Revolutions in the Meaning and Study of Politics

Abstract

Several recent revolutions (in the early-modern sense of the term) have brought change and cyclical rotation to the study of early American politics. New accounts of class conflict and democratization return to terrain first plowed by progressives like Carl Becker and Charles Beard a century ago. A new imperial history revisits central preoccupations of the old “imperial school,” which (from the 1930s to the 1970s) sought to understand the settling of North America and the coming of the American Revolution from multiple vantage points in Europe and the Americas. New comparative studies of the Atlantic revolutions, from the US and France to Haiti and Latin America, build on the conceptual grounds of R.R. Palmer’s now fifty-year-old volumes on the age of the democratic revolution. Everywhere, it seems, studies of institutional and electoral politics are back in style, necessarily transformed by those revolutions in social and cultural analysis that were designed to shift attention away from politics. But the study of early American politics has also undergone three revolutions that represent novel developments rather than returns to important topics or rescaled geographies. The first is technological. Manipulation of verbal data generated by the digitization of large collections of English-language texts printed in colonial British America and the US before 1820 is transforming research on early American politics in ways that have not yet filtered into the study of later American politics, in part because later periods lack similar collections. The second is methodological. Recent collisions between the history of the book and the history of political thought have generated new understandings of political communication that have largely not yet been taken up by later