On The Radicalism of the American Revolution

We tend to think of the American Revolution as a relatively conservative affair, a tax revolt that swapped a king for a congress while leaving society much as it was. Gordon Wood's The Radicalism of the American Revolution, published in 1991, argues the opposite, and argues it powerfully: that the Revolution was among the most radical in history, not because of the violence it involved, which was modest, but because of the transformation it worked in how Americans related to one another. It dissolved a whole social order, and that, Wood contends, was the real revolution.

His method is to reconstruct the world the colonists started from, a society Wood calls monarchical, organized around hierarchy, patronage, and deference. In that world, society was a chain of dependencies running from the king down through the gentry to ordinary people, held together by personal obligation and the assumption that some were born to rule and others to defer. People understood themselves through their place in this web of rank and connection, and politics was the business of the well-born few.

The Revolution, Wood argues, destroyed that order. It replaced a society of hierarchy and deference with one of equality and independence, in which ordinary people no longer accepted that their betters should govern them, in which commerce and self-interest replaced patronage, and in which the very idea that some men were naturally superior came to seem absurd. By the time the dust settled, Americans had become, in their own self-understanding, a people of equals, and the old assumptions of deference had become not just wrong but unthinkable. This was a deeper change than the mere replacement of one government with another.

The argument matters because it reframes what the Revolution accomplished and what it set loose. The egalitarianism that Tocqueville would later marvel at, the restless democratic energy, the refusal to defer, all of it, Wood suggests, was unleashed by the Revolution's dissolution of the hierarchical world. The founders, many of them gentlemen of the old order, may not have fully intended this; they let loose forces more democratic than they were comfortable with, and could not call them back. The principle outran the men, the pattern this library keeps finding.

The Radicalism of the American Revolution belongs alongside Bailyn's Ideological Origins, also on these shelves, as the two great modern accounts of what the Revolution was about, one focused on ideas, the other on society. It is in copyright and widely available in print and digital editions. Read it to see the Revolution not as a cautious political adjustment but as the overturning of an entire way of ordering human relations.