Dry but informative.

A deep dive into the social and cultural context in the ~50 years before & after the revolution. It definitely helps place in context how our society was initially envisioned in fairly utopian terms at the time, and also the fundamental flaws that have existed since the very beginning. Also a few "aha" moments that help explain deep undercurrents of american culture: our value on work, money, land, homeownership, white privilege, etc.

Worth a read if you are a history nerd, or just want to see how much/little our country has changed in 250 years.

Comprehensive description of the American Revolution in terms of the socio-economic environment. Most books focus on the war or specific people. This book gives you a great understanding of why the United States was formed. It also shows the unforeseen consequences that led to this country becoming a world superpower.

One warning to casual readers. This book is not an easy read. If this book is not used in college History classes I would be surprised.

Another uni book and perhaps one of the hardest reads I've done. Wood's style of writing is really not to my taste but I can't deny that his arguments are well developed and argued. I think he's right that most people don't consider the American Revolution to be as revolutionary as it's French or Russian counterparts, the founding fathers don't come across as radical revolutionaries like Lenin but instead they are slightly boring elitists. However, as Wood shows the revolution brought about significant and radical changes and it's worth a look if it's your area of interest.

Not a book about the battles fought, but of the sociopolitical origins of the American Revolution. Interesting to know that the Founding Fathers were not particularly content with the outcomes of democracy in their lifetimes once achieved. Would be interesting to know what they would think of the 20th and 21st century American political climate. Ha. They’d probably find recent presidential candidates truly a basket of deplorables if there ever was one. Would recommend pairing this book with some of Wood’s YouTube speaking events/lectures to capture the message of this book a little faster and solidify its content.

I was looking for a book to help me better understand and fill in knowledge gaps about the American Revolution. What I got was a book that did that, but it also ended up being a highly relevant look into why America is the America that we know right now and why Americans are they way we are. To me, at least, it explained so many of the trends that we have seen over the last decade and the continual tension between two (at least) vastly different sides of our culture and society. What I found most interesting is what I can only describe as affirmation of American Exceptionalism but not a celebration of the some of the hallmarks of American society: materialism, self-interest, and individualism (to the point of disconnection).

Another book that earns its Pulitzer Prize and then some. I made the mistake of starting this book while in law school, so I ended up reading it off and on over a period of years. Part of why this book took so much time to read is that it is an unbelievably dense tome that requires long stretches of unwavering attention. Dr. Wood covers an enormous amount of material without ever letting it up, yet the book coalesces into a brilliant narrative. While the long stretch of time between starting and finishing the book was not ideal, it afforded me the chance to see how the book affected my thinking, and I can comfortably say this is one of the most influential books I’ve ever read, given how it altered and shaped my understanding of numerous topics. Reviews call this book a tour de force, and this is one time the term is well deserved. Highly, highly, highly recommended.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. It turned out it's scope was far more extensive than I had previously thought; which was a good thing. The book is laid out in three segments: monarchy, republicanism and democracy. It tells the story of how the enlightened generation (among them of course the Founding Fathers) went from a monarchical society into a republican one and how it transformed itself again into a democracy in the decades following the Revolution. Something many of the Founding Fathers viewed as a step backwards, and many saw the republican ideas of the Revolution change into something they were never intended.

The author quotes Thomas Paine:

"The mind once enlightened cannot again become dark."

This shows the sentiment prevalent in 1776. They were on an upward path towards independence and freedom. Yet, in the years and decades after the Revolution things changed radically. As the author explains:

"Americans were reversing the civilizing process, going backwards in time, losing politeness instead of, as the revolutionaries had hoped, gaining it. Usually the first settlers of any country were barbarians who gradually in time became cultivated and civilized. ”The progress has been from ignorance to knowledge, from rudeness of savage life to the refinements of polished society. But in the settlement of North America the case is reversed. The tendency is from civilization to barbarism.” Under New World conditions ”the tendency of the American character is then to degenerate, and to degenerate rapidly; and that not from any peculiar vice in the American people, but from the very nature of a spreading population. The population of the country is outgrowing its institutions.” To some it seemed that the mind once enlightened could after all become darker."

A comparison is also drawn between the French and the American Revolutions. As the title of the book implicates, the American Revolution was radical, but in quite a different way than how we might think of a revolution today.

