Stability and Change in Revolutionary Pennsylvania: Banking, Politics, and Social Structure by George David Rappaport (review)

188 Canadian Review of Amencan Studies Revue canadtenne d'etudes americames lighting Americans and establishing his place in American popular culture. For him, equality not liberty was the point of the revolution. Having come to learn not teach, he acquired an experience of republican principles that laid the foundation of his lifelong political beliefs. He ;:i.lsolearned the significance of citizen armies. Lafayette's symbolic importance for Americans peaked with his return in 1824-25. Proclaiming the notion of American exceptionalism, he and Tocqueville were to give Americans the most important confirmation of their national self-image but in quite different ways. Their portraits confirmed either Americans' deepest beliefs or worst fears. Tocqueville appealed to and reflected an elite, intellectual culture; Lafayette reflected the popular one. He was the participant and symbol of a virtuous revolution that had created unique and virtuous institutions that ensured American freedom and prosperity and established a new starting point for history. This is a fascinating, well-written book, well-researched, based on copious manuscript and printed primary sources and while grounded in the recent work in cultural history, it wears its learning lightly and is remarkably free of jargon. Its approach to Lafayette as a mirror rather than as a manipulator of trends and forces is appropriate and his concept of him as essentially a constant mediator both of people and ideas make sense of the numerous contradictions in his life: the aristocratic democrat, the republican monarchist , etc. Whether it reestablishes the reputation his contemporaries saw is an other matter. Lafayette is writing his own text and this can be read in other contexts and, as a police spy noted, he had an "unquenchable thirst for public applause, [the] passion of his life11 (259). Peter]. King Carleton University George David Rappaport. Stability and Change in Revolutionary Pennsylvania: Banking, Politics, and Social Structure. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996. Pp. xix + 276 with appendices, bibliography, and index. One of the major debates that has shaped the writing of early American history over the past three decades is that over the relative modernity of colonial, revolutionary, and early American sodety. This controversy came Book Reviews 189 to the fore with the wntmgs of the 11 republican" schools of intellectual historians, most notably represented by Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood, J.0.A. Pocock, and Lance Banning, when they challenged the view most notably expressed in Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York, 1955) that America had been born liberal. Among social and economic historians the same question gained sharp focus. Did America have a traditional past? Was capitalism offloaded with the first landing of European immigrants? If not, when did the transition to capitalism take place? Was it agrarian/localists, or commercial/cosmopolitans that dominated early American society? It is into this contested territory that George Rappaport boldly heads with a promise of a close analytical examination of the geography of early Amencan society. Focusing on Pennsylvania, a colony and state that has often been viewed as the vanguard of modern America, Professor Rappaport argues that the employment of precise social science definitions and categories lead to a somewhat different emphasis. Whether we look at the entrepreneurial facility of farmers, the scope of market activities, or the various types of social relations integral to Pennsylvania's social structure it is clear that even by the 1780s "capitalism as a social system had not yet emerged" (41). If we look at various indicators of social change we find the 11 system transformation" (61) essential to any meaningful definition of modernization was not occurring. And if we examine the types of economic, social, and political structures most closely resembling our evidence for Pennsylvania we see "a flourishing traditional society" (134). But at the same time, the situation is not quite as simple as that: "capitalism had made inroads " (223), Market-oriented behaviour did exist, alterations were taking place in the class structure and the relatively open political system served, at the very least, not to inhibit change. There was something of an "unstable balance" here between tradition and modernity, a "balance [which] would change in the direction of the dynamic, democratic, modern capitalist society that...