annals of Western history," writes Bailyn in his 1990 book, "Faces of Revolution," "there is probably no equivalent annus mirabilis, so far-reaching, in its challenges and in the range of its ultimate consequences."

1776 opened, on Jan. 10, with the publication in Boston (then an obscure backwater) of a brief but immensely influential work: Thomas Paine's "Common Sense." This pamphlet--the product of an itinerant corsetmaker -- spoke to ordinary people about political freedom in an unprecedented, and unprecedentedly effective, way. It galvanized resistance to British rule among an uncertain American populace.

Three weeks later, a very different sort of work was published in London, historian Edward Gibbon's "History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." In this masterwork, Gibbon used a historical tapestry of a thousand years to depict the ways in which moral corruption, and the abuse of power, can destroy a great civilization. Gibbon's book provoked wide-ranging reflection on the causes of societal decline, and the human failings that contribute to it.

March 1776 saw the publication of another towering work of intellect-- economist Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations." As Bailyn notes, Smith's book "was recognized from the day of its publication as the voice of a new age, a monument of critical intelligence likely to redirect the course of economic development at home and throughout the British world." "The Wealth of Nations" sought the demolition of government regulations, including the stifling system of mercantilist controls that yoked Britain to its colonies. The book's premise was that the release of personal self-interest and economic energies, rather than their regulation and management by the state, would enhance the wealth of nations.

On July 4, 1776, these challenges to the Old Order erupted in a worldshaking event at Philadelphia. The Second Continental Congress declared the upstart America colonies to be a free and independent nation. As Bailyn writes, the Congress "gave reasons for doing so that were so utterly idealistic and so rational--and yet so manifestly practical--that they stood as a threat and a challenge to every political system that existed."

In the future, all governments would have to contend with the premise of the Declaration of Independence: that legitimate governments are founded, not on raw power, or tradition, or divine right, but on the consent of the governed. Men are born equal, with unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Governments that fail to protect these rights can and should be changed.

As 1776 drew to a close, six American states adopted constitutions, while two more completed preliminary drafts. These were unprecedented documents, in which the people's representatives sought to design governmental institutions that would ensure an acceptable balance between power and liberty.

Simultaneously, Congress reformulated the basic principles of international relations, drafting a model treaty that viewed America's relationship with Europe as based, not so much on power, as on the rational self-interest of commerce.

The ideas and events of 1776 launched a dramatic process of metamorphosis, which ultimately transformed the Old World into the New. Today, at the close of the millennium, reverberations of that extraordinary year continue to shape our world.

On the political front, the principle of equality is overturning age-old hierarchies of race, sex and social status across the globe. The principle of popular sovereignty has demolished the Berlin Wall, and nations formerly dominated by the Soviet Union are now free to chart their own future.

On the economic front, Adam Smith's vision of free markets and free trade has produced an astonishing prosperity in the developed world, and is beginning to release the creative energies of people in developing nations from China to Brazil.

Yet as we contemplate the fruits of 1776, we would do well to remember the lesson of Edward Gibbon's great work. Without a firm moral foundation, neither freedom nor riches can be preserved.  

--Katherine Kersten is a director of the Center of the American Experiment in Minneapolis.