ABSTRACT

Gordon Wood charted a clear trajectory from monarchy to republicanism to democracy in the period, beginning with the revolt against colonial authority and through the rapid democratization of American society and politics in the postrevolutionary period. The republican theory seems to take us well beyond not only the somewhat conservative constitutional arguments but also the most radical arguments based on John Locke. Gordon Wood argued accordingly that the American Revolution was not simply an anticolonial rebellion; it was much more—an effort at moral regeneration, one having great psychological and sociological significance. It is important to understand the Revolution as only the first phase of a very complex process of nation-building or, perhaps more accurately, placing a new political order on the old colonial foundations. That process can be viewed as part of the continuing dialectic between liberalism and republicanism.