The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
 | |
| Author | Bernard Bailyn |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | History |
| Publisher | Harvard University Press |
Publication date | 1967 |
| Pages | 242 pp. |
| ISBN | 978-0674443013 |
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution is a 1967 Pulitzer Prize-winning book of history by Bernard Bailyn. It is considered one of the most influential studies of the American Revolution published during the 20th century. The 1967 edition is often associated with Bernard Bailyn's conception of a sociopolitical "radically libertarian" realization of British Country Party ideas transmitted to the "colonies," fueling "paranoiac fears" of "power" that propelled "colonists" into revolution in a "special sense."[1]
The Logic of Rebellion[]
The book grew out of an array of works by literary scholars and historians before and after the Second World War, most notably Edmund S. Morgan and his immediate postwar studies on the consistent as well as principled "constitutional consensus" of the Stamp Act Crisis and American Revolution. During this period, in 1950, Harvard University Department of History graduate student Bernard Bailyn published a William and Mary Quarterly article on the last will and testament of seventeenth-century "man of business" Robert Keayne, a man "twisting in the confines of Puritan ethics" and trading within a "structure whose proportions, the Pilgrims were convinced, had been drawn by the hand of God."[2] Bailyn later confessed that "Perry Miller was fascinating at the time, and I became much involved in what he was doing, though in ways I don't think he entirely appreciated." For Bailyn, New England merchants of the seventeenth century such as Keayne, devoid of divisive class conceptions, contributed to the "biblical commonwealth," born from the "Augustinian strain of piety" in a cacophony of spirits that fueled the singular "New England mind."[3] The cultural memory of "Puritan spirits" in New England hastened Revolutionary sentiments and haunted congregational abolitionism.[4]
The next year, Bailyn published a review of La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l'époque de Philippe II by Fernand Braudel in the Journal of Economic History. Bailyn noted that the division of the book into three metahistorical sections precluded Braudel from setting "political events in a meaningful relationship with the other aspects of society...is there no demonstrable relationship between the general situation of the Ottoman Empire (pp. 5091-6) and the Turkish impact on Balkan society (pp. 571-76) on the one hand and the political developments of 'the last six years of the Turkish supremacy, 1559-1565' (pp. 791-856) on the other?" His central critique of Les Annales totalité de l'histoire was a theme that he returned to in subsequent reviews for intellectual history, as well as, of course, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution.[5]
Bailyn published a January 1954 William and Mary Quarterly review of the collected Blount family papers, marking his first published encounter with "merchants" during the "revolutionary period" and the notions of "radical" and "conservative" in the eighteenth century. This review also featured his first published criticism of historian Carl Becker's scholarship.
For the March 1954 New England Quarterly, Bailyn reviewed Perry Miller's The New England Mind: From Colony to Province, inaugurating his engagement with intellectual history in print. Bailyn initially praised Miller's approach to conceptions of, and jeremiads on, purported "Declension" in Puritan intellectual history. But Bailyn abruptly changed course, focusing on what he described as "the fundamental problem" of the study, namely, Miller's attempts to connect the tenacity and dissolution of Puritan ideas with changes and continuities in New England "society." Bailyn questioned the purpose of examining an extemporized "society" in the latter half of the book, when Puritan ideas had either transformed or dissipated. In Bailyn's reading, Miller had also deemphasized the roles of merchants and financiers in intellectual history: "...should we not, then, expect an account of 'the actions of merchants and men of business'? None is given..."[6] In 1994, Bailyn recollected that Miller's rejoinder engaged with one facet of the review, that "Miller was really extemporizing--that is, making up--an unwritten social history...it's just a few paragraphs, but it's a defiant, though to me elusive, defense of the autonomy and inclusiveness of intellectual history, brilliant but baffling, and complete with a few sideswipes at the statistical tables he had seen me studying for my book on shipping."[7] At the time of writing the review, Bailyn had been in the midst of revising his dissertation on New England merchants in the seventeenth century, a social history begun under Samuel Eliot Morison, ultimately shepherded by Oscar Handlin, and subsidized as well as published by the Research Center for Entrepreneurial History at Harvard University. Significantly, for these seventeenth-century traders, Bailyn argued "that there was no such thing as a 'class' in any recognizable sense. The merchants were simply a group of people who participated in trade. The social and economic range of these people defies all class definition."[8]
At the time of the publication of Bailyn's revised dissertation, the Research Center for Entrepreneurial History at Harvard University was in the throes of its own schöpferische Zerstörung revolution after the death of founder Joseph Schumpeter. Bailyn described his 1950s colleagues at the center as an "excellent group, led by Arthur Cole of the Harvard Business School. The ultimate intellectual influence behind the center was Schumpeter, and Cole had somehow collected money for research grants and publications." Cole was the long-time opponent of N.S.B. Gras, champion of a distinction between the interwoven fields of business and economic history. Bailyn also recalled that "there was a German historian of banking, a strange, eccentric, but very learned man, Fritz Redlich. When Robert Fogel's work on counterfactuals started to come out, the fullest critique of it was Fritz's, who at a dinner meeting gave a passionate attack on that whole technique. It was published in the Journal of Economic History in 1965. I recommend it." Redlich articulated the Cole faction's critique of Gras in a 1950 German periodical, shortly after a 1949 joint conference of the American Historical Association and the Business History Society in Boston. According to Robert Fredon and Sophus Reinert, Reidlich had averred that "business history in America had to be understood in two senses, one narrower and older, the other wider and newer. Narrow business history is roughly synonymous with the 'historical study of companies' (wissenschaftliche Firmengeschichtsschreibung), of the sort that had been practiced best by Richard Ehrenberg, whose 1906 study of Siemens was, for Redlich, a milestone...Redlich traced a line directly from Ehrenberg to Gras." Yet, in Redlich's account, "Gras became a catalyst for dissention and personality conflicts inside business history, which he had intentionally spun off from economic history in the early 1930s, a 'fatal detachment' that fragmented the social sciences in America further, precisely at the time when integration was needed. The 'monographic, quasi-isolating approach' of 'Gras’s School,' which labored to produce books on individual businessmen or firms, could only be defended, according to Redlich, on the grounds that not enough material had yet been collected...since Gras and his followers were unwilling even to move on to 'comparative company history,' the whole enterprise seemed interminably stalled." Of course, Redlich and the Cole faction practiced "the other kind of business history 'studying relevant problems that extend beyond the individual firm.' " This alternative "had emerged, naturally, in Redlich’s story, around Arthur Cole’s Harvard Research Center in Entrepreneurial History, officially founded in 1948 with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, and had as its focus the Schumpeterian study of innovation and, in Redlich’s words, of “Schumpeters Unternehmer (Amerikanisch: entrepreneur), mein creative entrepreneur. "
"Al Chandler was a member. He did his first book under the center's sponsorship. David Landes, Hugh Aitken, Alf Conrad (who died young but with John Meyer did some of the first studies on the profitability of slavery and in counterfactual cliometrics), Henry Rosovsky...The group in entrepreneurial history was full of ideas and projects, experimenting with all sorts of connections between history and the social sciences, and developing new ideas about business and economic history. I was very lucky in having a subsidy from them in publishing my book on the merchants."
Between 1952-54, Bailyn published two articles in the journal for the Research Center for Entrepreneurial History, Explorations in Entrepreneurial History. The first was "Hedges' Browns: Some Thoughts on New England Merchants in the Colonial Period," and the second, published two years later, was "Kinship and Trade in Seventeenth-Century New England."
An intellectual biography of Carl Becker allowed Bailyn to evaluate Becker's historiography without writing a string of reviews for separate publications. His subsequent review essay on early studies of Carl Becker and Charles McLean Andrews appeared in the December 1956 New England Quarterly.
