If the celebrations of this year’s semiquincentennial of independence are any indication, most Americans take pride in the revolutionary birth of our Republic. July 4, 1776, marked the birth of a “novus ordo seclorum,” and this nation seemed to have the power, as Thomas Paine wrote, “to begin the world over again.” Conservatives have always been somewhat ambivalent about those revolutionary beginnings. After all, conservatism emerged as a distinct philosophic position in reaction against the French Revolution, which was at least partly inspired, we must sadly admit, by events on this side of the Atlantic. How might thoughtful conservatives resolve the tension between counter-revolution and patriotism?

　　Certainly not by looking to the political Left. They accuse our Founders of hypocrisy or at least allege that they did not take their revolution far enough. This is old hat—the American franchisees of Jacobinism have been hurling this sort of invective since Thomas Jefferson returned from his mission to Paris. More surprising, perhaps, is that many on the Right are adopting increasingly revolutionary attitudes of their own. Some have called for “regime change” in favor of a “postliberal future,” or else declared that “conservatism is no longer enough.” Revolution (if not outright insurrection) is in the air. On both the Left and the Right, extremism is seen increasingly as a virtue and moderation as a vice. The limits of the Constitution are disparaged; politicos and theoreticians alike imagine new and more terrifying ways to deploy power against their enemies. The rage of parties does not seem to me likely to help us learn how to love our country or to justify the American Revolution.

　　John Adams—America’s foremost revolutionary statesman—warned about the perils of this sort of radical political situation. In a pamphlet he wrote in 1765 during the beginnings of the Imperial Crisis, A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, he urged his New England countrymen to adopt an ardent “spirit of liberty” and actively resist schemes from Parliament to destroy self-government and impose tyranny. But he also cautioned that this spirit could become little more than a “brutal rage” if left unenlightened. Adams and most of the Founders understood that revolution always poses serious dangers, and that it should always be a last resort.

　　And yet they also knew that there was a time for everything under the sun. “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes,” the Continental Congress admitted in the Declaration of Independence itself. “But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.” The question is, how can we know when we have reached such a point of abuse? In our own time, we no doubt face any number of serious injustices. But would it be lawful to throw off our government and establish a new constitution? Does America need a revolution?

　　Strictly speaking, there can be no such thing as a positive legal right to revolution—certainly not for citizens of the United States. Though there have been various insurrections against federal authority throughout our history, only one came close to succeeding: the Southern Rebellion of 1861–65. Even as states were seceding to join the revolutionary Confederacy, Abraham Lincoln insisted that their actions were constitutionally null and void. “Plainly the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy,” he wrote in his First Inaugural Address. Lincoln’s argument rested on what Publius called throughout The Federalist the “republican principle” of majority rule. “Whoever rejects it does of necessity fly to anarchy or to despotism,” Lincoln told the nation. “Unanimity is impossible. The rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible; so that, rejecting the majority principle, anarchy or despotism in some form is all that is left.”

　　Lincoln went on to describe the difference between the “constitutional right of amending” our frame of government and “revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.” If our Constitution had granted states a legal right to dissolve the Union, let alone individuals an explicit legal right to wage war against federal authority, it would have simply been impracticable. How could the frame of government bind the people of the states together if every act passed under it could be merely nullified by the threat of secession? Revolutionary politics, Lincoln teaches us, is fundamentally different from constitutional politics.

　　There is a distinction between a lawful revolution in favor of the old moral order and an unlawful revolution in favor of ideological speculation.

　　But while revolution may never be strictly legal, as Lincoln acknowledged, it may be necessary in order to preserve liberty and even what we might call the “natural law.” This is certainly how the American Founders justified their break with the British Empire; the Declaration bears some of the characteristics of a legal brief, but it does not ultimately refer to a positive right granted by the British constitution. Though they had been petitioning Parliament to respect their rights “as Englishmen,” they, at last resort had to appeal to their natural rights simply as men.

　　The revolutionary appeal to natural law, then, goes beyond the determined confines of conventional law—and herein the conservative perceives the great danger of revolutionary politics, the flight “to anarchy or to despotism” of which Lincoln warned. It is not altogether incorrect to identify the murky concepts of “natural rights” and even “natural law” as “glittering generalities.” The idea of a “higher law” has certainly been abused by demagogues and would-be tyrants grasping after power, and it is difficult to define with the kind of rigor that would truly satisfy a court—let alone a philosopher. And yet the appeal is so effective because the natural law is written on our very hearts; we innately know the difference between right and wrong, and we seek justice through politics for that reason.

　　Russell Kirk, a founder of the modern conservative movement, wrestled with the complexities of natural law throughout his scholarship. He was certain that such a thing existed and undergirded all political societies—and yet he saw the very same revolutionary dangers his heroes Adams and Lincoln did. In a late essay, “The Case for and Against Natural Law,” he wrote that we must not understand it as “a harsh code that we thrust upon other people: rather, it is an ethical knowledge, innate perhaps, but made more clearly known to us through the operation of right reason.” Citing his experiences as Mecosta Township’s justice of the peace, he noted that in the course of his normal duties he would never “repair to theories of natural law and meditate upon which of two claimants [in a property dispute] is the more worthy of judicial compassion; rather, the justice of the peace turns to statute, common law, possibly to local custom—and to the files of the recorder of deeds at the county seat.”

