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Gordon Wood’s Radical Achievement
Rosen, Jeffrey
Rosen, Jeffrey
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Abstract
It’s an honor to be part of this celebration of Gordon Wood, our greatest living American historian. And I’m grateful that Steve Calabresi has asked me to talk about The Radicalism of the American Revolution, which I hadn’t previously read. The book was published in January 1992, the year after I graduated from law school. My teacher and mentor, Akhil Amar, viewed Gordon Wood’s Creation of the American Republic as the central text in Founding Era constitutional history, but he didn’t have the opportunity to assign the new book during our final year.
I’m grateful for the belated homework assignment because The Radicalism of the American Revolution has transformed my understanding of the Revolution, just as it has transformed the understanding of so many readers. Gordon Wood shows that the American Revolution was not just a political revolution but a social and cultural revolution, and as a social and cultural revolution, it was as radical as any the world has ever known. As Wood writes, “If we measure the radicalism by the amount of social change that actually took place—by transformations in the relationships that bound people to each other—then the American Revolution was not conservative at all; on the contrary: it was as radical and as revolutionary as any in history.”
The radicalism of the American Revolution, as Wood shows, was based on the transformation of American society from one based on hierarchy and monarchy to one based on equality, republicanism, and ultimately, democracy. And although Thomas Jefferson initially framed the debate between America’s two political parties as a debate between republicanism and monarchy, the Revolution set in motion democratic forces that swept further than either he or Alexander Hamilton imagined.