| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different. By Gordon S. Wood. (New York: Penguin, 2006. xiv, 321 pp. Paper, $16.00, ISBN 978-0-14-311208-2.)

It has taken Gordon S. Wood nearly forty years to assemble his cast of "revolutionary characters" and place them all onto the stage of the republican synthesis he helped create. These essays have been published independently elsewhere and revised for this volume. There is little new aside from the introduction, which asserts that the founders "unleashed ... egalitarian forces" that prevented the "character" they embodied from being reproduced in the nation they created (p. 26). In that sense, they became truly "revolutionary characters," with goals and ideals informed by the Enlightenment, empowered by republicanism, but ultimately impeded by egalitarianism.

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