ABSTRACT
Enlightened political thought had always toyed with the idea of forming a system of government from the beginning but had never actually expected to be given the opportunity to do it. Enlightened political thought was generally reformist in spirit because the state system of Europe seemed well enough set in the political firmament. Hence Enlightenment’s search for reforming agencies in established states and its love affair with enlightened despots whose centralisation of state power seemed to offer the most obvious means of reforming existing institutions. The Americans of the revolutionary era found themselves in the position of having to take ideas about the origins of government very literally indeed, and we do well to remind ourselves that they had not chosen to put themselves in that position. Crevecoeur’s Letters From an American Farmer is the first work to attempt to define the American character, a concern which was subsequently to become something of a national obsession in the United States.
