Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different

by Gordon S. Wood Narrated by Scott Brick

Overview

In this brilliantly illuminating group portrait of the men who came to be known as the Founding Fathers, the incomparable Gordon Wood has written a book that seriously asks, ?What made these men great???and shows us, among many other things, just how much character did in fact matter. The life of each?Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, Hamilton, Madison, Paine?is presented individually as well as collectively, but the thread that binds these portraits together is the idea of character as a lived reality. They were members of the first generation in history that was self-consciously self-made?men who understood that the arc of lives, as of nations, is one of moral progress.

Editorial Reviews

What explains the resurgence of interest in America's Founding Fathers? According to Pulitzer and Bancroft Prize winner Gordon S. Wood, part of the answer resides in our own yearning for disinterested leadership. The ten essays of Revolutionary Characters suggest, however, that the first generation of American leaders shared an 18th-century moral sense that would be impossible to replicate. Though sometimes irreconcilably dissimilar, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, and their peers saw themselves as comprising the world's first true meritocracy.

The Washington Post Book World

Elegant ... absorbing ... from one of our leading scholars of the American Revolution.

Michiko Kakutani

Shrewdly argued ... powerful.
— The New York Times

Jon Meacham

Illuminating ... poignant.
— The New York Times Book Review

The Weekly Standard

If we can't turn back the clock, at least we can enjoy a master historian's refreshing reassessment of seven men whose legacies live on.... It has the integrity and, yes, the eccentricity of the Founders it celebrates.

The Philadelphia Inquirer

Of those writing about the founding fathers, [Gordon Wood] is quite simply the best.

Robert Middlekauff

At several points in this volume, most notably the essays on Washington and the epilogue, Wood argues that the founders contributed unwittingly to a democratic and egalitarian society that they never wanted. This is another point in favor of the history Wood provides in this splendid collection: He relates what he would have us believe, explains much of what was done and leaves us with an ironical appreciation of the founders' achievement.
— The Washington Post

Kirkus Reviews

In this collection, Pulitzer Prize-winner Wood (History/Brown Univ.; The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin, 2004, etc.) elegantly examines the meaning of the Founding Fathers for our time and-an infinitely harder thing to discern-for their own. Obsessed with race, class and gender, today's historians are often more intent on dehumanizing rather than simply debunking, the Founders, Wood notes. Without losing sight of the revolutionaries' often significant faults, he offers a welcome, if ironic, reminder of one of their lasting achievements: creating an egalitarian polity that had no place for aristocrats like themselves again. His meditations on the Founders' relationship to the Enlightenment and the creation of American public opinion bracket profiles of six revolutionaries who have entered the American pantheon and two (Thomas Paine and Aaron Burr) who have not. The author typically begins by discussing how different generations viewed a particular figure, then attempting to ferret out the reasons for that revolutionary's conduct. For instance, he shows that Benjamin Franklin's image as folksy self-made American is at odds with the Philadelphian's pre-revolutionary desire to become a gentleman in London. Above all, the Founders adhered to a "classical ideal of disinterested leadership" that fit their notions of character. This ideal suited a meritocracy such as their own, which broke with the English tradition of a corrupt hereditary aristocracy, but it was out of place in a rapidly evolving America that thrust obscure ordinary men into power. Wood explains his figures and their times in fresh ways, noting, for example, how Madison's frustrations in the Virginia legislature inspiredhim to curb state power at the Constitutional Convention, and why the Democratic-Republican opposition to the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 fostered the notion of truth as "the creation of many voices and many minds."Bracing, clear-eyed perspectives on why we are unlikely to see such a politically creative period again.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171990343
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	05/18/2006
Edition description:	Unabridged

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