laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness."
The Declaration of Independence, 1776 "We must realize that today's Establishment is the new George III. Whether it will continue to adhere to his tactics, we do no know. If it does, the redress, honored in tradition, is also revolution."
Win. O. Douglas, Points of Rebellion (New York: Random House 1970, p. 95) This is the nation, we were taught, founded during a revolution, and self-consciously founded upon one. Ours is the government which started its career in legitimacy precisely because the revolution which made it possible was legitimate. The right of revolution which initiated the entire enterprise has never been denied, and, as we can see from Justice Douglas' thesis, is presently being reasserted as peculiarly relevant to the current situation. Yet the simultaneous assertion of the right of revolution and of the virtues of a going political enterprise, even one founded upon a revolution, must lead to certain logical problems.
Is the right of revolution actually inherent in the political theory itself? does it or does it not follow logically from the other premises of the political system? are its consequences compatible or incompatible with the functioning of any political system? What, in brief, is the logical geography of a right of revolution? and what is the relation between the logical conditions of a right of revolution and the logical conditions of good government under the political system in which it arises?
No one doubts that a right of revolution does exist among the scattered premises of our political creed, and we shall not attempt to establish it. Rather, this paper is an attempt to systematize the obvious; to sketch out the outlines of justified revolution with somewhat more precision than recent writers (especially Douglas) have tried to employ. In the context of a brief look at two theories which avoid the problem by differing margins, we shall present a description of the logical situation with regard to this undoubted right. We shall conclude first, that a right of revolution is reducible without remainder to a simple consequence of certain assump-