Product Description

One of the half dozen most important books ever written about the American Revolution.

New York Times Book Review
During the nearly two decades since its publication, this book has set the pace, furnished benchmarks, and afforded targets for many subsequent studies. If ever a work of history merited the appellation 'modern classic,' this is surely one.

William and Mary Quarterly
[A] brilliant and sweeping interpretation of political culture in the Revolutionary generation.

New England QuarterlyThis is an admirable, thoughtful, and penetrating study of one of the most important chapters in American history.

Wesley Frank Craven

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #171191 in Books
• Published on: 1998-04-06
• Released on: 1998-03-18
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 675 pages

Amazon.com Review
Gordon S. Wood--winner of the Pulitzer Prize and professor of American history at Brown University--had no idea what he was getting into when he began this 653-page book. Innocently, he wanted to write a "monographic analysis of constitution-making in the Revolutionary era." Little did he know he would discover an intellectual world where a complete transformation of political thought was occurring, one that would create "a distinctly American system of politics." As Wood explains, "Beneath the variety and idiosyncrasies of American opinion there emerged a general pattern of beliefs about the social process--a set of common assumptions about history, society, and politics that connected and made significant seemingly discrete and unrelated ideas. Really for the first time I began to glimpse what late eighteenth-century Americans meant when they talked about living in an enlightened age." This original study of the American political system is a strong contribution to the scholarly studies of the events surrounding the nation's independence.

Review
One of the half dozen most important books ever written about the American Revolution.

New York Times Book Review

If ever a work of history merited the appellation 'modern classic,' this is surely one.

William and Mary Quarterly

[A] brilliant and sweeping interpretation of political culture in the Revolutionary generation.

New England Quarterly

This is an admirable, thoughtful, and penetrating study of one of the most important chapters in American history.

Wesley Frank Craven

From the Inside Flap
This classic work explains the evolution of American political thought from the Declaration of Independence to the ratification of the Constitution. In so doing, it greatly illuminates the origins of the present American political system.

Customer Reviews

Outstanding
This outstanding book is generally regarded as fundamental to understanding the American Revolution. Wood immersed himself in contemporary writings including a huge array of political pamphlets, sermons, letters, and other texts in an attempt to reconstruct the thinking of the people who made the Revolution and the Constitution. Wood begins with a reconstruction of how colonial Americans perceived the political organization of their societies, their relationship with Britain, and how they conceived politics in general. The initial parts of the book parallel and draw from Bernard Bailyn's outstanding book, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Indeed, much of Wood's book can be seen as sequel to Bailyn's book.
Wood begins with a reconstruction of the pre-Revolutionary conception of politics. Like Bailyn, Wood reconstructs this as a compound of several elements but dominated by certain general Enlightenment concepts and the specific framework developed by dissident 18th century British Whig intellectuals. Basic concepts included the idea that political structure reflected basic social structures, that the 'people' embodied by parliamentary representation were opposed and oppressed by the Crown, and an obsession with 'corruption' induced by abuse of the executive power of the Crown.
The successful conclusion of the Revolution, however, did not produce the outcome predicted by this conception of politics. The resulting confederation and states were perceived by many American intellectuals as dominated by greed and self-interest, there was an absence of the expected moral regeneration, and there were increasing concerns about the power of state legislatures causing both abuse of minority rights and threats to social order.
The reaction to these problems produced a wholesale revision of American's conceptions of politics. In the period leading up to the formulation of the Constitution, many ideas that we accept as basic were formulated. The nascent and later explicit Federalists severed the coupling between social and political organization. This gave government an essentially independent role and represented a form of social engineering because the Federalists essentially depended on constructed institutions to guarantee social success rather than the prior emphasis on public virtue. The ideas of constitutionialism, large republics, delegation of sovereignty, mixed government with responsibility divided between states and the Federal government, and emphasis on social contracts as a source of authority all stem from this period.
Wood is careful to emphasize some particularly interesting aspects of this process. In some respects, the Federalist drive to constitutionalism was a reactionary act on the part of traditional elites who felt they were losing out in excessively egalitarian world created by the Revolution. The process was widely diffused. Important and generally recognized figures like Madison and James Wilson figure prominently in the story but Wood demonstrates how a host of other figures, many now obscure, contributed to and articulated this process.
In a sense, there were 2 American Revolutions. The first being actual revolt from the British Empire and the second being the dramatic change in political thought and institutions that followed the successful conclusion of that revolt. Wood does a wonderful job of delineating how this second revolution occurred.

The authoritative book on the aftermath of the Revolution
Gordon Wood's celebrated book is the story of the way people thought about themselves and the revolution they had made. It explains in great detail the initial failures of majoritarian democracy and the development of constitutionalism. A glance at the footnotes reveals the genuine source of this book's authority: Professor Wood has drawn his narrative and his conclusions from original sources--newspaper articles, letters, and diaries of the period. The only complaint I have is the glaring omission of any mention of slavery. That word doesn't appear in the index or anywhere else in this book. This is all the more remarkable in light of our growing awareness of just how deeply the Founders struggled with this issue. Nevertheless, this is the single most important book on the period. If you want to know about American Democracy and its intellectual origins, this is the book to read.

"a true, enduring classic"
Gordon S. Wood is one of the deans of the so-called "intellectual historians" of the Revolutionary era. I just finished reading this book for the third time in the last 15 years, and I am struck by the sweeping nature of it. Wood's thesis is essentially that Americans' thinking about government and politics underwent a remarkable change in the 11 years between the writing of the Declaration of Independence and the framing of the Constitution. In short, through a series of piecemeal changes during this brief period, Americans largely put together a new mode of political thinking. The key to Wood's argument seems to be his discussion of the changes that occurred in the locus of sovereignty, and the separation of political from social authority. "The people" play the key role here. They went from traditionally being "embodied" in one branch of the gov't (the House of Commons in England, for example), to being the source of all governmental authority. This change brought with it changes in the understanding of representation and of separation of powers, and made possible Americans' unique concept of federalism, and the development of an "American science of politics". Wood uses a dazzling array of sources to support his arguments, and in doing so, shows how many hands and brains were involved in this work. The book is long and the general reader may find it a bit difficult, but anyone interested in the development of American political thought cannot neglect it.