Tom Cutterham. Gentlemen Revolutionaries

If your interest is the American Revolution or the road to the U.S. Constitution, you should read this book. If your interest is elite ideology or plebeian mentalité, speculators or squatters, bankers or merchants, debtors or consumers, restriction or advancement of slavery, government mercenaries or agrarian regulators, revolution or counterrevolution, you should read this book. If you have graduate students and are teaching the Revolution, they should read this book. If you have undergraduates and are teaching the Revolution, you could easily assign this book, but after you read it, you will need to update your lectures. Tom Cutterham’s beautifully written Gentlemen Revolutionaries is both familiar and groundbreaking. His description of elite revolutionaries’ ideology treads the well-worn winding country lane of the old “republican synthesis.” His gentleman revolutionaries revolted against European inherited aristocracy in favor of American meritocracy. They claimed the right to rule themselves and their common neighbors based on their wealth earned through commerce and on the education and disinterestedness their wealth afforded. Gentlemen revolutionaries disdained the moral corruption of the idle elite’s conspicuous consumption as much as they did commoners’ reliance upon credit for things they should not have afforded themselves. Equally, they disdained aristocratic oligarchy as much as they did democratic “licentiousness” and tyranny of the majority. This is the old road.

Aristocracy (class) · Constitution · Democracy · Elite · Ideology · Oligarchy · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Sociology · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies