Isaacson's vivid and readable narrative gives a clear account of Franklin's scientific work, of his extraordinary career as a social innovator, of his labors as a diplomat and statesman, and of the vagaries of his love life. Animated by pride in "American idealism" and "the most successful [constitution] ever written," Isaacson's warm and various book furnishes a portrait that chimes with the recent tidal wave of national feeling. It is given shape and direction by its close attention to the growth of a dynamic civil society, which supplied the wind in Franklin's sails.

Edmund S. Morgan, the doyen of colonial historians, has written a biographical essay on Franklin, largely based on his writings, including his voluminous correspondence. Morgan's book, at only about half the length of Isaacson's, does not attempt the same sort of comprehensive treatment of Franklin's life, but it is sometimes better attuned to historical context, and achieves truer perspective on some vital topics. Where Isaacson too readily assumes that Franklin shares our understanding of democracy, Morgan stresses his considerable attachment to the assumptions of eighteenth-century English gentlemen on both sides of the Atlantic, including their great distrust of direct action by "the mob." In the 1760s such attachments led Franklin into taking stands, notably his initial support of the Stamp Act, that he would later see as contrary to American ideals and interests.

Of course, Franklin was a gentleman with a difference. While happy to mingle with aristocracy and royalty, he retained pride in his middling origins, claiming that the name Franklin itself echoed the status of his long line of freeholding ancestors. This much respect for tradition in no way inhibited his extraordinary gift for social innovation, as he founded newspapers, self-help societies, debating clubs, lending libraries, firefighting organizations and colleges. More than a century of development, combined with metropolitan neglect, had brought the North American colonies to the point where there was great pent-up need for such institutions of civil society. As the most successful colonial printer and publisher, Franklin was well-placed to take the initiative, illustrating Benedict Anderson's point about the powerful role of "print capitalism" in the birth of a new horizon of social identity.

Belying his self-portrait as someone obsessed with money and grudging with his time, Franklin often threw himself into these projects with little thought of gain. Likewise, Isaacson reminds us, he never sought to capitalize on his numerous technical inventions, including the famous lightning conductor, by taking out a patent.

Isaacson sees Franklin's scientific genius as essentially pragmatic. Obviously he was not a grand theorist. But neither did he proceed by pragmatic induction and common sense. His account of electricity--of positive and negative charges, of batteries and conductors--was a theoretical system, and he even left it to French experimenters to make the first test of his device for snatching electricity from lightning. His penchant for the counterintuitive was shown in his explanation of why "northeasterlies" actually came from the southwest.

Franklin's social initiatives also had an experimental quality. He was not a great orator and often shied away from the limelight. Instead, using one of his pseudonyms, he would propose some new measure and then lobby behind the scenes for others to make it their own. His keen sense of how society might be transformed for the better was vindicated time after time and helped to remove the social prejudices that blinkered other gentlemen-philosophes. Thus when he proposed a militia for Philadelphia he insisted that officers be elected, because this was likely to promote volunteers for the new body. But he confidently predicted that the militia would express the social leadership of "we, the middling people...the tradesmen, shopkeepers and farmers of this province and city!"

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