Slavery continued for the following century and nothing was achieved for women, so what kind of a revolution was it anyway? Farmers and creditors were no different.The perceived lack of public-spiritedness had important political implications. But what was envisioned as a form of republican virtue was itself doomed, if not by human nature, then by the other social forces, such as demands for equality, loosed by the Revolution.
Yet it didn’t take long for interest-group politics to dominate national as well as local politics. The primacy of the individual is still a radical notion that has yet to be duplicated in any other revolution. Once one’s reputation as a gentleman had been established, however, one could engage in a commercial activity so long as it was seen as an avocation rather than a vocation.Colonial America was also noteworthy for the role of patriarchy, which, argues Wood, “may even have been stronger in America than in England precisely because of the weakness in the colonies of other institutions, such as guilds.” Although primogeniture was not uniformly followed in colonial inheritance law, the first-born male was usually the favored heir. Politicians were workmen worthy of their hire. Instead, the merits of hard work and being self-made began to take precedence. The Radicalism of the American Revolution is a nonfiction book by historian Gordon S. Wood, published by Vintage Books in 1993.
Gordon S. Wood The Radicalism Of The American Revolution Analysis 1021 Words | 5 Pages. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except for material where copyright is reserved by a party other than FEE.Please do not edit the piece, ensure that you attribute the author and mention that this article was originally published on FEE.orgThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except for material where copyright is reserved by a party other than FEE. Wood is surely right that business played a much more important role in the U.S. than in most European nations at the time. Self interest was no longer taboo. But, Wood emphasizes, “this social assault was not the sort we are used to today in describing revolutions.” Rather than proletarians versus bourgeoisie, for instance, they were “patriots versus courtiers,” the latter being the primary beneficiaries of the patronage of a hierarchical society.To replace patronage the leading revolutionaries hoped to establish new bonds, principally what Wood calls the notion of “benevolence,” the natural ties that all men should have to one another. “Yet, however superficial and hollow, it was still a monarchical society the colonists lived in, and it was still a king to whom they paid allegiance,” explains Wood.Some of the affectations of monarchy seem particularly ironic today. Modern readers of Patrick O’Brian get a sense of this intermingling of private and governmental concerns in the way Captain Aubrey and other Post Captains were expected to furnish their own ship-board larders, and how O’Brian’s hero even buys much of his own gun powder.
True gentlemen might dabble in economic affairs, but they “were not defined or identified by what they did, but by who they were,” observes Wood. There was no murder, oppression, and tyranny in the new United States. One group of white landowners in By the time I finished this book, back in October, I was so tired of Wood’s dry Kashi prose—as Matt memorably put it —that to write a review seemed more than I could bear. And “if we measure the radicalism of revolutions by the degree of social misery or economic deprivation suffered, or by the number of people killed or manor houses burned, then this conventional emphasis” is warranted, writes Gordon Wood in The Radicalism of the American Revolution.