<i>The Royalist Revolution: Monarchy and the American Founding</i>, by Eric Nelson
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Royalist Revolution: Monarchy and American Founding, by Eric Nelson. Cambridge, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014. 390 pp. $29.95 US (cloth). Eric Nelson's new book is a controversial analysis of American founding. Far from being a revolt against repeated injuries and usurpations of royal power as stated in Declaration of Independence, American rebellion was a revolt in favour of royal government, driven by conviction that parliament had usurped just prerogatives of crown. Those attuned to history of American Revolution will be struck by significance of this claim. While intellectual origins of Revolution have long been subject of controversy--from Lockean liberalism of Hartz, to turn of Bailyn, Pocock, and Wood, to neo-liberalism of Appleby--few have gone so far as to suggest as a progenitor of movement. There is much to commend Nelson's intellectual revisionism. What Nelson terms royalism was a significant strand of thought and framed how many colonists understood imperial crisis. They saw in George III an executive capable of offering them protection from tyranny of parliament and imagined that he would listen to their pleas for redress. The king's rejection of colonial petitions turned Americans toward republicanism in 1776. Nelson takes his argument into era of constitution to explain why, despite their disappointments in 1775, revolutionaries kept faith with a powerful executive and saw independent prerogative powers as a crucial check to legislative tyranny. The modern--albeit circumscribed--presidential veto can be interpreted as a reflection of patriot royalism. For Nelson, 1787 Constitution was not a counterrevolution against radicalism of 1775-76; but nor was it a radical experiment in popular sovereignty. It was product of ideological consistency and inherent of Revolution: the Constitution ... upheld spirit of '75 (p. 185). The book's greatest achievement is to counter triumphalist reading of revolutionary values that have come to be described as republican synthesis. In Nelson's interpretation, revolutionary Americans were not as radical as we once thought. They wanted to turn back clock on British constitution and, far from being harbingers of modern age, were profoundly at odds with constitutional evolutions in eighteenth-century Britain. He reminds us that American Revolution was not first of modern revolutions but last of early modern revolutions. But Nelson stops short of endorsing conservative revolution theory favoured by those on modern American right and contextualizes revolutionary ideology as very much a product of its time and place. In entirely reconstructing our history of origins of Revolution, however, there are issues with this book. Nelson states that patriot was not coterminous with American Revolution as a whole (p. 9) and that he is only describing one strand of thought. One gets sense that this statement is a reaction to criticisms Nelson received in a William and Mary Quarterly roundtable in 2011 than it is a genuine statement of his reservations. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".