[Research Restructuring]
Transformation[]
In 1957, Bailyn presented a paper on "Politics and Social Structure in Virginia," for a Williamsburg symposium sponsored by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. The paper, revised and published two years later, examined early seventeenth-century "settlers" in Virginia who became "struggling planters" attempting to identify "with the land and the people, ruling with increasing responsibility from eminent positions." Bailyn argued that "the fact is that with a few notable exceptions...these struggling planters of the first generation failed to perpetuate their leadership into the second generation." Between approximately 1645 and 1665, they were displaced by a second wave of "immigrants," the "younger sons of substantial families well connected in London business and governmental circles and long associated with Virginia." Absentee planter records and inherited Virginia Company shares "were now brought forward as a basis of establishment in the New World." This second wave established themselves as a landed gentry, but the appointment of royal governors resulted in a "hierarchy of position within the newly risen gentry...created by the Restoration government's efforts to extend its control over its mercantile empire." William Berkeley, for instance, selected members of gentry families—the "Green Spring" faction—to serve on his Council, cultivating a "growing distinctiveness of provincial officialdom within the landed gentry." The ensuing 1675-76 Bacon's Rebellion became a three-way conflict between the "Green Spring" landed gentry, non-"Green Spring" gentry in the House of Burgesses, and "ordinary settlers" resentful of the entire landed gentry. After 1676, kinship and intermarriage between Council gentry families and gentry in the House of Burgesses rendered the council a "social and ceremonial" institution, while the distribution of soil to all children, although precluding frequent primogeniture and entail, continued to expand the landed gentry's familial dominance over the land base in a sociopolitical "league of local oligarchs." For "ordinary settlers" and their direct descendants, "there was an acceptance of the fact that certain families were distinguished from others in riches, in dignity, and in access to political office." Offspring of the landed gentry, as they jockeyed for "material wealth" and access to formal educational institutions (not limited to the family, community, church) as the basis of sociopolitical office in the early eighteenth-century House of Burgesses, aimed to eliminate royal governors and their deputies who distinguished "social leadership" by a "natural aristocracy" from "political leadership" by royal magistrates. The former "had neither the need nor the ability to fashion a new political theory to comprehend their experience." Half a century later, a child and grandchild of these gentry offspring "would find in the writings of John Locke on state and society not merely a reasonable theoretical position but a statement of self-evident fact." The history of additional British colonies, each distinct in their trajectories, exhibited "common characteristics" to that of Virginia. The "social and political structures" that converged in colonial legislatures seemed "by European standards strangely shaped. Everywhere as the bonds of empire drew tighter the meaning of the state was changing. Herein lay the origins of a new political system."[9]
Two years later, Bernard Bailyn published (with Lotte Bailyn) Massachusetts Shipping, 1697-1714: A Statistical Study, a follow-up to his revised dissertation. The Bailyns rested their findings predominantly on entries in Massachusetts shipping registers, 1697–1714. Four observations from this statistical study proved relevant to studies of the American Revolution. First, the Bailyns substantiated their interpretation, with records from the shipping registers, of the Boston fleet not increasing in numbers because of the privateering of ships during Queen Anne's War. Instead, as "older vessels were disposed of, the overseas fleet was becoming increasingly concentrated in the Bay City," offering wartime employment opportunities to Boston sailors and shipwrights. Maritime experience later spurred Atlantic commerce and hemispheric trade after this watershed of the War of the Spanish Succession. Resource extraction, equine cross-breeding (principally for overseers), and the erosion of varieties of Native food sovereignty, all sustained this commerce. Second, the Bailyns argued that in Boston "claims to the title of merchant were extraordinarily widespread. It was an occupational designation that could be assumed easily by anyone involved in trade or maritime activity, and it was not used exclusively when adopted. This expression of occupational mobility was to a much lesser extent evident in the other Massachusetts towns." Similarly, "throughout the province the shipowning population extended far beyond the boundaries of a merchant-shipowning 'class' defined in any traditional sense. It constituted a wide social spectrum. This social span was largely composed of a broad band of small entrepreneurs for whom artisan