The American Revolution and Declaration of Independence, it has often been argued, were fueled by the most radical of all American political ideas.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
The American Revolution was, in fact, a battle against the philosophy of Locke and the English utilitarians.
Many of us came away from our youth thinking that the story of the Revolution was that the Americans were patriots fighting the oppressive British. It was kind of good versus evil, liberty versus tyranny. When you get into it, you find that it was much more complicated.
What was the American Revolution? The people who joined to carry it out had different views of what they had done.
Quite naturally, the men who led in stirring up the revolt against Great Britain and in keeping the fighting temper of the Revolutionists at the proper heat were the boldest and most radical thinkers - men like Samuel Adams, Thomas Paine, Patrick Henry, and Thomas Jefferson.
Every time there's a revolution, it comes from somebody reading a book about revolution. David Walker wrote a book and Nat Turner did his thing.
Revolution did not necessarily involve sanguinary strife. It was not a cult of bomb and pistol. They may sometimes be mere means for its achievement.
Radical thought has inspired many of the great political and social reform movements in American history, from ending slavery to establishing the minimum wage.
Methods of thought which claim to give the lead to our world in the name of revolution have become, in reality, ideologies of consent and not of rebellion.
Therefore, our fight must primarily be a political mass struggle with revolutionary goals.
Georgian England was very radical; there were all these new revolutionary ideas, and I think women had more freedom than they did later on.