Gordon Wood and Alfred Young are two of the most venerable elder statesmen in the field of the early American republic and its founding. But the ways they write the history of that period, and their approaches to the purpose of writing it, could hardly be more different. In these books, each man effectively offers a summary and apologia of his own life's work. The reader of both, then, is faced with a somewhat disturbing image: two wings of a historical field almost totally divorced from each other.

The Idea of America is a collection of essays and lectures that covers the span of Wood's career. These are not arranged chronologically, so placing them in historiographical context relies on the laconic “afterword” that follows each “chapter.” Wood has also written a significant introduction, much in the vein of the 1998 preface to The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787, which reflected on the impact and afterlife of the book and its arguments. What is most striking in these portions of The Idea of America is Wood's insistence that he has tried to transcend the very chasm that most deeply marks the field, between intellectual and social history.

That transcendence was indeed the intention of Wood's very first article, “Rhetoric and Reality in the American Revolution,” which also appears first in this volume. Published in 1966, a year before his mentor Bernard Bailyn repackaged his own hugely influential intellectual interpretation as The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Wood's essay made a powerful case for the role of ideas as social and political signifiers. Rhetoric “was never detached from social and political reality,” he wrote, “and indeed it becomes the best entry into an understanding of that reality” (52). So what became of this bold methodological vision?

It would be unfair to judge the answer on the basis of this aptly titled book, for the impression it creates is one of frustration. Frustration that, as he writes, “Rhetoric and Reality” “seems to have had very little influence on the historical profession” (53), and indeed that his own work has so often “contributed its share” (53) to the apparent consolidation of intellectual history and the exclusion of the social. Wood repeats the damning judgement he pronounced on the “so-called republican synthesis” as early as 1989, “a monster that threatened to devour us all” (53).Footnote ¹ Indeed, the defence and elaboration of his thesis about republican ideas and their relation to liberalism has been the consistent refrain of Wood's work.

In The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992), and then in Empire of Liberty (2009), Wood did indeed come somewhere close to his promise of 1966: a social and political history done through ideas. Unfortunately, The Idea of America gives us much less of Wood the innovative social–intellectual historian, and much more of Wood the eminent professor and public lecturer. “Of course,” he writes in the conclusion, “we Americans have vaguely known all along that we are peculiarly dedicated to intellectual principles” (321), principles like “our devotion to liberty and equality, our abhorrence of privilege” (334). It would be reasonable to wonder, at this point, if we are reading a historian at all.

Alfred Young's eminence comes in a quite different style. In Whose American Revolution Was It? he writes, “I had begun my exploration of the Revolution in the grim 1950s … When I set out to explore mechanics [i.e. urban industrial workers] more extensively, I was impressed by the power of the scholarship by [Staughton] Lynd and [Jesse] Lemisch, who became fellow explorers” (96). His signal contributions to the study of the founding have not been synthetic or interpretive works, but two edited volumes, The American Revolution (1976) and its sequel, Beyond the American Revolution (1993), the former of which was considered “the most important book on the Revolution yet produced by historians of the New Left” (96).

Whose American Revolution Was It? is not a career-spanning collection like Wood's. Instead it is made up of two historiographical essays, the first by Young and the second by Gregory Nobles. While Young's essay was written in 1995, and surveys the history of writing on the Revolution since the early twentieth century, Nobles picks up the story where Young leaves off, and takes it up to the present. At times the two essays read like a bibliographical catalogue. But they do express a particular interpretive and methodological stance, especially if we read in the silences as well. Young and Nobles want to demonstrate, in short, the triumph of social history.

The account of early twentieth-century historiography Young offers is largely a familiar one, which Wood also rehearses: Progressives concerned with conflict, interests, and democratization in the 1920s–1940s, followed by Consensus historians of the 1950s and 1960s, reacting against both the claims of their forebears and the threat of Soviet Communism. Yet Young takes an unorthodox starting point, which gives his story an interesting twist. Not Charles Beard, but Frederick Jameson is the standard against which Young measures subsequent writers, which means that not economic but social forces are taken to be the crucial category of analysis.

Jameson's 1926 book, The American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement, offered the thesis that the Revolution “could not be confined” to its original political goals, that “social aspirations were set free by the political struggle, [and] many aspects of colonial society profoundly altered by the forces thus let loose” (quoted at 16). There is a sense in which precisely this thesis is the theme of Gordon Wood's later books, Radicalism and Empire of Liberty, and Young indeed gives several pages at the end of his essay to a critical reading of Wood. The 1992 book, he writes, “rattled Jameson's dry bones” (124), yet it was ultimately “a synthesis so protective of the achievements of equality that it seems unwilling to come to grips with inequality” (130).

The real standard-bearer for the kind of history Young admires, whose influence colours the whole of Nobles's follow-up essay, is Wood's contemporary Gary Nash. “Nash has produced the largest and most multifaceted body of scholarship on the era of the Revolution of any scholar in the new social history” (118). It was only to be lamented that he had written no overarching synthesis. That was until 2005, and The Unknown American Revolution, which, as Nobles writes, “tracked the many parallel strands of radical struggle taking place between the 1760s and 1785,” underscoring both “the significance of social conflict that suffused the Revolutionary era” and “the compromised nature of the revolutionary settlement” (261).

It is a testament to the success of the new social history as a whole, and of course to the continuing failure of the American political settlement, that it is easy to guess the strands of discontent picked out by Nash, and surveyed by Nobles. Race, class, and gender are now centre stage, as far as these historians are concerned.Footnote ² Slaves and freedmen, Native Americans, women of all backgrounds, artisans, sailors, the urban and rural poor have been gradually integrated into the history of the Revolution since the innovations of the New Left, Alfred Young among them, in the late 1960s.

Nobles offers only one alternative trend to this “increasingly inclusive view of American society” (136) – the phenomenon of “Founders’ Chic,” epitomized by books like David McCullough's John Adams (2008) and its attendant TV miniseries. But this is an easy target, which does not justify the exclusion of important recent work in the political and intellectual history of the founding, like Max Edling's A Revolution in Favor of Government (2003), David Hendrickson's Peace Pact: The Lost World of the American Founding (2003), or Douglas Bradburn's Citizenship Revolution (2009). There is still vital and relevant history to be done in this period which does not follow Frederick Jameson's lead.Footnote ³

There is also a more subtle difficulty in Young and Nobles's approach. Whereas Gordon Wood has always written in an ironic and paradoxical mode, like Tocqueville both celebrating and lamenting the rise of capitalist democracy, the emphasis of social historians on the left has been on the positive agency of ordinary and marginal actors. They have sought, like E. P. Thompson (and like Howard Zinn), to rescue “the common people from ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’” (80) by drawing out and playing up the deeds of heroic radicals.

But a historical perspective on such acts of resistance underscores the strength of structures of domination, including capitalist democracy itself. In the end, this emphasis on agency keeps radicals on the margins, struggling against a monolithic system of which neither they nor we have much understanding. An alternative for politically engaged scholarship would be a renewed attempt to analyse structure and its contradictions. For this, we would need not Jameson, but Charles Beard; not social history, but a historical political economy.