Radicalism of the American Revolutionby Gordon S. Wood | |
| List(s): | "Carp 500" |
|---|---|
| Category: |
"U.S. History - Political" |
| Pages: | 447 |
| Year of Publication: | 1991 |
| Date Read: | 05/01/2001 |
| Notes: | Wood pictures colonial society as overwhelmingly deferential — to king, to family patriarch, and to aristocrats — with “personal obligations and reciprocity that ran through the whole society.'” But patriots such as Adams, Jefferson, and Franklin, aspiring to become gentlemen, resented this entrenched order of patronage and kinship. Their classical republicanism stressed benevolence and government by an enlightened elite. To their dismay, however, they discovered that their rhetoric unleashed all the latent entrepreneurial and egalitarian energies of American life, which even the elaborate mechanism of the Constitution could not completely contain. COMMENTS — In a grand and immensely readable synthesis of historical, political, cultural and economic analysis, Wood, a prize-winning historian, depicts much more than a break with England. He gives readers a revolution that transformed an almost feudal society into a democratic one, whose emerging realities sometimes baffled and disappointed its founding fathers. |
| My Rating: | 7 |
Reviewed by Roger on 2001-05-01 16:03:31
