I have said so before, and am now obliged to say it again. I think the attribution of this position to me, which has been going on since the appearance of The Machiavellian Moment in 1975, is based on a persistent misunderstanding of what I then wrote. I am supposed to have denied this by emphasizing his concern for agrarian values and his terror of a system of government based on the financing of a national debt. Wood repeats the decades-old charge that I riveted on American history a “republican synthesis” from which Appleby “almost single-handedly” rescued Jefferson by emphasizing his immersion in an ethos of liberal capitalism, entrepreneurial and democratic. In his review of Joyce Appleby’s Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans, Gordon S. After a quarter of a century, I should like to be free of the role of straw man to the American historical profession, which I did not seek and do not think I have deserved.
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