I just finished reading Gordon S. Wood’s Pulitzer Prize winning “The Radicalism of the American Revolution.” This 2011 work looked at the transition the American culture made from the “virtue” of Enlightenment thinking of the mid-1700s to the commercialization and democratization of the middle class in the first three decades of the 19th century. It was a fascinating look at the disappointment many of the founders had at the direction that the new nation took economically, commercially, culturally, governmentally, and religiously. It was not a book that one zips through, but it was a masterfully written one that is filled with information that would interest a student of American history. (466 pages)

THAT ENDING. WOW. Wood takes us through an entire description of how radical politicians tore down monarchy... and then adds a sarcastic, bitter, twist ending revealing that every founding father eventually came to hate the America they had created.

Wood's depiction of the American Revolution is incredibly insightful and appealing to anyone interested in American history. He is able to put the Revolution into the context of the time in which it occurred in a respect that brings the era to life with periodic anecdotes from individuals that lived from the time: whether common man, aristocrat or founding father. The thesis of the work is that the revolution that occured here in the U.S. was much more radical than it has been given credit for. In comparison to the French Revolution, for instance, it wasn't near as bloody. However, Wood argues that our Revolution was a Revolution of our state of mind,agradual buildup from hierarchal and monarchical servitude and patronage that evolved into a republic and eventually a quasi-democracy in which we are a part of today. Wood explains the era through setting the context in a way that many historians have trouble portraying. By putting the reader in the shoes of the individual living through these revolutionary times, Wood accomplishes an unabashed and insightful work that many will find captivating.

Rejoinder to the notion of American Revolution as a conservative, intellectual constitutional exercise which cemented an existing power structure (albeit decapitated) instead of overthrowing it, a la French or Bolshevik Revolutions. Arguing for discontinuity where consensus says there's continuity. Thesis is basically that “ALL MEN are created equal” is far more radical than we can now comprehend from our modern POV: monarchical society was vertically-oriented rather than broad horizontal bands as we now see it after Marx; The American Revolution upended this personal, family-metaphor-clad patron-client structure with a non-hierarchical civic republicanism (which would morph towards democracy after the founders).

I'm not sure that both Wood and the tradition he's writing against can't both be right. OTOH, Wood is really good on the virtue politics of republicanism, and the founder generation’s concept of the gentleman: one with enough privilege to be capable of disinterested government, the natural aristocracy. This is what Washington fretted over like Hamlet, Jefferson whistled past in denial and Hamilton hustled hardest in grasping towards.

Chapter 14 onwards are the high point of the book: Interest politics emerges, much to the chagrin of gentleman founders. Debt-burdened farmer entrepreneurs lobby for paper money. Republicans embraced this naked interest-based politics, so long as it was naked, and accused the moneyed aristocracy of federalism of being just another interest group who was posing as disinterested. Property, which had been the measure of a man in the classical mold, became just a species of interest. Federalists lacked grassroots support so the only thing they could do was be purer than pure in upholding classical republican ideals of gentlemen exempt from market concerns. When human federalists fell short of this lofty goal (another function of patronage falling apart post-Revolution and the American Gentry being quite poor compared to the upper crust of europe: they needed to find income streams) it all fell apart on the Federalists.

A great read on the revolution from a completely different angle than I've ever read. Wood doesn't write the book chronologically; there are no story arcs, protagonists, etc. It reads like a textbook and as such can get pretty dry. But textbooks can also be fascinating.

When we think of the American Revolution, we think of a war and a political revolution. We were taught that the French Revolution, even though it happened afterward, was the more monumental event because it was a social and societal revolution, eradicating monarchy and enabling middle class rule. Wood doesn't spend time comparing the revolutions, but his point is clear: ours produced every bit the change as in France.

To fully understand this revolution, Wood says we must consider not just the war of 1775-1783, but the entire time period from about 1740 to 1820. The gentry of the early 1700s mirrored English aristocracy; inheriting their wealth, owning land, serving as judges and legislators, independent. Labor was an act of poverty, and anyone who could not live on their inherited wealth was a member of the mob, unsophisticated and dependent upon the gentry both socially and politically. Commerce was limited to trade with Europe. As much as 40-50% of all men were slaves or servants.

By 1820, all this had changed. Wealth in the colonies was not enough to allow anyone to live the life of a true, leisurely aristocrat, which created dependencies. Leisure itself became a vice and labor a virtue--the exact opposite of colonial America. The realization of the benefits of interstate commerce launched the US into the commercial, market-centric society we know today. And that firm line (huge gap) between commoners and gentry was obliterated. Everyone was now a gentleman, everyone was free to pursue happiness in their own way, no one had to be dependent on anyone else if they worked hard enough. Except slaves. But eliminating the hierarchy and dependency of colonial society gave oxygen to the emancipation movement where before there was none. The revolution made it possible to begin the debate on freeing slaves, and that alone is an underappreciated and radical consequence.

