The Commodification of Revolution

Much of the argued ideology was based on ideologies originally from England.  Many writers in this revolutionary time wanted only to preserve the rights that every Englishman was granted by the constitution of 1688.*  This leads many historians to see the American Revolution as less a revolution than a conservative movement fought in the name of an already existing status quo as the, pushing the Revolution back to its pre-20^th century standing.  “Revolution was an ideological, constitutional, political struggle and not primarily a controversy between social groups undertaken to force changes in the organization of the society or the economy.”**  “The colonists were content to celebrate the wonderful balance of forces they understood to exist in England, and to assume that in some effective way the same principles operated both in epitome within each colony and in the over-all world of the empire as well.”***

* Merrill D. Peterson, The Jefferson Image in the American Mind, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), 165-166

** Bailyn, x-xi.

*** Ibid., 75-6.

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