occupations touching maritime affairs furnished access to investment and to mercantile activities that made the designation of merchant seem reasonable, at least in occasional usage. But it also included the complex reality of what has been loosely called a 'merchant aristocracy.' " This "peculiar" use of "prestige titles" suggested that within "the wide spectrum of the merchant-shipowning group there was an inner area of distinction. It lacked precise boundaries, and was defined not by institutional or legal demarcations but by an effective degree of common agreement." For the Bailyns, the implications of a self-identified "merchant aristocracy" ran deep: "...in the environment of colonial America where traditional landmarks on the social terrain were indistinct, there was already by the early eighteenth century evidence of what would become the characteristic American practice; not of giving up efforts to mark out an elite sphere but, out of necessity, of substituting voluntary, informal, vague, and highly impermanent demarcations for the more precise boundaries defined by more stable social and economic institutions." Third, the Bailyns' registers revealed that "Massachusetts people...invested in shipping based in the West Indies, the Wine Islands, Newfoundland, and Nova Scotia." Half of overseas investors in Massachusetts shipping were from the "British Isles," while "most" of the other half hailed from "addresses in the Caribbean Islands." Yet many, if not most, of the "West Indies, etc." overseas investors also listed addresses in Massachusetts townships and burgeoning cityscapes. For instance, "thirty-three of the total 142 investors...were Bostonians." Fourth, the Bailyns concluded that "there lies in the Register, finally, not merely clear evidences of a forming economy, but also the less clear signs of an emerging social order. The broadening of popular participation made affluence for many a tangible possibility. Traditional definitions of occupational role and social status weakened and blurred. The desire to set oneself apart remained, but the forms of its satisfaction were less evident and more elusive. When every petty shopkeeper could call himself merchant only to find himself joined in elevation by ropemakers, carpenters, and sailors, what dignity was there in such a designation?"[10]
Bernard Bailyn's next study on Education in the Forming of American Society began as a 1959 conference paper for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. The short book, published in 1960, has recently been described as "anti-ideological" and cited as an example of "liberal consensus" because of an underlying de-"politicizing" of educational ideas that countervailed a "social order." Additional review essays lambasted Bailyn for his apparent questioning of educational assumptions about a dearth of "cultural consensus" and his alleged preference for cultural-intellectual historians and anthropologists, rather than "professors of education" and child development, in crafting histories of education.[11] Still other historians examine crucial topics absent in Bailyn's study, from postbellum African-American schools to the "new disability history" of education. The opprobrium is not a substantive focus of this wiki.[12]
The first interpretive essay in the 1960 Education in the Forming of American Society charted the history of education during the "colonial period" and American Revolution. Early American historian Mark Peterson refers to "family" history as Bailyn's principal contribution to the historiography of American education, beginning with a "colonial society shaken loose from the moorings of European educational traditions" that altered educational pathways. In the introduction to the book, "Bailyn defined education broadly as 'the transfer of culture' across space and time and identified the family, with its tendrils into the wider community, as its most important agent."[13] From there, Bailyn added "church," which included proselytization and "ethnocentric" boarding schools for Native Americans, to an educational family-community-church trinity that transmitted culture across "English America." Yet fears of cultural decline, as evidenced by attempts to establish "formal schools" in Puritan New England, and efforts to provide for formal education in the southern regions, ostensibly to "rescue the children from an incipient savagery," introduced educational institutions to "English America." Despite the foundering of a number of these institutions, the idea of "formal schooling" spurred eighteenth-century educational pursuits. "This whole cluster of developments," Bailyn declaimed, "the heightening of sensitivity to educational processes as the family's traditional effectiveness declined, the consequent increase in attention to formal education and in the cultural burdens placed upon it--was not confined to the boundaries of the original seventeenth-century settlements. It was a pattern woven of the necessities of life in the colonies, and it repeated itself in every region as the threat of the environment to inherited culture made itself felt." For artisans and craftsmen accustomed to the apprenticeship system, indentures