Thus was begun the myth that has continued into our own time—the myth that the American Revolution was sober and conservative while the French Revolution was chaotic and radical. But only if we measure radicalism by violence and bloodshed can the myth be sustained; by any other measure the American Revolution was radical.."

The radicalism of the American Revolution didn't lay so much in its bloody struggle with the British, as it did in their changing of every aspect of society as they knew it. The very foundations we torn down and build anew. The aristocratic and paternalistic society that existed was demolished and with it the most basic concepts known to the colonists at the time. One such definition that changed (radically), was the definition of 'property'.

"Indeed, the entire Revolution could be summed up by the radical transformation Americans made in their understanding of property. In classical republican thought, property, landed property in particular, was not some special interest needing representation or protection. Rather, property had been considered in proprietary terms as part of a persons identity and the source of his authority. Such proprietary property was regarded not as the product of one’s labor or as a material asset to be bought and sold in the market but as a means of maintaining one’s gentility and independence from the caprices of the market. Landed property was the most important such guarantee of autonomy because it was the least transitory, the most permanent form, of property. Such proprietary property was designed to protect its holders from from external influence or corruption, to free them from the scramble of buying and selling, and allow them to make impartial political judgements. But by making landed property merely another ”interest” among all the other market interests to be promoted or protected, [James] Kent and the other Federalists unwittingly stripped property of its older sanctified, static meaning and turned it into a mere material possession or capital commodity. They therefore conceded the northern Republicans’ more modern understanding of property at the outset—that property was changeable, based on people’s labor, and ”essential to our temporal happiness”.

If property had become just an ”interest,” a mere material possession, just venture capital, then, the Republicans said, everyone had an equal right to acquire it, for ”the desire of acquiring property is a universal passion.” Such property could no longer be an intergal part of a person’s identity; instead it was ”only one of the incidental rights of the person who possesses it,” important no doubt, but scarcely requiring specific representation in a branch of legislature. In fact, ”compared with our other essential rights,” property was ”insignificant and trifling."

America, after the Revolution, became the most commercialized nation on earth, which leveled the playing field for its inhabitants. The distinction of Gentleman vs (for example) Yeoman disappeared quickly, as ones social status became more and more dependable on ones own labor and ability to make money, instead of depending on the patronage of well to do Gentlemen.

“The idea of labor, of hard work, leading to increased productivity was so novel, so radical, in the overall span of Western history that most ordinary people, most of those who labored, could scarcely believe what was happening to them. Labor had been so long thought to be the natural and inevitable consequence of necessity and poverty that most people still associated it with slavery and servitude. Therefore any possibility of oppression, any threat to the colonists' hard earned prosperity, any hint of reducing them to the poverty of other nations, was especially frightening; for it seemed likely to slide them back into the traditional status of servants or slaves, into the older world where labor was merely a painful necessity and not a source of prosperity.”

Labor thus became the source of their prosperity. Something it still is in the Western world today, generally speaking. Also, it was elevated in status, where people who would still be holding on to the old aristocratic ideas, were more and more looked down upon. Their positions became financially unbearable in many instances, because people who would want to uphold their Gentility, refrained from working to make money, as it was considered beneath them and would interfere with their ability to participate in politics and government without any form of alternate interests.

The meaning of the Revolution differed for people, but it was the common seed that bonded the American people together.

"Some found the meaning of the Revolution in the Constitution and the union it had created. Others discovered the meaning in the freedom and equality that the Revolution had produced. But many other Americans knew that such meanings were too formal, too legal, too abstract, to express what most actually experienced in being Americans. In concrete day-to-day terms invocations of the constitution meant the freedom to be left alone, and in turn that freedom meant the ability to make money and pursue happiness.”

What was most interesting to read about were how the original ideas and expectations of the Founding Fathers actually differed from what American society actually turned into. One of the main interests I decided to read this book. Most especially the advent of Democracy, unsettled many of the Founding Fathers:

"The founding fathers were unsettled and fearful not because the American Revolution had failed but because it had succeeded , and succeeded only too well. What happened in America in the decades following the Declaration of Independence was after all only an extension of all that the revolutionary leaders had advocated. White males had taken only too seriously the belief that they were free and equal with the right to pursue their happiness. Indeed, the principles of their achievement made possible the eventual strivings of others—black slaves and women—for their own freedom, independence, and prosperity.”

