>In message <14109.62414.46297.589951 at lisa.zopyra.com>, William S. Lear
><rael at zopyra.com> writes
>
>>It's hard to see how a document prepared by slave-owners, merchants,
>>bankers, lawyers and the like could be "revolutionary bourgeois".
>
>Reading it, it's hard to imagine that it is anything other than
>revolutionary, and popular in character. It's major literary influence,
>I think, was John Locke, that theorist of the English revolution. A fine
>document it is too.
>
>Particularly interesting is the great complaint against the British -
>that they armed Indian savages against the colonists. This was true, as
>it happened, but I think an enlightened democratic nation would have had
>those passages struck out.
Jim, you are mistaking the Constitution for the Declaration of Independence. Whomever William Lear was quoting as calling the Constitution (since that is the only place right to bear arms is found - in the Declaration I think the only reference to "bearing arms" is the complaint that the Brit government were forcing pressed sailors to bear arms against their own country) "revolutionary bourgeois" had written something quite ignorant, or was merely canting. Insofar as the Constitution was "bourgeois" (as, for instance, representing the interests of urban elites who stood to benefit from funding the revolutionary debt) it was most decidedly not in any way "revolutionary." Its only arguably "revolutionary" aspect - and this is a bit of a stretch - might be in the Amendments known as the Bill of Rights, added as a result *solely* of pressure from non-bourgeois interests.
john mage