Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 15 of George Will’s superb 2019 book, The Conservative Sensibility (footnote deleted; link added):

[Historian Gordon Wood] insists that the American Revolution “was as radical and as revolutionary as any in history,” but was “radical and social in a very special eighteenth-century sense.” It severed the conception of society from the conception of government. Hitherto, the assumption was that the state precedes and sustains society; America’s revolutionary idea was to reverse that formulation. What made the colonists restive, and then revolutionary, was, Wood writes, their acute sense that government was the root cause of their social grievances.

DBx: To all of my fellow Americans, Happy 4th of July!