These strivings weren't limited to North America either, for most of the principles and ideas advocated and developed at the time we can see (in some form or another) in most Western societies. It laid the groundwork for the modern concept of democracy.

The amount of research that has gone into this book must have been enormous. The author has woven all this research into a very readable narrative. Most informative and educational and most of all enjoyable!

Caveat: While this book is the kind of great history book to tickle a history fan like myself pink, I see it as being too "on subject" to appeal to most general readers. My nutshell review is that it offers a fine three stage analysis of the changes in the American social-political thought process in the years before, during, and after the Revolution. If that sort of thing floats your boat you will love this book. If not, I know very well this one will bore you stiff.

Too bad that last bit, since the material inside would go a long way toward disabusing you of a lot of the bowdlerized notions of history they filled your head with in public school. It offers a fine glimps at how far the ideals & expectations of the founging fathers were at odds with how things actually turned out, and how unhappy many were with the kind of democracy that came out of the Revolution. You'll also learn a bit about the rise of the religeous right in the years just after the Revolution, which took good rationalists like Jefferson and Franklin quite by surprise.

Actually, when I consider the subject matter I am inclined to think that the people who would benefit most from reading this are the sort of people who by political leaning never would. This makes it just the sort of history book that if I were an instructor at the college level, and so free to pick most of my own ckass material, I would inflict on my students for their own good.

An epic work of intellectual history which will undoubtedly transform your understanding of the American Revolution and, most importantly, your understanding of contemporary America.

Wood meticulously traces the sociological and ideological change in America from a Monarchy, to a Republic, to a Democracy. In other words the rise of "classical republicanism" but also its quick change into "liberal democracy." Along the way Wood describes the radical transformation of key concepts such as that of the "gentleman," "property," "disinterestedness," work, "the market," and religion, all of which to a large extent were occurring in the Western world, but which were most clearly articulated and institutionalized in America.

Wood rightly points out the important point that “the Anti-Federalists lost the battle over the Constitution. But they did not lose the war over the kind of national government the United States would have…” (259) The change from monarchy to democracy is not simply of bad to good. One gets the impression that Wood believes that, like many of the Founding Fathers towards the end of their lives, the revolution in some senses might have unleashed elements that have gone too far. Namely, the destruction of disinterested civic virtue in favour of the unbridled pursuit of self-interest, even within government office. Seen in this light, the Revolution can be said to have "failed... because it had... succeeded only too well." (368)

This evolution is epitomized by a passing reference Wood makes to Thomas Jefferson's concerns about the popularity of Andrew Jackson as "a man of violent passions and unfit for the presidency." They are certainly two vastly different personalities, but along the same ideological continuum. Jefferson could not fully comprehend the radicalism of the revolution he was helping to further. Reading in 2025, one can't help reflecting on the rise of our era's own version of Jackson. Even the debates between Federalists and Republicans over the "nature of truth," deeply resonate with contemporary debates about "alternative facts" and legacy media vs. new media (X, etc.). This book is a great help to contextualize such apparent aberrations as in fact part and parcel of the radicalism of the American Revolution which continues to unfold even today.

We often don't realize just how revolutionary the social changes of the American Revolution were because we no longer have a real understanding of the monarchial social system that dominated the colonial era up to the middle of the eighteenth century. A hierarchical society in which there was a place for each person, and people who sought to break out of it could be forcibly returned to it, or left with no place else to go (thanks to warning-off laws that sent outsiders on their way after three days). A society in which the father's rule was law, in which subordinates (wives, children, servants) striking back at even an abusive superior was treated as akin to treason, where tenants owed landlords not just rent in cash or kind, but also loyalty, even to the point of helping track down rebellious servants and bring them back. A society of very personal ties and loyalties.

It's often overlooked in histories of the Revolution because there was no sharp cultural break of the sort we see in the French or Russian Revolutions, in which the monarchy was overthrown and the aristocracy abolished. Instead the change was a process that began as Enlightenment ideas such as the equality of Man and the sentimental family made their way across the Atlantic from Europe. It accelerated after the French and Indian War, which brought much of what had been Upper Louisiana under British rule, and thus available to the colonists. With people going west and spreading out, the ties that had held them weakened to the point that invoking them seemed increasingly old-fashioned.

