Revolutions in the Meaning and Study of Politics

Several recent revolutions (in the early-modern sense of the term) have brought change and cyclical rotation to the study of early American politics. New accounts of class conflict and democratization return to terrain first plowed by progressives like Carl Becker and Charles Beard a century ago. A new imperial history revisits central preoccupations of the old "imperial school," which (from the 1930s to the 1970s) sought to understand the settling of North America and the coming of the American Revolution from multiple vantage points in Europe and the Americas. New comparative studies of the Atlantic revolutions, from the US and France to Haiti and Latin America, build on the conceptual grounds of R.R. Palmer's now fifty-year-old volumes on the age of the democratic revolution. Everywhere, it seems, studies of institutional and electoral politics are back in style, necessarily transformed by those revolutions in social and cultural analysis that were designed to shift attention away from politics.¹

But the study of early American politics has also undergone three revolutions that represent novel developments rather than returns to important topics or rescaled geographies. The first is technological. Manipulation of verbal data generated by the digitization of large collections of English-language texts printed in colonial British America and the US before 1820 is transforming research on early American politics in ways that have not yet filtered into the study of later American politics, in part because later periods lack similar collections. The second is methodological. Recent collisions between the history of the book and the history of political thought have generated new understandings of political communication that have largely not yet been taken up by later Americanists, perhaps chiefly because of field asymmetries. Although early American literary scholars put a premium on nonfiction genres, later Americanists privilege imaginative writings; early Americanists concentrate on the culture of politics, whereas later Americanists concentrate on the politics of culture.²

The third revolution is ontological or categorical. It concerns what we mean by politics and it has transformed the study of both early and later American literature. The recasting of social or economic relations in political terms, the recognition of the political dimensions of cultural phenomena, the rise of studies of politics in journals of literary criticism since the 1960s are parts of a revolution that has fundamentally reshaped the objects of our attention, causing (or allowing) us to see politics everywhere. Something similar happened in the late eighteenth century, when the term "politicks" expanded in use and meaning and when ordinary people witnessed and participated in an increasing politicalization of everyday life. This revolution, fueled by democratization but distinct from it, is one of the most enduring legacies of early America, and the new technologies, methodologies, and changed assumptions about politics allow us to appreciate it better than we did or could before.

1. The Technological Revolution: Quantitative Cultural Histories

Like much of the political writing of the period, Abigail Adams's most cited letter, in which she hoped that the Congress would "Remember the Ladies" in drawing up a "new Code of Laws," is a tissue of citations to other texts. "That your Sex are Naturally Tyrannical is a Truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute," Adams wrote to her congressman and spouse John Adams in March 1776, "but such of you as wish to be happy willingly give up the harsh title of Master for the more tender and endearing one of Friend" (370). In a close reading of this letter published in 1999, historian Elaine Forman Crane noted that a nineteen-year-old in Philadelphia had written a similar phrase in her journal: "that men are generally tyrannical I will own," Nancy Shippen Livingston wrote in 1783, "but such as know how to be happy, willingly give up the harsh title of master for the more tender & endearing one of Friend" (qtd in Crane, "Political" 758). Livingston probably had not read Adams's letter, and the phrasing was too close to suppose independent genesis; no doubt these two women read the same source. Crane engaged in a five...