The Realistic Revolution Redeemed

John Ferling. A Leap in the Dark: The Struggle to Create the American Republic . New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. 558 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, and index. $30.00.

People often ask what is the best one volume history of the American Revolution. I still clutch at the question after twenty-five years of reading about eighteenth-century Anglo-America and two decades of teaching an undergraduate course and graduate colloquiums on the subject. There are many good books, and some that are brilliant, but each covers aspects of what is a sprawling subject without a clear beginning or end. Each necessarily represents a perspective rather than the definitive synthesis of "facts" that those who are not historians, and some who are, naively expect. All are products of their times, reflecting the fears, ambitions, and contestations of culture through which Americans read the Revolution.

There are intellectual histories of the Revolution, comprehensive military histories, ever so many biographies, books about texts—pamphlets, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution—, about ideology, and about politics—high and popular. There are various beginnings—1754, 1763, or long-term social, cultural, religious, and ideological contexts reaching back as far as 1650 and across the Atlantic—and a number of logical ends—1783, 1787, 1789, 1801, 1815, 1840, or the Civil War. Well, I respond indecisively, do you want to read a military, political, intellectual, social, economic, or cultural history? Are you more interested in the Revolution's beginning or end? Do you want a patriotic book that celebrates and/or deifies the Founding Fathers, or would you prefer one that is cynical about politics and politicians and rails against the social injustices of the times? Do you like your history from the top down or the bottom up? Take your pick, but do not expect it all from any one author or book.

The principal fault-line of the Revolution's historiography is an old one between two visions that are often called Realist/Idealist or Neo-Progressive/Neo-Whig. In the past twenty-five years historians have breached this divide by bridging it or ignoring it. Indeed, the most creative recent work on the Revolution is not political, social, economic, or intellectual history at all, but is inspired by cultural anthropology, literary criticism, social theory, gender studies, ethno-history, the history of medicine, religion, slavery, and the narrative arts. Since the passing of Francis Jennings, who went out in a blaze of rage against the Founding Fathers, Realism shines less brightly, although a handful of able heirs keep the torch lit. Idealists remain prolific, writing traditional intellectual history with disregard for the work of other historians published during the past half century. ¹

As a result, the stark alternatives persist in the face of changing fashion, new insights, and creative approaches because there is an audience for them, because they reflect ideological and personality differences among historians, and because historians are not really in dialogue with each other. Idealists assert that there were no significant social or economic causes, narrowly construed, of the Revolution, which they believe means that society and economy are irrelevant to the story, and that the Revolutionary movement was a triumph of brilliant ideas and political geniuses against less bright and talented politicians who were less successful in exploiting the popular will.

The Idealists' Revolution is a history of ideas, the central debates among them being whether the Founding Fathers were liberals or republicans. The quest for a hegemonic eighteenth-century ideology has failed, non-combatants agree, and the stark alternatives are now supplanted by subtler categories representing half a dozen or more value systems. The Idealists' Revolution is always top down, meaning that the Founding Fathers led the Revolutionary movement as Idealists explain it. ²

The Realists' Revolution is sometimes bottom up, meaning that, according to these historians, popular unrest generated the movement to which elites responded or, at least, that people acted in their own...