Review: The Creation of the American Republic by Gordon S. Wood, Part One
First of Two Installments; Part of an Ongoing Book Review Series
[Happy Independence Day! To celebrate American independence, this month History Killers presents a review, in two parts, of one of the most important works of American history, Gordon S. Wood's Creation of the American Republic.]
The first three hundred pages of Gordon S. Wood’s The Creation of the American Republic: 1776 – 1787 (1969) cover a broad scope of some of the intellectual, cultural, and legal history of revolutionary-era North America. More specifically, Wood explores the republican themes that permeated Colonial American culture in the 1760s and 1770s. These themes wrestle with ideas concerning the proper role of the state and the duty of a population’s culture to act as a binding agent that promotes virtue and contemplates the benefit of the people broadly.
This work is noteworthy in the canon of American intellectual history for its de-emphasis of the influence of seventeenth century English political philosopher John Locke. Instead, Wood argues that classical republicanism was responsible for the ideological motivations of the American Revolution. This is an interesting assessment and not merely for the circumvention of Locke’s impact on the political thinkers of the age. Wood’s thesis casts the protagonists of the American Revolution into a more collectivist light. Lockean individual rights are downplayed in favor of a sort of republican virtue that instead asserts the cultural necessity of a philosophy that considers the group over the individual and the majority over the minority.
The Creation of the American Republic is an important work in the historiography of the American Revolution and American intellectual history largely because of the fact that Locke’s influence is minimized. Wood uses a plethora of sources to bolster his argument, and this historical revisionism has been, for the most part, beneficial to the field. That said, this writer sees it to some extent as Wood inventing a new angle that is at best incomplete and at worst a form of careless disregard for inconvenient historical facts. It seems, to some degree, that Wood’s avoidance of Locke (which is considerable but not wholly done) is a device to present his thesis as more solid than it is. To be clear, Wood’s thesis is quite valuable. Shining a light on a different cultural/political ideology and analyzing its influence, especially when it in so many ways is antithetical to the individualism of Locke, is certainly an esteemed addition to the historical canon. Ignoring Locke, however, to the extent that Wood does seems to be a mistake, and not an insignificant one.
Nevertheless, Wood does an enviable job of illustrating the cultural and political moment of this time. He notes the sense of a neo-classical age emerging, including the trend of public writers utilizing names of ancient republican heroes, and other classical references alluded to by prominent members of society. This is useful to the reader, as it reveals the way politics and culture were so overlapped and intertwined; indeed, that politics and culture were to some degree one and the same in eighteenth century America.
Perhaps the most valuable aspects of this work in the first half, is Wood’s analysis of the evolution of legislative powers among Americans through this era. This is also true of the evolution in thinking of what embodies executive powers and the judiciary, but Wood demonstrates that executive and judicial powers evolved more or less as a result of the evolution in thinking regarding the role of the legislature. Wood skillfully demonstrates that legislative powers were, as a consequence of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the emergence of a dominant English Parliament, virtually a catch-all for government power. It is in this that one can begin to recognize the growing demarcation between English and American thought regarding the proper role of Parliament. The English saw no real limits on Parliamentary power, while Americans did. This divergence in ideology only grew throughout the revolutionary period and underscored further the difference in how both viewed the concept of representation. Wood notes that the British saw no essential difference between the people and their representatives while Americans believed more and more that the people and their representatives were not one and the same. This discrepancy helps to explain some of the ideological tension between the Americans and the English. It also helped to define something new and unique in American political thought, inspired by philosophical writings like Cato’s Letters in the mid-eighteenth century: what may be good for the people may not be good for the government, and vice versa.
American political thought found its defining quality in this idea that governmental motivating interests and the interests of the people may not only be out of step with each other; they may well be diametrically opposed. Representation, thus, does not necessarily erase those differing motivations. This was a decidedly non-English way of viewing government, the English Parliament specifically, and contributed to the collapse of relations between the colonies and the motherland. It is this detail, above all, that Wood examines in the first half of The Creation of the American Republic that makes this work so compelling for those interested in the intellectual underpinnings of the American Revolution.
Some of Wood’s prose in his other works can be very dry. This is not the case with this book. That said, I found the first hundred pages or so less interesting than the two hundred that followed. Overall, the first half of The Creation of the American Republic is a great work of early American intellectual and cultural history. The avoidance to take on Locke directly seems like a mistake and a way to avoid his profound influence. However, by deciding to give Locke merely an occasional honorable mention, it allows Wood the space to demonstrate the tremendous impact civic virtue and other aspects of classical republicanism had upon Americans in the late-colonial and revolutionary periods. This combined with Wood’s ability to point to a specific difference in intellectual thought between Americans and the English, and note its profound implications, makes The Creation of the American Republic a must-read for scholars of the revolutionary era. The next installment of the book review series will analyze the second half of this monumental work of American history.
[End of Part One]
[James M. Masnov is a writer, historian, and lecturer. His book, History Killers and Other Essays by an Intellectual Historian, is available here.]