Blog Posts on Political Science - Essay Example

Blog Posts on Political Science Compare notions of popular sovereignty championed in English and American Revolutions According to the Agreement of the People as presented to the Council of the Army, the notion of popular sovereignty was championed for and developed on the principle that the authority of the government is born and bred on the consent of its people. It is executed through the elected representatives who consequently are and bear the political power. In American Sovereigns: The People and America’s Constitutional Tradition before the Civil War, which is a study on the early history of American constitutionalism, Christian G. Fritz describes how the Americans attempted to apply the doctrine of popular sovereignty prior to the territorial struggle over slavery which is attributed to the emergence of the Civil War. Political scientist Donald S. Lutz observed that in the American notion, popular sovereignty meant placing ultimate and unyielding authority in the people given that there are varied ways to which sovereignty can be expressed covering multiple institutional possibilities be they passing of laws, elections, and recalls (Constitution Society, n.d.). The American Revolution marked a departure in the concept of popular sovereignty as it had been known and used in the European historical context (Constitution Society, n.d.). Thus, with the revolution, the Americans were able to substitute the sovereignty that had existed in the King George III personage. Goldstone (2014) concurs that prior to this, however, the power of declaring war, levying general taxes, making peace were vested on the Federal government with the government of the Union drawing similarities with the King’s Government in the old French monarchy. The spirit of popularity and conciliation would have the Federal legislature of the Union composed of a Senate and a House of representatives. Another parallel can be drawn in the executive powers. The executive powers in the Northern States were limited and partial while the English represented supremacy. Thus, pursuant to popular sovereignty, the president acted just as the executor of the law that the populace would him against his life, his honour, his pledge and when he was incompetent, the people could vote him out as per the constitutional agreement. de Tocquiville (1831) explains that he Queen/King was independent in their decisions and exercises representing a monarchy which the people were expected to concede to. The duration of the two powers, also show discrepancies. While the term of the president was subject to the executive authority. The monarchy was undisputable and would only end upon death after which the chosen next of kin would be up in king or queen. That would mean a certain kind of power and mild slavery for the citizenry (de Tocqueville, 18531). No one had the power of ever ascended to the high authority unless you belonged to the royal family. Even then, there was a criterion to be followed. While it is an established axiom in Europe that a constitutional King cannot persevere in a system of government opposed by the other two branches of the government. Some United States presidents have been known to be devoid of the majority in the legislative body without giving up the supreme power and not inflicting a serious evil upon the society (Goldstone, 2014). Whether it is accurate to label the American Revolution and the French Revolution political and social revolutions respectively Chapter XX of Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856) highlights how France was the only feudal country which had maintained its sick characteristics while it had lost its useful characteristics. It goes on to say that it was not surprising that the revolution meant to do away with the old constitution of Europe should have broken out there. The French Revolution illuminates ideological trends that were developed towards the end of the 18th Century. Whether the revolution achieved its objectives, was a bourgeois, liberal, radical, wrong, or correct still remain controversial subjects highly dependent on an individual’s point of view. That the country badly needed change and whether a revolution was the only viable option to realize this, one incredible fact stands out the noble principles and the violent excesses taken together in the most powerful 18th century European country (de Tocqueville, 1856). Up until 1789, France was an Absolutist state that was ruled by a king who then claimed that his power to rule had been granted to him by god. Consequently, the top posts in the government, army, church, the civil service, and the judiciary were preserved for members from a noble heredity. Recall that the entire French population was actually divided into three “orders” namely: the clergy, the nobility, and the rest (de Tocqueville, 1856 & Goldfield, 2014). In addition, recall that “the rest” bracket boasted of over 95 percent of the population who were peasants, very few serfs actually tied to the land or a master. Moreover, whether you