and related contracts, with an increasing frequency and urgency, required "evening schools" instructed by salaried teachers. Benjamin Franklin's organization of a Junto of tradesmen, all aiming for self-improvement, accomplished similar aims of cultural transmission. After the Great Awakening, "schools and colleges" became essential for, respectively, training "the young in purity and loyalty" and producing "a proper ministry and mission." Theirs was not a "neutral pedagogy," but a competition among sectarian schools to demonstrate adherence to "the early Church as pictured in the New Testament." To the family-community-church "great axles of society," Bailyn added eighteenth-century "economy," a prerequisite "everywhere" for schools sustained by recurrent community taxation and individual donations, rather than early real estate investments and isolated endowments. He crucially argued that such taxation shared more in common with "[private] colonial school financing" than "its 'public' aspects" because most of the taxes were paid by "those who had created and maintained the institutions," vesting "initiating groups" within the highest tax brackets, largely denominational after the Great Awakening, with "external control."[14]
Bailyn's conclusion to the first essay of the 1960 Education in the Forming of American Society featured another early example of his version of sociopolitical dimensions to the American Revolution. In what would become a familiar refrain, Bailyn rhapsodized on "the Revolution" as "a social movement only in a special sense. It did not flow from deep sources of discontent, and its aims were not to recast the ordering of the society that had developed in the earlier years. In education as in so many other spheres of social action, its effects were to free the trends of the colonial period from legal and institutional encumbrances and to confirm them, to formalize them, to give them the sanction of law in a framework of enlightened political thought." As the Revolution proceeded, "most of the major statesmen had sweeping schemes for national systems of education and national universities, or other programs by which the new nationalism and its republican spirit might properly be expressed. But the efforts to realize these plans came to naught." Great Awakening sects still held sway over education in the United States, for "wherever schemes for state systems of education threatened the influence of sectarian groups they were defeated or fell under the control of the denominations. It took Jefferson forty years to create the University of Virginia, and when it opened in 1825 it had acquired religious attributes he had struggled to eliminate." Then, in a contention that adumbrated his student Gordon S. Wood's dissertation chapters on the 1780s "critical period" and "Federalist Persuasion," Bailyn explored the outcomes of Pennsylvania legislators' attempts to transform the College of Philadelphia into a statewide public school. The "powers of denominations" and concomitant "business organizations," the latter wellsprings of taxes and donations, challenged Pennsylvania state seizure of the college, which had been done "in the name of the People...But who were the People? A handful of legislators?...But what was the State in a republican government? Should it have powers against the people themselves? Was not the answer the multiplication rather than the elimination of privilege?" Bailyn did not situate these queries in the contexts of federalism and anti-federalism in an ostensibly "national government." He did, however, explain that the antebellum U.S. Supreme Court ultimately decided in favor of the "initiating groups to control what they had created," confirming that education in American society came under the purview of "bankers" and sectarian "educators whose enterprise would advance the general good." These denominational "initiating groups" (families?) gained "from the state equal privileges with all other groups and to retain them even against the state itself." In the final analysis, education before and after the Revolution "tended to isolate the individual, to propel him away from the simple acceptance of a predetermined social role, and to nourish his distrust of authority."[15]
Bailyn additionally reviewed a collection of the papers of Thomas Jefferson and a collection of the papers of John Adams, prior to the invitation to edit collected volumes of American Revolution pamphlets.
