How radical was the American Revolution?

There is no way to definitively answer this question,
which has been at the heart of historical debate about the Revolution for many years
now, and historians by no means agree on its answer. Historians at the beginning of the
twentieth century tended to view the Revolution as a profoundly conservative affair,
focusing on the economic interests of elites and the efforts they made to contain any
potentially radical reforms. According to Carl Becker, one the preeminent Revolutionary
historians of the period, the Revolution was about two things, "home rule" and "who
would rule at home." Later historians rejected this class-based analysis, but still
noted what they saw as an ideological consensus among elites, who fought to preserve
their rights, not to create any sort of new society. A later generation of social
historians, beginning in the 1960s and 70s, point out the many ways in which the
Revolution failed to live up to its rhetoric. The most famous recent book on the topic,
The Radicalism of the American Revolution, by Gordon Wood, argues that the revolution,
while limited in its goals, unintentionally unleashed radical democratic ideals, which
took root despite the Founders' fears of democracy. Other historians have focused on the
Revolution from the "bottom up," showing that it involved the actions of urban crowds,
agrarian radials, women, Native Americans, and slaves, who played a role in pushing the
events of the revolution along and altering them to fit their circumstances. Most
historians would now allow that because of the changes it set in motion, albeit against
the wishes of many elites, that the Revolution was, in its way,
radical.