Gordon Wood e a Originalidade Americana

Excelente artigo sobre o historiador Gordon Wood:
Wood rejected all of these approaches. He went deep into primary materials and made an open-minded effort to understand the language and thought of 18th-century Americans in their own terms. After 10 years of research he reported his results, first in a short essay reprinted in this collection, then in the 1969 book “The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787.” Leading his readers into the ­sources, Wood demonstrated that Americans in those years invented “not simply new forms of government, but an entirely new conception of politics.” They rejected ancient and medieval ideas of a polity as a set of orders or estates. In their place they created a model of a state that existed to represent individual interests, and to protect individual rights. To those ends, Americans invented radically new ideas of representation, and new models for the “parceling of power.” Wood also made another discovery: This revolutionary way of thinking did not derive from small elites or large treatises. He wrote that it was “not delineated in a single book; it was peculiarly the product of a democratic society.” In newspapers and pamphlets he found evidence that Americans of all conditions joined this great debate — men like William Findley, a weaver and farmer in Pennsylvania, and William Thompson, a tavern keeper in South Carolina. To all this, Wood added a third finding. From the start, this new way of thinking was consciously conceived as an open process. Wood quoted Samuel Williams, a country clergyman in Vermont, who observed in 1794 that the American system “contains within itself the means of its own improvement.” It created a process of permanent reform that proved more durable than Trotsky’s permanent revolution.