Introduction

DURING the late eighteenth-century political thinkers and actors engaged actively with the idea of equality. In the essays that follow, drawn from the American Political Cultures Forum, an event co-convened by the Quarterly and the Massachusetts Historical Society last September, Professors Gordon S. Wood and Wim Klooster explore some of the ways revolutionaries in Revolutionary America and France implemented ideas about equality, political and economic. Wood compares the connection between property, especially landed property, and political power in the pre-Revolutionary period with the post-war early republic—when, he argues, elected officials severed the ancient régime connection between property and office-holding. As the “founding father” George Mason put it in Virginia's 1776 Declaration of Rights: “no man, or set of men, is entitled to exclusive or separate emoluments or privileges from the community, but in consideration of public services, which, nor being descendible, neither ought the offices of magistrate, legislator, or judge...