In August 1960, Bailyn presented a conference paper for a panel on new directions in the history of the Enlightenment, organized by historian Franco Venturi, at the International Congress of Historical Sciences IX held in Stockholm, Sweden. The title of the paper was "Political Experience and Enlightenment Ideas in Eighteenth-Century America." In a brief report on the Stockholm conference, the authors provided a cursory synopsis and comment on the presentation: "American thinkers were steeped in a terminology derived from European experience: the contrast between their ideas and their own political experience could be presented in the most striking way. This was an exceptionally happy instance."[16] On January 12, 1961, Bailyn presented an expanded version of the paper at the Massachusetts Historical Society. One year later, this expanded version was accepted for publication by The American Historical Review editorial board, which included Harvard University classicist Mason Hammond and the historian of "liberalism" in "Anglo-America," Max Savelle. The latter was previously investigated for Communist Party sympathies while teaching abroad in Spain and at the University of Washington, first for donating funds to the American Medical Bureau, second for opposing the formation of the Dies Committee, and third for renouncing the University of Washington firings of his colleagues for refusing to sign state loyalty oaths. The first two charges were dropped, but Savelle challenged the constitutionality of state loyalty oaths and awaited a U.S. Supreme Court decision in January 1962. The editorial board also included early American intellectual historian Charles F. Mullett, Richard Current, Leo Gershoy, and Lynn Townsend White.[17]
Only one month after Bailyn's presentation at the Massachusetts Historical Society, Perry Miller finally responded to his review of The New England Mind: From Colony to Province, in the 1961 Beacon Press edition of the book. In the preface, Miller identified Bailyn as "the most charitable of my critics," the reviewer who "paid me a dubious compliment on my ability 'to extemporize' the history of New England society...he intended this courtesy to be a rebuke to the profession for not having yet built the foundation on which my account ought, by rights, to have been based. He implied that therefore that construct was floating on thin air." Miller instead aimed his response at Bailyn's questions regarding the purpose of sustaining an analysis of "society," extemporized or otherwise, when Puritan ideas had all but dispersed or entered into new configurations. For the latter, Miller indicated that his "unrepentant—or should I say defiant?—contention is quite the reverse. The terms of Puritan thinking do not progressively become poorer tools than were the concepts of the founders for the recording of social change. On the contrary, they are increasingly the instruments through which the people strove to cope with a bewildering reality." Samuel Eliot Morison, Oscar Handlin, and Perry Miller all sat on the editorial board for the 1954 and 1956 volumes of The New England Quarterly. In addition to comments by the book review editor, Houghton Mifflin reader Katherine Simonds, the editorial assessments of Bailyn's reviews and internal politics thereof, especially for The New England Mind review, remain subjects of scholarly inquiry.[18]
[Research Restructuring]
The Literature of Revolution[]
Bernard Bailyn cited a number of works by literary scholars in Ideological Origins, including Perry Miller. In 1961, months after his rejoinder to Bailyn, Miller published the essay, "From the Covenant to the Revival," for the collection Religion in American Life: The Shaping of American Religion.
In 1965, Bernard Bailyn published a renowned introduction, "The Transforming Radicalism of the American Revolution," to the first volume of the January 1965 Pamphlets of the American Revolution, a series of documents of the Revolutionary era which he edited for the John Harvard Library. In the process of reading hundreds of pamphlets published between 1750 and 1776, Bailyn detected a pattern of similarities in argument, language, and invocation of certain figures including Cato the Younger and radical Whig heroes Algernon Sidney and John Wilkes. Bailyn analyzes the content of these popular pamphlets as clues to "the 'great hinterland' of belief" in the British North American colonies, "notions which men often saw little need to explain because they were so obvious."
[Research Restructuring]
Sources and Traditions[]
In the expanded 1961-62 version of Bernard Bailyn's 1960 conference paper, "Political Experience and Enlightenment Ideas in Eighteenth-Century America," the oft-cited first footnote contained a multitude of studies that contributed to the article. Bailyn informed his audience that "recent revisionist writings on eighteenth-century America are voluminous. The main points of reinterpretation will be found in the following books and articles, to which specific reference is made in the paragraphs that follow: Robert E. Brown, 'Middle-Class Democracy and the Revolution in Massachusetts, 1691-1780' (Ithaca, N. Y., 1955); E. James Ferguson, 'Currency Finance: An Interpretation of Colonial Monetary Practices,' William and Mary Quarterly, X (Apr. 1953), 53-80; Theodore Thaver, 'The Land Bank System in the American Colonies,' Journal of Economic History, XIII (Spring 1953), 145-59; Bray Hammond, Banks and Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War (Princeton, N. J., 1957); George A. Billias, The Massachusetts Land Bankers of 1740 (Orono, Me., 1959); Milton M. Klein, 'Democracy and Politics in Colonial New York,' New York History, XL (July 1959), 221-46; Oscar and Mary F. Handlin, 'Radicals and Conservatives in Massachusetts after Independence,' New England Quarterly, XVII (Sept. 1944), 343-55; Bernard Bailyn, 'The Blount Papers: Notes on the Merchant 