| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Andrew Shankman. Crucible of American Democracy: The Struggle to Fuse Egalitarianism and Capitalism in Jeffersonian Pennsylvania. (American Political Thought.) Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. 2004. Pp. xii, 298. $34.95.

Some questions just never go away—and rightly so. To many historians trained in the "consensus school" of the 1950s, capitalism and democracy were two sides of the same coin. Many subsequent scholars, rejecting that premise, nevertheless have sought to explain how the two became fused. Prominent among them have been Joyce O. Appleby and Gordon S. Wood, who, in their distinctive ways, traced the fusion to the revolutionary period and its aftermath. In this important new study, Andrew Shankman acknowledges an interpretive affinity with both of them. Like Wood, he sees capitalism and democracy as twin legacies of the American Revolution, and like Appleby, he sees Jeffersonian politics as the vector of a liberal democratic tradition. But he differs from both in his explanation of how a "democratic capitalist consensus" (p. 221) emerged. It arose not from an established liberal tradition or as an outturn from the politics of the revolution, but from the political struggles of the early republic. This was a "tortured and contingent" (p. 238), even paradoxical process, in which politicians ended up with something none of them had intended to achieve.

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