Economic interests can help overturn an old political order. Whether they also support political equality is another question.
A merchant wants predictable laws, secure contracts, and freedom from arbitrary taxes. A tenant farmer wants relief from obligations inherited from a social order that gives someone else privileges by birth. Both may oppose the existing government. They may even stand on the same side of a revolution.
But do they want the same society afterward?
The merchant might be satisfied when property and commerce are better protected. The farmer may ask why a person born into privilege should continue to have a greater political voice. Cooperation against an old order does not establish agreement about the new one.
In When Do Economic Interests Support Political Freedom?, I distinguished the gains employers receive from migration, the benefits they may see in workers’ freedom to change jobs, and their willingness to support equal political membership. These are not the same interests.
History gives us a way to examine the distinction, though not a simple experiment. Consider the English revolutions of the seventeenth century and the French Revolution beginning in 1789. Both challenged established political authority and brought together groups with different interests. Yet their trajectories differed in important ways.
My purpose is not to declare one revolution successful and the other a failure. It is to ask a narrower question: under what conditions might groups seeking economic reform also support a wider transformation of political membership?
Two Histories, Not Two Simple Models
First, a historical distinction. The phrase English Revolution can refer to the Civil Wars and political upheavals of the 1640s, or to the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89. They were different events. The first included war, the execution of Charles I, and an experiment without a monarchy. The second replaced James II with William and Mary and helped establish new limits on royal power. The Restoration of 1660 stands between them.
Nor was the French Revolution a single decision made in 1789. It passed through successive constitutional arrangements, political conflicts, war, and violence. Its meaning changed as different groups gained and lost power.
Comparing these histories therefore requires restraint. England did not simply choose commerce, while France chose equality. In England, disputes over religion, sovereignty, taxation, and political participation were intertwined. In France, the defense of property and the demand for equal citizenship appeared together, sometimes in tension.
That tension is precisely what interests me.
England: Restricting the Crown, Not Equalizing Membership
By the seventeenth century, the English Parliament had become an important arena in conflicts over taxation, religion, and royal authority. The Civil Wars beginning in 1642 divided people for many reasons. Allegiance did not follow a neat division between merchants and aristocrats, or between the wealthy and the poor. Religious convictions and local loyalties mattered, as did material interests.
Some commercial groups supported Parliament; landowners could be found on opposing sides. Popular political arguments also reached beyond the interests of the governing elite.
At the Putney Debates of 1647, Henry Ireton argued that a political voice should be tied to a “permanent fixed interest” in the kingdom. Thomas Rainsborough challenged this restriction: “the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he.” He argued that people should not be governed without their consent. The disagreement was about representation within England, not an individual’s freedom to join another country. But it raised a question with wider significance: should political participation depend on property and established standing, or on the lives people lead under a government? [1]
The settlement after 1688–89 strengthened Parliament’s position relative to the Crown. The 1689 Bill of Rights constrained royal authority, including the suspension of laws and taxation without parliamentary grant. Subsequent changes in public finance made Parliament central to the government’s ability to raise and manage resources. [1]
This was a consequential redistribution of political power. But Parliament was not a legislature elected by all adult residents. The change did not abolish the social and property restrictions that limited who could participate in politics. Nor did it create equal membership across England’s wider imperial relationships.
The beneficiaries of constitutional change were not necessarily committed to every extension of equality. That does not make the change meaningless: limits on arbitrary power are real achievements. But the political character of a revolution cannot be inferred from the economic interests of those who supported it.
The important distinction is that institutional changes can advance commerce without automatically broadening political equality. Historians disagree about how much economic development should be attributed to the settlement of 1688 rather than to earlier and later changes. [2]
France: Declaring Equality, Then Drawing Boundaries
The French Revolution confronted a different set of inherited privileges. In August 1789, the National Constituent Assembly moved to abolish feudal rights and privileges, although some obligations were initially subject to compensation and the process was not completed at once. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, adopted later that month, announced a principle of equality before the law and located sovereignty in the nation. [3]
That language went beyond a bargain about taxation or commerce. It challenged the idea that political status should depend on inherited social rank.
Yet the Declaration did not produce universal political membership. Under the revolutionary arrangements associated with the Constitution of 1791, the right to vote was restricted to active citizens, defined in part by age, residence, tax contribution, and other conditions. Women were excluded from national political voting. So were many men who did not meet the requirements. [4]
The rules did not remain fixed. In 1792, the distinction between active and passive citizens was removed for elections to the National Convention, considerably widening the male electorate while still excluding women and retaining other qualifications. Political inclusion could expand, but its boundaries remained contested. [4]
The Constitution of 1793 went further in an especially revealing way. Article 4 provided for the exercise of French citizenship rights by certain foreign men aged twenty-one or older who had lived in France for a year and met additional conditions. These included supporting themselves through work, acquiring property, marrying a French woman, adopting a child, or caring for an elderly person. The article also allowed the legislature to recognize foreigners judged to have served humanity. It did not offer unconditional membership through residence alone. Still, it imagined that a foreigner’s life and relationships in France could be grounds for political inclusion. The constitution was adopted but never put into effect. [5]
The contrast between principle and practice grew sharper in the case of Thomas Paine. In August 1792, the French Legislative Assembly conferred the title of French citizen on Paine, who was born in England. He was then elected to the National Convention. But on December 25, 1793, the Convention adopted a measure excluding foreigners from representing the French people. On December 26, it specified that members born in foreign countries could no longer participate in its deliberations and that their substitutes should be called. Paine was arrested later that month amid revolutionary political conflict. He was released in 1794 and subsequently returned to the Convention. [6]
The decrees did not erase Paine’s earlier citizenship title. They did prevent a foreign-born representative from exercising an office he had already held. His arrest should not be attributed solely to those measures: revolutionary politics and the treatment of foreigners were more complicated. Still, the reversal is striking.