were a landowner, sharecroppers, or tenants, you had to pay feudal dues in money or kind to the lord as well as tithes to the church in pre-1789 France. The Pre-1789 France is described as a country where capitalism had been developing within a framework of social and political institutions inherited from feudalism that had developed as an important obstacle for its further development. The aims of the 1789 revolution revolved around political and economic realms that were intertwined with social interests. On the political front, it sought to bring about equality between the property-owners by abolishing the privileges that were only enjoyed by the nobility and make them cross-sectional. Thus, the establishment of a constitutional government that would be charged with an assembly of property-owners elected on a restricted property franchise was vital (Goldfield, 2014). The economic front sought to establish custom duties and having a national market while abolishing government and guild restrictions on entry into particular businesses and trades in order to accommodate laissez-faire and enterprise. Thus, ending tithes levied on agricultural property; profits, rates, and rents were the only legitimate forms of non-work income. Then came the promulgation of the constitution in 1791 that was a preamble proclamation of the revolutionary terms towards complete abolition of aristocracy. “There is no longer any nobility, nor peerage, nor hereditary distinction, nor distinction between orders, nor hereditary justices, nor any order of knighthood…” (de Tocqueville, 1856). While the revolution had a social twist, we should not forget the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen adopted in 1789 by the National Assembly which declared that “men are born and remain free and equal in rights” but which was contradicted by the “active” and “passive” classification of citizenry based on the property as measured by the amount of the tax paid (de Tocqueville, 1856). According to de Tocqueville (1856), another compromise came with the military dictatorship of General Napoleon Bonaparte as the only way of ensuring a stable government, which was seen as a political failure, and to some extent, social too. The American Revolution was, at its best, a political upheaval occurring between 1765 and 1783 during which the colonists in the Thirteen American colonies would shun the British aristocracy and monarchy, overthrow the Great Britain authority, and found the United States of America. On this revolution ladder were rungs of political, social, as well as, intellectual changes in the American government, society, and ways of thinking (Greene, 2000, p. 102). The British began colonising North America in the 17th century on charters granted by the King with each allowed a certain amount of self-governance. The crown colonies comprised of New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey, Virginia, North and South Carolina as well as Georgia (Goldstone, 2014). Influence of revolutionary leadership on the French and Russian revolutions “If civil society be made for the advantage of man, all the advantages for which is made become his right…Men have a right to…justice; as between their fellows, whether their fellows are in political function or in ordinary occupation. They have a right to the fruits of their industry and to the means of making their industry fruitful. They have a right to the acquisitions of their parents; to the nourishment and improvement of their offspring; to instructions in life; and to consolation in death.” (Burke, 1790). This famous quote from Edmund Burke’s Reflection on the Revolution in France opens his argument that this revolution, boasting of abstract foundations, would end disastrously as it had, somehow ignored the complexities of the society and human nature (Burke, 1790). Never mind, Burke was notably the revolution’s strongest opponent. Moving on, he goes on to show the political, as well as, the intellectual influence yielded by the revolutionary leadership by writing. “His Majesty’s successors and heirs, each in his time and order, will come to the crown with the same contempt of their choice with which his Majesty has succeeded to that he wears” “… the political divide proceeds dogmatically to assert that by the principles of the Revolution, the people have acquired three fundamental rights…compose one system, to choose our own governors, cashier them for misconduct and to frame a government for ourselves (Trotsky, 2014). In Russia, the relationship between the Petrograd, now St. Petersburg and the population could not favour socialism. Thus pressurizing the bourgeois to rule, introduce, and accommodate guaranteed civil rights, democratic police as well as the abolition of ethnic and religious discrimination in a democratic Russia (Goldstone, 2014). Vladimir Lenin’s arrival in Russia from exile in neutral Switzerland would mean that when the Bolsheviks rose to power, Russia would withdraw from the war. On the other hand, the Germans hoped. It took Lenin’s arrival for the popularity of Bolsheviks to