From the back cover:
This is a book about the aging of the "young men of 1776," the men who came to adulthood with the Revolution, found their identity merged with the new republic they had created, and grew old as the nation matured. History was their tutor, says Peter Hoffer the study of the past, the probing of notable events, the exploration of earlier lessons. It was also the measure of their achievement. As they identified themselves with their nation's past, so they used that past to judge their own lives and what they had accomplished, or failed to accomplish.
Revolution and Regeneration is a marriage of psychohistory and intellectual history, applying the principles of the psychology of maturation to a generation whose experiences were crucial to our history – the generation of Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Madison. What does the psychology of Erik Erikson and his fol- lowers tell us about the "generation of 1776"? For one thing, says the author, we discover that as young men their need for identity, for a place in the adult world, drove them to demand independence for themselves and their communities long before older revolutionaries reached the same conclusion.
Hoffer argues that in the next stage of the life cycle they constructed a constitutionalism out of their own search for domestic intimacy, harmony, and order. In the following decade, maturing into fathers of the new nation, they fashioned political par- ties to pass on their conceptions of order and liberty to a new generation. Finally, in old age, they used history to express their fear that their lives had fallen short of their own goals, that the past, once their tool, would now engulf them.
Revolution and Regeneration is a bold and imaginative book that is certain to provoke further discussion.
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