Subtitle
What Made the Founders Different
Author
Gordon S. Wood
Full Title
Revolutionary Characters - What Made the Founders Different
Genre
History
Page Count
344
Pages Read
344
Progress
●●●●●●●●●● Read
Reading Status
Read
Rating
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Read Dates
Mar 9, 2026 → Mar 12, 2026
ISBN_10
1594200939
ISBN_13
9781594200939
Notes, Highlights & Quotes
“To be a gentleman was to think and act like a gentleman, nothing more, an immensely radical belief with implications that few foresaw. It meant being reasonable, tolerant, honest, virtuous, and “candid,” an important eighteenth-century characteristic that connoted being unbiased and just as well as frank and sincere.”“In the eighteenth-century Anglo-American world gentlemen believed that only independent individuals, free of interested ties and paid by no masters, could practice such virtue. It was thought that those who had occupations and had to work strenuously for a living lacked the leisure for virtuous public leadership. In the ideal polity, Aristotle had written thousands of years earlier, "the citizens must not live a mechanical or commercial life. Such a life is not noble, and it militates against virtue." For Aristotle not even agricultural workers could be citizens. For men "must have leisure to develop their virtue and for the activities of a citizen."Over several millennia this ancient ideal had lost much of its potency, but some of it lingered even into the eighteenth century. Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations (1776) thought that ordinary people in a modern complicated commercial society were too engaged in their occupations and the making of money to be able to make impartial judgments about the varied interests and occupations of their society. Only "those few, who being attached to no particular occupation themselves," said Smith, "have leisure and inclination to examine the occupations of other people.”“Whatever their fathers were, however, gentlemen could not themselves be husbandmen, mechanics, or laborers – that is, men who worked for a living with their hands.”