American founding, Richard K. Matthews concluded with the observation
that "not one was critical of the founding itself' or "could be considered a
critical analysis." ² Perhaps the complacency and self-righteousness of the
Reagan years have blighted bicentennial scholarship, but such an observa-
tion would not have been made in the 1960s regarding Hannah Arendt's On
Revolution. Appreciating the uniqueness of the American Revolution and its
attendant circumstances and achievements, Arendt was nonetheless able to
see that the Revolution, "while it had given freedom to the people, had
failed to provide a space where this freedom could be exercised. Only the
representatives of the people, not the people themselves, had an opportu-
nity to engage in those activities of 'expressing, discussing and deciding'
which in a positive sense are the activities of freedom." And she pointed
precisely to the men of the Philadelphia Convention, who had failed to find
a way to embrace without smothering the winged hopes of the ordinary
people caught up in those great events: "Paradoxical as it may sound, it was
in fact under the impact of the Revolution that the revolutionary spirit in
this country began to wither away, and it was the Constitution itself, this
greatest achievement of the American people, which eventually cheated
them of their proudest possession." ³

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