Social Reproduction in the Critical Period

Social reproduction is what keeps things the same as time passes, reproducing the same social conditions each instant and for each person. It is both passive - in other words, inertia - and active - dominant forces interested in the status quo have methods of maintaining it. People seeking social transformation, of whatever kind, must be to break down the process of social reproduction: which, in simple terms, is what anarchists want to do when they 'smash the state.'

I was reading this stuff in a book today, and wondering how it might apply to Federalists is 1780s America. The first question is, were they changing or maintaining the existing social conditions? Not easy to answer. It appears to me that historians aren't so much divided from each other on this question, but contradictory within themselves: to take Gordon Wood for example, his thesis in Creation seems to be both that the social structure of America was truly transformed in 1776 and that the Federalists were defending their elite position in 1787. In other words the situation is one of counter-revolution.

There is probably a theoretical literature on social reproduction during the process of revolution; here is my guess what it says: before the revolution has been fully accomplished, some elements of the machinery of social reproduction remain in the hands of the enemy (perhaps indeed the definition of full accomplishment would be full control of these mechanisms), so there are countervailing forces at work. Society is in flux. Now the American Revolution is complex because there are different, competing elites: the British, for one, and then the competing American elites. Therefore, a question for research: which mechanisms of social reproduction were controlled by which groups, and at which times? How, if at all, did they change hands?