In the academic year 2019/2020, some of our ongoing research was presented at a seminar given by prof. Béla Kapossy at the History Department (Section d’Histoire) at the University of Lausanne. The title of the seminar was: Democracy and Despotism in America 1776-1840.
Short course description:
According to a familiar narrative, the American Revolution (1776) was inspired by the European Enlightenment, while the French Revolution (1789) was in turn inspired by America’s enlightened constitution of 1787. This optimistic account of the ‘age of democratic revolutions’ underplays fears of destabilization – the fear that, in the words of the French contrôleur général Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, America would eventually become ‘une image de notre Europe, un amas de puissances divisées, se disputant des territoires ou des profits de commerce, et cimentant continuellement l’esclavage des peuples par leur propre sang.’ Turgot’s remark can be read today as a prescient warning of the American Civil War (1861-65); when it was published in the 1780s, it provoked an intense debate about America’s future on both sides of the Atlantic. This seminar will explore the underlying debates about political economy which led Turgot – along with a range of other European and American thinkers, from Hamilton, Jefferson and Adams to Condorcet, Sieyès and List – to perceive that the future industrial development of America’s slave-owning agrarian economy would create enormously volatile conditions that were at least as likely to result in war and despotism as they were to generate prosperity and peace.
