The Political Theory of the American Revolution: Changing Interpretations

Abstract

produce in America a single important treatise on political theory. Men like Franklin and Jefferson, universal in their interests, active and spectacularly successful in developing institutions, were not fertile as political philosophers.' Revolutionary Americans were nonideological, because a revolutionary ideology seemed unnecessary. Indeed the Revolution, according to Boorstin, was not a real revolution at all, but only an act of separation from the old British Empire, and Americans