increase largely among the peasants, soldiers, and workers, which then pushed them to form radical parties. Lenin’s influence alongside his peers, Leon Trotsky and Lev Kamenev, would instigate and sustain the October Revolution based on his writings on Karl Marx ideas. A political ideological that would later be called the Marxism-Leninism ideology that marked the start of communism in the 20th century (Trotsky, 2014). Contrast the revolutionary subjects of the Russian and Japanese revolutions. The scholars involved in studying the history of women in revolutions, more so the twentieth century Marxist revolutions have examined the ideology of the revolutionary leaders in light of accomplishing women anticipation. Also crucial in both cases is the behaviour and the attitude of women as subjects of the revolution. Documented evidence (Cohen, 2014 & Goldstone, 2014) reveals that for the men and women of Russia, the revolution was a paradox as it was marred with massive deprivation as well as frightening social disintegration. To worry were the peasant and working-class women as it threatened to rob them of their defences, crippling with illiteracy, burdening them with children to carry and raise into a world at war. In this maze came the Bolshevik word and goal to accord women full equality with the Red Army soldiers, city dwellers, pro-Bolshevik speakers, and newspapers returning to their villages to champion commitment to and the plans for female emancipation. The women were to enjoy in this wake as shortly after the Bolsheviks had instituted civil marriage and declared full civil and legal equality for women. They had also promised them equal educational and job opportunities with publicly funded maternity and day care (Cohen, 2014). The male subjects must have been confused and threatened by this interesting historical development as mentioned in a letter written by Maxim Gorky in 1918 which read, in part “…how we are to understand the proclaimed equality of women with us and what she is going to do now…undersigned subjects are alarmed by this law from which lawlessness may increase…family abolished, and because of this, the destruction of farming” (Cohen, 2014). What they failed to see was the pivotal role of the women at a friendly and submissive distance in the pre, during, and post revolution Era. Perhaps, what were stranger is the women working alongside men to reject this change and term it as morally retrogressive with the aim of destroying the family institution or at its best, family values. The subjects’ resistance to the Bolshevik must have led to economic deterioration coupled with a primitive desire to survive (Cohen, 2014). Women would however warm to the Bolshevik call and led by Aleksandra M. Kollontai would go a long way to change the mentality of the other citizenry. On the other hand, much like the Russians, the Japanese intellectuals strongly believed that the world history was moving towards bourgeois democracy and consequently socialism. It then begged the question: who would be the “subjects” to this revolution in Japan? The Meiji Restoration comprised of a series of events that sought to restore the practical imperial rule in Japan in 1868 under Emperor Meiji. Throughout Japan, at that time, the samurai numbered 1.9 million. With the samurai being paid fixed stipends, their upkeep proved an uphill journey for the oligarchs who would then devise a slow but deliberate mechanism to eliminate the samurai class by convincing them to convert their stipends into bonds (Goldstone, 2014). Arguments from intellectuals from political standpoints points that in spite of the stress on individual autonomy, all subjects would come to define subjectivity in terms of deterministic historical structures. References Burke, E., 1790. Reflections on a Revolution in France, Various editions. Cohen, M., 2014. The Political Process of the Revolutionary Samurai: a comparative reconsideration of Japan’s Meiji Restoration. Theory and Society, 43, pp. 139-168. Constitution Society, n.d.. 74. The Agreement of the People, as presented to the Council of the Army. [Online] Available at: http://www.constitution.org/eng/conpur074.htm [Accessed 21 February 2015]. de Tocqueville, A., 1831. Chapter IV: The Principle of the Sovereignty Of The People In America in Democracy in America. [Online] Available at:https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/de-tocqueville/democracy-america/ch04.htm [Accessed 21 February 2015] de Tocquiville, A., 1856. Chaper XX: How the Revolution Sprang Sponaneously out of the Preceding Facts in Ancien Regime and the French Revolution. [Online] Available at: http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/2419 [Accessed 21 February 2015]. Goldstone, J., 2014. Revolutions: A Very Short Introduction. Open University Press. Greene, J., 2000. The American Revolution. The American Historical Review, 105, (1), pp. 93-102. Trotsky, L., 2014. The History of the Russian Revolution. [Online] Available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/hrr/ch15.htm [Accessed 21 February 2015]. Read More