The most jarring message of the book was how disappointed the revolutionaries were with what they had created. They thought republicanism would lead to a more enlightened society, where each man would use his new freedom to become more informed and more sophisticated. Disinterested, liberally educated men would serve in the government, above private interests and all for the common good. Some of them were mortified to see what then occurred. By 1820 it was considered virtuous by many to have no college education. Common mechanics, artisans, and merchants, with no knowledge of government or the political philosophy of Cato and Cicero were being elected to legislatures. By the time Andrew Jackson, a crude, violent Tennessee farmer, was elected President, Jefferson was disheartened and disillusioned with his own Revolution, and even "reduced to despair."

A good look at early American history, centered around the American Revolution. I appreciated the author's focus on social, cultural, and political change (the Revolutionary War barely gets a mention). Chapter by chapter, the author lays out his theory and the evidence for the radical changes the effected American society during this era and how they came together to shift society and government into something we can recognize today. A very interesting read and I look forward to reading more from this author.

Or, "How A Revolution Transformed a Monarchical Society into a Democratic One Unlike Any That Had Ever Existed", to quote from the introduction directly.

The book is divided into three sections: Monarchy, Republicanism, and Democracy. To sum up very briefly: a group of idealist classical republican revolutionaries who thought of a "disinterested educated elite" sought overturn the patrimonial and hierarchical structures of the old monarchical system, and they were in turn supplanted by advocates of a broader democracy - which still comes nowhere near to the modern definition of a democratic state of course but surpassed whatever came before.

The previous utopian ideals of the revolutionaries came to conflict with the reality of what was the 19th century - "population growth and movement and commercial expansion". By the 1820s, the surviving revolutionaries could barely recognize what their revolution had created. In some cases, their idealism seemed out of touch - the ideal of the United States as a society of landholders seems far afield by the late 19th century. In other cases, it is tragic. The most optimistic would assume a withering away of the criminal institution of slavery after a legal ban on the slave trade in 1807.

Wood makes his argument by compilation- piling up stories, quotes, and illustrations to make his point. While this book is rosier than post, he takes the argument seriously.

The thesis of this book is that American colonial society sat on the edge of the known world, stretched thin across the doorstep to a continent. This already weak, in an english sense, society of patronage, paternalism, and monarchical hierarchy generated ample room for independence and equality to thrive. American society was one where an unheard of percentage of society owned their own land and sustainable farm. The people came to value independence so much that the traditional belief that one's place in society was below the nobles and king simply didn't stand up to inspection. American colonial life was one where no hordes of urban poor existed, (because there was almost no urban space) and the wealthiest of society were paupers in comparison to the elite gentleman class of Europe. This lopping off both extremes of society gave the settlers even more notion that they were equal. The founding fathers, though mostly all quite wealthy, were newly wealthy, and knew the whims of the government in England could wipe them out. This solidified the felt need to cast off the capricious government across the sea. Additionally, royal influence in the colonies was already so light, it isn't like there was a massive infrastructure the revolutionaries needed to overthrow. They already did most of the their governance.

Anyway, extremely good book. The above is a reminder for me if I ever look back at this. Well written, with lots of direct quotations from primary sources. Quite long and took me a while to get through, but full of good details.

The forces of Americanism are dynamic and have always been so. My assumption, born of ignorance, from the outset of attempting to self-educate on the American founding was this: All colonists hated the British for the unfair treatment of them, ie "Taxation without representation," rebelled against a tyrannical government in unison, won against extreme odds through sheer determination, got together, without partisanship and schisms in interest, and created the best documents to birth the first nation-sized democratic republic in history. All was joyous and the founders lived the rest of their lives patting themselves on the back for the genius of which they had wrought. WRONG.

Many of the founders to their dying day recognized approximately nothing American about the country they founded at the end of their lives. From the early rise of the corporation in the early 19th century to strict partisanship, changes in who should best represent the people, all evolved in some way during their lives. For better or worse, many of these founders thought what they had created was destructive and in honest moments antithetical to the mission of their beginnings.

The American founding, in all its radicalism and invention, was never destined to achieve any great global, society-changing outcomes. Many speculate about what the founders would think of America and our current governing structures and habits today. I now think of this exercise as pointless and impossible because of how different we are from the days of a new nation with only 2.5 million people.

It truly is amazing that this country has survived the way it has over the past centuries. What will become of us and the wider world in the centuries to come can't be speculated with any certainty but it is not destined to be a nation of great wealth, a pillar of democracy in the world, or functional for its citizens. Democracy is not guaranteed and we must protect it with Enlightenment principles and reflections of what kind of country we want to be.

This Pulitzer-Prize winning book is an original, must-read for any reader interested in the sociological changes in American society at the time of the Revolution, and how those social upheavals were the truly radical innovation of the revolt.

Wood himself has argued very cogently that the political changes of the Revolution were eventually far more conservative than originally envisioned (the need for a strong executive to pull together the disparate strands of the Confederation to ensure the economic survival of the Union). Here, he explodes all previous conceptions of social change in the period by insightfully arguing that the 1770s-1780s oversaw the complete overturning of centuries of world order by taking America from a European model "vertical" ordering of society to a horizontal democratization of those social interchanges. For those decades, there was no strong executive like today, no overtly centralized government. Previously, as Wood argues in his first part, social interchanges were conducted on the monarchical model, a complex series of interchanges of patriarchy and paternalism and patronism which left no doubt as to who was higher in the social food chain. In Part 2, Wood tracks the leveling of that paternalism into a "republicanism", where enlightened representatives represent the common people in a convention or a representative body. By the time of Jackson, a sort of rhetoric of true democracy erupted, with the feeling of direct representation by non-elites in the government. At this time, banks, and special interests, and emolument made a mockery of that projected democracy.