The political Revolution only reinforced the trend, which grew organically both from the vastness of the land and the fact that the people who settled these new lands were the people who were dissatisfied with their lot in the old country. As a result, the American Revolution brought about a cultural revolution on top of the political one without the mass graves that have been the mark of other revolutions.

Picked this up at Heirloom Books in Chicago in preparation for a visit to Vermont later this summer. My host, a retired American historian, plans a series of trips to sites relevant to the colonial and revolutionary war periods.

This book is about cultural history. It's divided into three major parts descriptive of three sociological modes of being, those being the monarchical, the republican and the democratic, with the intention of showing how the peculiar circumstances of North American settlement led, almost inevitably, through these stages to the present-day United States of America.

Implicit to author Wood's argument is what may be taken as a critique of Marxist analyses as applied to the American experience. The centerpiece of the story is, of course, the American revolution, a revolution which, as he has it, was not of the economically oppressed against their oppressors--descriptive of the later French and Russian revolutions. Rather, the American revolutionaries were relatively well off compared to their English peers, their movement precursing a broader cultural transformation which in time would manifest in Europe as well.

When still in high school I read Charles Beard's economic interpretation of the American revolution and McDonald's critique of same, the argument of the former being that the delegates to the constitutional convention were significantly motivated by their economic interests. This, despite errors in detail, seems to have been the case overall. In a Marxist sense, so far as I understand it, the American revolution represented a pivotal transition from late feudalistic forms to a maturing capitalistic one, distinct from subsequent European changes in great part owing to the abundance of land and the paucity of its white population. In this sense, recognizing that the American revolution was not a revolt against capitalist exploitation, but a revolt which fostered the development of wage labor, of industry, of markets and, yes, of peculiarly capitalistic modes of exploitation, Wood's work seem to me to be a valuable contribution to any discussion of the transformations of dominant modes of production.

Wood's most famous work argues that the American Revolution was actually a radical event if we understand the changing ideas and social structures of the time rather than judging the American Revolution by modern standards of radicalism. By modern standards of radicalism, the American Revolution looks downright conservative: an attempt by elite white males to maintain their wealth and privilege from British encroachment and the protestations of everyone else in society. They also didn't do much to revise the status of slaves and women. However, the shift from a monarchical society to a republican society and then to a democratic society were three very different visions, and the cumulative result was a democratic society and state dominated by the massive middling classes. To some extent, the democratic society was a betrayal of the virtuous and selfless republican society that the Founders wanted, but it emerged largely because that republican period (the revolution itself) had broken so many of the bonds of monarchy and unleashed the desires and liberty of the common individual. Everything in this new world gravitated towards the democratic mean, causing monarchical Europeans to look on a mixture of shock and admiration that the whole thing didn't just fall apart. These changes, especially the breaking of the orderly monarchical society in which everyone is bonded to each other in a web of natural dependency culminating with the King, were truly radical for the time.

The American Revolution was not simply radical in bringing about these changes, but radical in the sense that no society existed like it at the time or possibly ever in history. The society that emerged from the Revolution was democratic in an almost chaotic sense, with seemingly no one actually in charge of this rapidly expanding, commercially minded, evangelically Christian, ferociously social-climbing nation. Critics have accused him of American exceptionalism, but I think this is a silly point. The whole point of the book is that America was exceptional in this time period as it charted a course, created a social system, and espoused values different from everyone else in the world. This is a posteriori exceptionalism, which is a perfectly valid argument to make.

Wood's account of the Revolution is generally more positive than most modern historians. I think he is merited in this positive take. The revolution unleashed the energies of a huge part of the American population, increased the wealth of the majority of society, and lifted millions of people into a status of rights and equality. Wood argues that these philosophical changes, especially the rigorous notion of white male equality, laid the groundwork for the end of slavery and the women's rights movement. There some validity here, but he seems to be overlooking the fact that the founders deliberately avoided putting slavery on the table, setting the stage for its revival and geographical surge with the cotton boom. His statement that the founding principles "doomed" slavery is utterlMoreover, historians like Rosemarie Zagarri have shown . So much of this book is about how the visions of the Founders ultimately did not come true even though they built a brilliant structure for politics and government. He does a great job showing this process on a variety of topics (commerce, culture, poverty, religion, elections, parties, etc), but I would have really liked to have seen him do the same for women and religion. The book is long enough to incorporate those groups. Still, even if people don't read this rather dense book, teachers should try to bring across these highly important and original ideas to as many people as possible.