A revolution could affirm equal rights as a principle while retaining a boundary between those allowed to take part in political power and those governed without an equal voice. It could even propose a wider route to membership without putting that promise into practice.
This does not mean that the Declaration was merely a disguise for elite interests. Words can alter the terms of political struggle. Once equality is declared a public principle, excluded people can use it to challenge the limits imposed in its name. The subsequent revolutionary history shows how fiercely such limits could be contested, and how unstable the results could be.
French revolutionary politics cannot be reduced to a single bourgeois program, any more than English history can be reduced to a merchant victory. Fiscal crisis, harvest failures, rural mobilization, urban protest, ideological conflict, and war all shaped the outcome. The demand to end privilege was carried by people whose interests and aspirations did not coincide.
The lesson is not that France accomplished equality while England accomplished liberty. It is that a universal claim about equality can become a political force even when the institutions created in its name remain unequal.
What the Comparison May Suggest
Here I want to separate historical evidence from my own hypothesis.
The historical record supports three modest observations. Revolutions involved coalitions, not one unified economic class. Restrictions on arbitrary authority did not necessarily produce equal political participation. And principles of equality could be invoked by people whom the initial settlement excluded.
My hypothesis goes a step further.
When economically powerful reformers can secure the changes they need without sharing political power more widely, they may have little incentive to support broader equality. When they cannot prevail alone, however, cooperation with groups demanding liberty and equality may become more attractive.
This is a hypothesis about incentives, not a judgment on the character of merchants or property owners. Nor do the two revolutions prove it. Religion, war, ideas, and the competing aims of participants mattered. We cannot conclude that French elites supported equality simply because they needed broader allies, or that England would have extended political rights further if its commercial groups had been weaker.
To test the hypothesis, we would need to study what different participants sought, what they conceded under pressure, and what they defended after victory. We would also need cases that do not fit the proposed pattern. A powerful economic group that voluntarily supports equal membership when it has no strategic need to do so would challenge the simplest version of my claim.
As I argued in Who Defines Victory in a Political Revolution?, a coalition’s gains should be judged both by the rights they change and by the power they create to defend those rights. The constitutional advances of 1689 and the unrealized membership provisions of 1793 remind us that a victory for one demand does not settle every claim to political equality.
The Question for a World Citizen Revolution
The existing nationality system ties political membership strongly to birth and inherited legal status. Yet economic life regularly crosses those boundaries. Employers recruit abroad, investors move capital, and workers build lives in societies where they were not born.
These developments create interests in mobility. They do not automatically create interests in equal political membership.
Neither historical struggle was about a right to choose a political community across national borders. The useful comparison is narrower: reforms serving particular interests can come into conflict with demands for more equal political standing.
Foot Democracy—the freedom to choose and join a political community—requires more than the possibility of moving for an employer’s purposes. It requires that the person who moves has a credible path to secure membership, rather than remaining dependent on continued economic usefulness. Hand Democracy, the power to participate in collective self-government, raises a connected question: who may take part in deciding the rules under which residents live?
That is why a World Citizen Revolution cannot be understood simply as the victory of forces that benefit from globalization. Its political content would depend on what those forces are willing—or compelled—to support, what other groups demand, and whether excluded residents can organize on their own behalf.
Economic reformers may be essential allies. They need not be the final judges of the revolution’s purpose.
A Promise That Never Became a Right
In 1793, French revolutionaries adopted a constitution that envisioned certain foreigners exercising the rights of citizens because they lived, worked, and formed relationships in France. That constitution never came into force. Before the year ended, Paine, who had been welcomed as a French citizen and elected representative, was excluded from the Convention’s deliberations because of his foreign birth.
This is not a blueprint for Foot Democracy. The proposed rights were conditional, limited to men, and embedded in a very different political order. Yet the episode leaves a question that is still ours: what is needed for a claim to political membership to become a right that people can exercise and defend?
Economic interests may help change an established order. A coalition may open a path that did not exist before. But once the interests of its strongest members are satisfied, who will defend the political standing of those whose lives are now bound to the community?
The Putney Debates asked whether a voice in government should depend on property. The Constitution of 1793 suggested that foreigners’ residence and social ties might matter for citizenship. Neither settled our present question. Both remind us that the boundary of political membership is a political choice—and that announcing a different boundary is not the same as securing it.
Notes and References
- UK Parliament, Overview of the Glorious Revolution, The Convention and Bill of Rights, The Financial Revolution, and The Putney Debates and the Levellers. For Ireton’s and Rainsborough’s words, see the transcript of the Putney Debates. The National Army Museum’s British Civil Wars explains diverse allegiances.
- The interpretive debate is summarized in “1688 and All That: Property Rights, the Glorious Revolution and the Rise of British Capitalism”. See also The Oxford Handbook of the English Revolution, “The Long-Term Consequences of the English Revolution: Economic and Social Development”.
- French National Assembly, The Night of August 4 and the Abolition of Privileges and The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen; French Presidency, English text of the Declaration.
- French National Assembly, The Constitution of 1791 and Restricted, Indirect Suffrage and The 1792 Elections to the National Convention; French Presidency, Constitution of September 3, 1791.
- French Presidency, Constitution of June 24, 1793, Article 4; French National Assembly, The Constitution of 1793: A Text Never Applied.
- French National Convention, decree of December 25, 1793, excluding foreigners from representing the French people, and decree of December 26, 1793, excluding foreign-born members from deliberations; Thomas Paine, Address to the People of France (1792); French National Assembly, biographical record of Thomas Paine. For debate about his arrest, see historical research indexed by Sciences Po Lyon.
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