It's a brilliant overview of the true revolution, the radical overturning of the social order, which is still on display today: anti-intellectualism, anti-elitism, appeals to the lowest common denominator. The fundamental socioeconomic underpinnings of America were present from the beginning, as Wood brilliantly demonstrates.

America - its democratic egalitarianism, commercial fixation, workaday striving, and, yes, its radical flattening of society - is beautifully captured in Gordon Wood's magnum opus of the Revolutionary generation. Wood traces the trajectory of America from a society founded upon principles of master-inferior relationships and top-down political and economic structures to the messy egalitarianism unleashed by the American Revolution.

The stunning thing about Wood's book is how true it rings to a reader in 2018. The laments of Federalists and despairing Founding fathers over how the common people, the middling sort, took control of government; how society had been reduced to a series of commercial exchanges; how reason and expertise were forsaken at the altar of rule by the common man - all such complaints could conveniently be transposed to the current era of a politics seemingly run by the self-interested and dolt-ish.

Wood's achievement is painting the American Revolution as truly revolutionary: a moment in history that divides the pre-modern, monarchical world from that of the messy republicanism of the 19th century. Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton and others didn't merely create a system of government; rather, they brought forth a new destiny for America, and mankind. America became a place where material ambition and the pursuit of happiness could, in the collective sense, breed liberty and prosperity. It was not the republic of reason that the Founders had intended, but it was radical, perhaps even more so, than they had originally intended.

I'm very not interested in military history or hagiography, but this book isn't about battles and famous documents. The premise is that we can't understand what the revolution changed, socially, unless we understand what it was like before.

There's an idea out there that the American Revolution was political but not social. Meaning it changed who was in power, but not how society works (for example, compared to Mexican Revolution, which redistributed land and ended Indian serfdom). I'm partial to this. Wood's book tried to take that head on and has some good points, mixed with some overstated ones.

But I knew very little about how monarchical society worked in America. The fairy tale version is you have a King, lords, knights, and serfs. But it also involved a complex social hierarchy in which everyone had a place and knew a thousand unwritten rules about that place. Rank was apparent and recognized. Your relationship to nobility trumped economics. For instance, merchants were the richest people in colonial America, but they were looked down on by "gentlemen" for being corrupted by money-making. Being a gentleman wasn't a set of behaviors (Wood explains a lot of words had different meaning back then) but primarily meant to you heir to hereditary estates and equally important: you did not work. You only made money thru rents. That was a rigid system in England, where land was locked down, but was mismatched in America where free laborers could flee your land fairly easily (especially if they were willing to kill or join Indians).

Another key (and surprising) piece of that society was they believed the primary motivation to work was poverty. To that end, it was the gentry's job to keep people in poverty so that they would continue working. The gentry's other job was to consume, to buy what commoners created. The idea that commoners would buy luxury goods was abysmal to the statues quo.

The crux of the argument, then, is that the radical break was 1. American focus on industriousness as virtue, and 2. consumerism, or the idea that people's drive to buy stuff trumps poverty as the best motivator for work. These were revolutionary reactions to the old order of things. I can see that. And though it meant people's material lives didn't really change, the author argues that in this pre-industrial society, people weren't materialists and didn't have a class analysis that tracked onto the class system of the 19th century.

I haven't read anything like this before, so that was pretty cool. BUT this was definitely a book written in 1992, with all the historical tropes we're trying to put to bed.

First off, women, slaves, and indigenous people are footnotes. Discussed here and there, oh so unfortunate. But not fundamentally something that shapes the social relations...in this book about social relations.

Second, and IMO the worst thing historians have done, is using their subjects to make constant and ignorant assertions about all society and human nature. You don't see this in a lot of quality history books published this century. But this book has it's share. For example:

It is impossible to exaggerate the significance of this westward movement of people. It was a “stupendous work of human advancement … of which the history of mankind certainly affords no other example.” The movement was far more spectacular than the historic events revealed by the ancient ruins of the Old World.

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I'm not sure whose quote he's laundering his words with there.

But i learned a ton of stuff here about the origins of today. The role of corporations; the endorsement of self-interest as the acceptable type of corruption; the "independent judiciary" created to end debate over how government ought to work—and the judiciary as only surviving group in America vested with the traits of nobility (absolute power over their domain, always being addressed as "your honor," people stand when they enter the room, their supposed impartiality, indifference, and incorruptibility). There's a LOT here.

The book ends with a fun fact I wasn't aware of. The founding fathers who survived into the decades after the revolution HATED what they saw. Their journals were full of disgust, regret, and loathing. So for anyone who says the founding fathers wouldn't agree with what's happening today: it's true! They already hated what was happening in 1790!