'Class' in the Revolutionary Period,' William and Mary Quarterly, XI (Jan. 1954), 98-104; Frederick B. Tolles, 'The American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement: A Reevaluation,' American Historical Review, LX (Oct. 1954), 1-12; Robert E. Brown, Charles Beard and the Constitution: A Critical Analysis of 'An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution' (Princeton, N. J., 1956); Forrest McDonald, We the People: The Economic Origins of the Constitution (Chicago, 1958); Daniel J. Boorstin, The Genius of American Politics (Chicago, 1953), and The Americans: The Colonial Experience (New York, 1958). References to other writings and other viewpoints will be found in Edmund S. Morgan, 'The American Revolution: Revisions in Need of Revising,' William and Mary Quarterly, XIV (Jan. 1957), 3-15; and Richard B. Morris, 'The Confederation Period and the American Historian,' William and Mary Quarterly, XIII (Apr. 1956), 139-56." In the body of his article, Bailyn mentioned that "Caroline Robbins' recent book, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman (1959), suggests, that the commonwealth radicalism of seventeenth-century England continued to flow to the colonists, blending, ultimately, with other strains of thought to form a common body of advanced theory." Richard Hofstadter's 1963 lecture on "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," published in the November 1964 Harper's Magazine, was not cited in The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, but Bailyn and Hofstadter corresponded on their respective projects. Bailyn's student, Gordon S. Wood, later critiqued Hofstadter's limited treatment of an eighteenth-century "paranoid style."[19]
Hannah Arendt, in her 1963 On Revolution, provided conceptual underpinnings for the "social question" and the role of continental expansion in the "origins" of the American Revolution despite, and in dialectical response to criticisms of, her previous distinctions between a political ideology and a system of philosophical ideas, as well as between public and private space. Arendt's Neoplatonist preferences for a natalität pursuit of aletheia (not necessarily a synonym for "truth") over "mere opinion" may or may not have compelled her to study revolutions as well. This pursuit similarly may or may not have been conjoined with post-"gigantic" principles of "erasure" as well as Heideggerian Die Zeit des Weltbildes, irrespective of a post-industrial "machination...of their own deconstruction" and later paleonymy. Hannah Arendt had defined the "vita activa as political action distinct from productive work or necessary labor. Only the growth of mass-market economies in the eighteenth century, she argued, broke down the integrity of a distinct public space that was the essential preserve of human spontaneity." But then, she further contended in "On Revolution and again in [a subsequent] speech that the founding generation could still serve as a model to illuminate 'darker times' [which] demonstrated the way that she, too, held up the examples of the past to castigate the trajectory of the republic and to offer the point of foundation as a source of comfort and confidence. Significantly, her account of the precipitous position of the United States suggested that imperial overextension was a central cause of the corruption of the republic, where [historian J.G.A.] Pocock subsequently argued that its republican heritage was also the source of its expansiveness." Hannah Arendt's 1963 On Revolution examined Machiavellian ideas and James Harrington's seventeenth-century reconfiguration of these ideas into proprietary landholdings for temporal stability, transmitted to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century proponents of "commerce." Arendt's "non-Marxist" On Revolution shifted the focus of the "social question" from proletariat uprisings to the "rise of political economy in the eighteenth century and its clash with [adherents of] the ancient vision of citizenship and liberty." Despite the transition from landholdings to an "interests"-based political economy (even notions of the public interest), in enshrining themselves and narratives of customary and civil law into foundational moments that, in the absence of "transcendent sources of authority," became "a space of time that preceded and would transcend one's life...the American founders had provided a unique example of how contingent and groundless origins could become a source for stability through time." She elucidated these arguments in the 1971 "Thoughts on Politics and Revolution," republished and expanded in the Crises of the Republic collection—which also included the "On Violence" essay that incited the 1970 Arendt-Agamben correspondence. According to Mira Siegelberg, both Arendt's and Pocock's arguments substantially rest on the importance of historical thinking.[20]
