
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, May 3, 1993                   TAG: 9305030283
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

GORDON WOOD

THE TITLE of Gordon S. Wood's Pulitzer-winning book, "The Radicalism of the American Revolution" (Alfred A. Knopf; just reissued in paper by Vintage) is also its theme. The theme resonates in the post-industrial America of the late 20th century, more than 200 years after the event of which Wood writes.

The radicalism of the American Revolution, Wood argues, lay in its fundamental alteration of how Americans perceived themselves and each other. No longer subjects of the crown, Americans saw themselves as citizens: partners and co-players in the tiny seaboard republic that was to become a continental power.

The conservatism of the American Revolution has been oft remarked. If it were genuinely radical, where the violent class conflict, the overnight overthrow of the established social and economic order, the abolition of slavery and the establishment of equal rights for women?

Answer No. 1: Don't interpret the 18th century as if it were the 20th. While neither abolishing slavery nor establishing equal rights for women, the Revolution popularized the egalitarian ideology that eventually fueled abolitionism and women's-rights struggles.

Answer No. 2: Don't be blinded by the limited, and limiting, definitions that were applied during the industrial era to terms like "radical" and "revolutionary."

The change wrought by the American Revolution was political, because politics was central to 18th-century life. When the industrial era arrived, "radical" change came to mean only social and economic upheaval, not political. (Indeed, Marxist radicalism foresaw the withering away of the state.) And workers' chains couldn't be smashed without using force.

Yet the collapse of Soviet communism and the liberation of Eastern Europe has shown the bankruptcy of Marxist notions that only the class struggle matters, that economic power alone rules the world, that the politics of the civic forum is of no account.

A new economic and diplomatic world order struggles to be born. The old industrial order, to which Marxism was a response, is undergoing an emphatically non-Marxist - but radically revolutionary nonetheless - transformation of its own.

Ever more sophisticated machinery makes traditional factory labor obsolete. The computer acts as liberator. Not socialists but profit-seeking businessmen make worker empowerment a catch-phrase.

A return to the world of the American Revolution? Of course not. But just maybe a return to the ideas and ideals of the republican Revolution, and an appreciation for how radical the notion of egalitarian citizenship can be.

by CNB