The Radicalism of the American Revolution

The Radicalism of the American Revolution is a nonfiction book by historian Gordon S. Wood, published by Vintage Books in 1993. In the book, Wood explores the radical character of the American Revolution. The book was awarded the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for History.In 1991, Gordon S. Wood attempted to reconcile his previous arguments in The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787, with myriad analytical categories, especially emotions, in this book. Wood's contentions remained the same from his revised dissertation sans the extensive foray into state constitutionalism during the Confederation period. That is, Wood maintained the premises of his contentions on the purposes of representation (including the idea of a "natural aristocracy"), "liberty" of assembly and association (sans antebellum conceptions of voluntaryism), as well as "tensions" within and without an idea of "liberty," often perceived as the indistinguishable "unity[?]" of "positive and negative." These principles, frequently classified as "libertarian," were inexorably collapsed into a sociopolitical "liberalism" and "interests"-based representation in an ostensibly "national government," more commonly associated with solely "negative liberty." Wood still depicted early federalism as a response to anti-federalist questions regarding the very notion of an expansive "[the] United States" and the solecism imperium-in-imperio, sovereignty-within-sovereignty. James Madison and his federalists offered a last rebuttal: the locus of "power," sovereignty, would be vested in "the people," not in a central government or in state governments, and certainly not in governmental apparatus or branches as such. This rebuttal encompassed not only direct apportionment for the House of Representatives, but also elected state assemblies and legislator appointment of Senators as an indirect form of representative election, in addition to the apportionment of Presidential electors and even state ratification conventions for the Constitution itself. A "mutuality of interests" generated a crucible for "the alliance of power and liberty."Historians such as Jack Rakove, Pauline Maier, and Lance Banning often quoted Wood's "disingenuous Federalists" and Edmund S. Morgan's "inventing the people" in studies of the lingering concerns over the scope and implementation of this popular sovereignty rebuttal, Senatorial and Presidential electoral mechanisms, and the persistence of "republican" signifiers for otherwise "modern" ideas of political economy. In this "American science of politics," government as an "umpire" of (ir)rational "interests" subsumed and transformed any disinterested publics associated with "positive liberty" into, for instance, the United States public interest. Wood concluded Radicalism with the rise of a fledgling Jacksonian democracy, contending that voters appropriated the "Federalist Persuasion" of an "interests"-based popular sovereignty and "celebration of commerce," much to the chagrin of many, but by no means all, of the former persuaders in their twilight years. The late eighteenth-century idea of the "equality" of sensations and benevolent "feeling," bestowed on a "moral" humanity by the deistic "Creator," gave rise to the idea of "equality" of opportunity in political economy. These dyadic and diachronic notions of "equality" potentially included diverse segments of "society," but interpretations by historical actors neither necessarily expanded bodies politic, nor civil government, much beyond self-described "white males." This appropriation nevertheless proved a cornerstone for Wood's ultimate argument that "the Revolution was the most radical and most far-reaching event in American history." More recently, Carli Conklin argued for "the pursuit of happiness" as a typology of "virtue" that may or may not include "property" (or possessive individualism, anti-covetousness, etc.): "...the pursuit of happiness, as used in both works, refers to man's ability to know the law of nature and of nature's God as it pertains to man, and man's unalienable right to then choose to pursue a life of virtue or, in other words, a life lived in harmony with those natural law principles. The result would be eudaimonia or man's own real and substantial happiness." In 2019, Conklin revised and expanded these arguments to include a variety of historical actors, including James Wilson, in The Pursuit of Happiness in the Founding Era: An Intellectual History. These contentions on constructed "happiness" do not necessarily undermine Wood's approach to "liberty" and his concomitant history of "feeling," including "happiness," in Radicalism.As discussed above, Gordon S. Wood argued in Radicalism that "in this classical republican tradition our modern distinction between positive and negative liberties was not yet clearly perceived, and the two forms of liberty were still often seen as one." This dearth of distinctions did not only apply to ideas within the category of "negative liberties," such as degrees of free markets and civil liberties, but also to the conceptual dichotomy of "positive and negative liberties." Any connection between Wood's arguments before the "Federalist Persuasion" and the neo-Kantian pursuit of transcendental apperception as well as the ontological unity of opposites in categorical epistemology, with the presumption (or potentially deleterious acceptance) of enlightened unmündigkeit in apperception and schemata, requires further research.