Democracy and the American Revolution

A MERICAN historians have never been famous for agreement, but in one respect they seem curiously united. All have tried to measure the significance of the Revolution in relation to the development of American democracy. However, beyond the limits of this initial premise their unity dissolves into a rich multiplicity of interpretations. Such a state of affairs is not necessarily to be lamented, for the diversity of opinions has helped to illuminate the complexity of our Revolutionary experience. There is a point, though, where multiplicity ceases to enlighten and instead merely creates confusion. We are approaching, though we may not yet have reached, that point on the question of whether or not the Revolution was a movement. While it is impossible, and even undesirable, to have complete agreement on the substance of interpretations, to be still debating such a fundamental question indicates a critical weakness in our knowledge. The crux of our confusion lies more in the realm of intellectual history than in institutional history. After almost a century and a half of historical speculation, we are still not agreed on the nature of Revolutionary ideas, let alone on precisely what democratic changes took place in American thinking between I760 and 1789. The problem transcends simple divergencies in individual points of view and relates more fundamentally to the methods employed. Our confusion in the realm of ideas stems largely from the reluctance of historians to define a point of departure in historical context. Because we have failed to clarify the manner in which mid-eighteenth-century Americans viewed the people's role in the polity, it has been difficult to interpret the significance of institutional and intellectual changes throughout the Revolutionary period. The institution of representation serves as a useful illustration both because it was subject to rigorous scrutiny during the Revolution and

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• Revolution in the Quarterly? A Historiographical Analysis

  Michael A Mcdonnell, David Waldstreicher et al.•The William and Mary Quarterly•2017

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• Prologue to Revolution

  Malcolm Freiberg, Edmund S Morgan•The New England Quarterly•1959

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