　　The American Founders shared this sensibility, for they were statesmen and not philosophes. They (for the most part) understood that the right to revolution may be justified in the abstract by the natural law, but we cannot derive from it some absolute formula of political action. Prudence dictates such things, and prudence is a very difficult virtue to practice. Statesmanship and geometry are very different pursuits. Our Founders were educated in such a way that these virtues perhaps came easier to them than to us. But even in the debates about independence, those great men of the Continental Congress hotly disputed whether revolution was justified by their circumstances.

　　Throughout those debates, however, they were guided by what one delegate called “the lamp of experience”—and especially the example of the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The Whig consensus that dominated both sides of the Atlantic held that the deposition of James II was entirely justified; in fact, as Russell Kirk would argue in another famous essay, they considered it “a revolution not made, but prevented.” The British Whigs who overthrew the tyrant were defending the ancient constitution they inherited—a constitution which made sense of their natural rights—against innovations which would have centralized power. The American Whigs who effected our own Revolution a century later made much the same case.

　　To some extent, our confusion about the legitimacy of revolution might be attributed to the slipperiness of the word itself. In the aftermath of the Jacobin Republic’s bloody mischief and the tragedy of twentieth-century totalitarianism, “revolution” denotes something profoundly radical: the utter destruction of social order. But for the advocates and inheritors of the Glorious Revolution, the term meant a return to what Dr. Kirk often called “the old moral order.” Unlike their would-be imitators among the French, most of the Founders did not become drunk with the notion that they had “it in their power to begin the world over again. They saw their republican revolution as a restoration of civilizational continuity, not a rupture.

　　Edmund Burke—the greatest counter-revolutionary mind of the eighteenth century—happened to be a true friend of the American Revolution. Not only did he advocate for conciliation with the colonies and concessions to their grievances, but he also, on rare occasions, praised the constitutions framed by the independent states after their victory. Burke understood the fundamentally tyrannical nature of imperial policy and even warned Parliament throughout his writings and speeches on American affairs that they were accumulating a power tending toward absolutism. The very issues at stake in the Glorious Revolution were at stake in the imperial crisis, although they concerned different branches of the British government.

　　Yet Burke was insistent that these legitimate revolutions could not be treated as normative. For one, both revolutions ultimately achieved the decentralization of power, whereas the ideological movements that have plagued our weary world since his day have sought to concentrate it. For another, in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke pointed out the ways that the revolutionaries of 1688 (and we might also say of 1776) did not seek to “dissolve the whole fabric” but rather “regenerat[e] the deficient part of the constitution through the parts which were not impaired.” “The Revolution was made to preserve our antient indisputable laws and liberties,” he concluded, “and that antient constitution of government which is our only security for law and liberty.”

　　Social and political renewal will be the product of civic and liberal education—the act of reminding our fellow-citizens of who we are and who we can be.

　　Burke was disgusted by Jacobinism’s lust for power and innovation, and the same mentality still defines ideologues. Speculation and theory are simple solutions to complex problems, and hasty revolutions motivated by them are “unforced choice[s]” and an “election of evil,” according to the Irishman. Jacobins—what Burke may have called unlawful revolutionaries—are “intoxicated with admiration at their own wisdom and ability” and practitioners of a false philosophy. Their revolutions are unlimited and perpetual, always seeking to centralize power in the hands of a tyrant or group of tyrants who try to remake society according to their whims.

　　Lawful revolutionaries, by contrast, offer something far more attractive than revolutionary rage: the restoration of the old moral order. In his aforementioned 1765 pamphlet, John Adams proposed this might be achieved through the uniquely American solution of education. “Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write,” he wrote. Adams cited the great thinkers and statesmen who secured English liberties, including those who conducted the Glorious Revolution, as examples for New England to imitate. “The prospect now before us in America, ought in the same manner to engage the attention of every man of learning, to matters of power and of right,” he wrote, “that we may be neither led nor driven blindfolded to irretrievable destruction.” Adams and the other Founders believed that a revolution could only be “lawful” insofar as it was the product not of heated passion, but “reflection and choice.” In this sense, lawful revolutions are limited; they aim, in the end, at restoring the conditions necessary for constitutional politics by dethroning power.

　　Today, the conservative movement—and the whole country—faces a choice between a constitutional politics established by our Founders’ lawful revolution and an unlawful revolution against the old moral order. On both sides of the aisle, ideological speculators and populist politicians clamor for more and more power. It is incumbent upon us, as heirs of the American Founding, to reject the temptations of this revolutionary moment. Prudence may indeed dictate decisive political action, the abandonment of defunct orthodoxies, and the replacement of a feckless elite. Statesmanship, though difficult, is always needful. But subverting the constitution and casting the nation into anarchy, despotism, and the other woes of revolution will not restore the old moral order, let alone the rule of law.

　　In 1813, John Adams lamented to a correspondent, “that the true history of the American Revolution is lost forever.” Just a generation after the Founding, the people were losing sight of the principles he and so many others fought to uphold. And yet, the symbols of the Founding were always a standard to which the wise and honest can repair. As Adams himself wrote just two years later to Jefferson, the real “Revolution was in the Minds of the People, and this was effected, from 1760 to 1775, in the course of fifteen years before a drop of blood was drawn at Lexington.” In his own time, the Massachusetts man was able to rouse the people against the threat of tyranny and provide “new guards for their future security by writing and debating in favor of liberty.

　　Likewise, social and political renewal today will be the product of civic and liberal education that can remind our fellow citizens of who we are and who we can be. Rather than overthrowing our constitutional order for the false promises of power, we must rediscover the deepest meaning of our Founding. Doing so is, to my mind, the only revolution that we might call “lawful”—indeed the only revolution worth effecting.

　　This essay was adapted from remarks delivered at the Philadelphia Society’s spring 2026 conference.