Sometimes reading various fairly specialized books leads to interesting analogies. For example, the classic book by Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. As sometimes happens with scholarly studies, the title reflects the content—the author examines “where the revolution came from,” and does so through the example of pamphlets. It turns out that in the pre-revolutionary years, future Americans published and read pamphlets en masse. Let me remind you what this is. George Orwell tells us that “a pamphlet is a one-act play. You are completely free in your choice of expressions, you can say indecencies, insult, trample upon the commonly accepted; or, on the other hand, reason with such thoroughness, seriousness, and refinement that is unthinkable in a newspaper and most periodicals. At the same time, a pamphlet is brief and printed without a binding, so its production requires much less time than publishing a book, and it typically reaches a much wider audience. Most importantly, the pamphlet is not bound by any established form. It can be in prose or verse, in the form of a story, fable, letter, article, dialogue, or report. It is only required that it be vivid, sharp, and brief.”
I would add that publishing pamphlets was inexpensive, and also that the tradition called for publishing under a pseudonym. Thus, it was pamphlets—many of which were responses to other pamphlets—that created the discursive environment out of which the ideas of the American Revolution grew.
Let me also remind you of some circumstances of those years that we typically overlook. First of all—and this is the most important thing—the American colonists were British citizens, and all this revolutionary activity took place within British history and British politics. For example, Cromwell taught the English that a standing army means dictatorship. Therefore, the attempt to station troops in the colonies met with fierce resistance. And so on. Even the mass writing of political pamphlets was a British tradition. Second, the colonists were far from the government. In the most literal sense. Sailing to America took a week or two, so inevitably the government and colonists had misconceptions about each other’s activities, which fostered mutual suspicion and insinuation. This also meant that the colonists almost never intersected with the English “political class” and were not integrated into it.
“The heralds of the revolution, the authors of numerous pamphlets and treatises, were not philosophers and did not form a separate ‘intelligentsia.’ They were politicians, merchants, lawyers, landowners, and preachers, and they did not intend to enroll themselves as followers of this or that grandee of political philosophy, whose influence the modern researcher will discover in their writings,” Bailyn writes.
It is precisely here that we will find a striking similarity with Ukraine. Although our government is located in Kyiv, although we have telegraph, telephone, radio, television, and internet, it is probably much more distant from the “people” than the English government of the late eighteenth century. The “people” has just as little influence on the political class, and therefore does not trust the representatives of that class. That is why “merchants, lawyers, landowners, and preachers,” and not status politicians, are the “heralds” of the Ukrainian revolution. And that is why the genre in which they communicate their ideas to the world is the pamphlet.
If you look carefully at what Ukrainian Pravda or Khvylia publishes, you will find pamphlets there. You will also find pamphlets in what is presented as “programs” or “strategies.” Furthermore, it is easy to discover that there is no political-economic analytics in Ukraine. Everything that is called analytics here is a pamphlet, simply more tedious. There are no experts in Ukraine and no expert opinion. Expertise is an evaluation of means in relation to goals. Ukrainian expertise, however, is almost always a critique of goals expressed in specialized language. Here I need to emphasize that I am not claiming that we have no specialists who could be experts. They certainly exist, but the state of society is such that expertise and analytics, if they concern the life of this society in any way, inevitably turn into a pamphlet.
Here I want to make one clarification. A pamphlet is not “worse” and not “better” than analytics or expertise. A pamphlet is simply a different genre, and if all our politically interested parties, including people who consider themselves political scientists and experts, express themselves through pamphlets, then this should primarily tell us that they do not identify with the object of their writings. For them it is an external, often hostile and impervious to any influence, force. The benefit I attribute to this statement lies precisely in noting this fact. As soon as the majority of “politicians, merchants, lawyers, landowners, and preachers” notice and recognize this fact, they will have a chance, because they will have to stop reasoning about “elections” or pondering which “force” to join.
And one final observation. The pamphlets of future Americans abound with the words “conspiracy,” “treason,” “betrayal.” These words are addressed to the British government. From the colonists’ perspective, the government was trampling upon the ancient liberties of British citizens (this was precisely the “betrayal” and “conspiracy”). It was the categorical rejection of tyranny, which the colonists saw in the policies of George III, that caused the revolution. In Ukrainian pamphlets, on the contrary, we will see a genuine thirst for tyranny. But that is already, as they say, details.