Of course, during the Second World War and more than a decade before contributions to this research field by both Arendt and Pocock, literati Zera S. Fink demonstrated that Polybian and Machiavellian ideas, the latter primarily in il Discorsi, had been transmitted into (what Fink described as) "the classical republican" minds of seventeenth-century England—one in particular, Fink averred, was none other than James Harrington.[21] Both Arendt and Pocock claimed that Fink's 1945 book on a "Venetian vogue" for "stability" by "mixed government," and the 1942 article in which Fink examined il Discorsi passages translated and quoted in the works of James Harrington, partially germinated their research.[22] Arendt, for instance, was quite explicitly "indebted to Zera Fink's important study The Classical Republicans...for the influence of Machiavelli upon Harrington and the influence of the ancients upon seventeenth-century English thought, see the excellent study by Zera S. Fink."[23] Pocock likewise credited Fink for beginning a study on Englishmen "impressed by the stability of Venetian constitutional reforms" and the classical ideas that spawned such reforms. Pocock wished to further research and elaborate on this project: "...what I propose to do is investigate the significance in the eighteenth century of a current of ideas that stems mainly from James Harrington, but can be traced additionally to the seventeenth-century theorists studied some years ago by Z. S. Fink under the name of the 'classical republicans'...[Caroline Robbins' Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman illustrated] how regularly recourse was made, throughout the century, to a group of writers essentially the same as Fink's Venetian theorists."[24]
As an editor for The William and Mary Quarterly, Bernard Bailyn read draft manuscripts of Cambridge School historian J.G.A. Pocock's 1965 "Machiavelli, Harrington, and English Political Ideologies in the Eighteenth Century," cited in Ideological Origins for "colonial" memory of the "ancient constitution" and for Revolutionary debates over "standing armies." In a critical prelude to The Machiavellian Moment, Pocock, more than Zera S. Fink and Hannah Arendt, crystallized a purpose of Machiavelli's il Discorsi, that is, Machiavellian promotion of armed militancy as a possible recourse for temporal stability in polities subject to the whims of fortuna. In the 1656 The Commonwealth of Oceana, James Harrington retained armed militancy as secondary to landholdings for temporal stability: "Harrington's citizen may or may not be an entrepreneur, but he is primarily a freeholder...the right to bear arms [from Machiavelli's Discorsi], and the propertied independence enabling one to provide one's own, become the tests of citizenship in Harrington's England as they had been in Athens or Rome." Pocock next charted the consequences of an "increased awareness of the growing importance of monetary relationships." Eighteenth-century "neo-Harringtonian" pundits subsequently narrated a "Gothic commonwealth of freeholders...an economy of masters and servants, defined mainly in agrarian and traditional terms," that had been lost to the early modern "corruption" of "money in government: of public finance...[and] a well-financed court bureaucracy... a Marxist might say that this was a [neo-]mercantilist rather than an entrepreneurial consciousness." The "neo-Harringtonians," extant dissidents against the "mercantile court" and "coffeehouse intellectuals living by their wit," began to deride "standing army" excursions against the landed gentry in their remonstrances, ostensibly "to win support from country gentlemen discontented with the progress of court government." The "neo-Harringtonians" demanded the replacement of this "instrument of corruption" with militias maintained by an "executive power." Popular demarcation of distinct ideas of "liberty," "mercantilist" (or even "mercantile commerce"), "the right to bear arms," and "militia" was more central to Pocock's "neo-Harringtonians" than Bailyn's "colonists," the latter seemingly engrossed in an ideology that was both cause and consequence of "paranoiac fears" and a "tradition" of British laws, grants, and charters that exercised "natural rights" only "minimally stated" in substantive law. The "neo-Harringtonians," in contrast, believed that "if the armed force of the nation is embodied only in this form [a militia], there can be no threat to public liberty or the public purse; and the proprietor's liberty is guaranteed as much by his right to be the sole fighter in his own defense as by his ultimate right to cast a vote in his own government."[25]
In Ideological Origins, Bernard Bailyn confirmed that an array of Revolutionary pamphlets were "neo-Harringtonian" publications, citing J.G.A. Pocock's 1965 interpretation of the bipartisan and Jacobite "left" opposition to Robert Walpole in eighteenth-century England. The "colonists" interpreted and appropriated ideas in these tracts by Country Party pundits on all sides of the eighteenth-century aisle, from Tory writer Viscount Bolingbroke to Walpole Whig Thomas Gordon. As a result, "incorporating in their colorful, slashing, superbly readable pages the major themes of the 'left' opposition under Walpole, these libertarian tracts, emerging first in the form of denunciations of standing armies in the reign of William III, left an indelible imprint on the 'country' mind everywhere in the English-speaking world...they had a vivid sense of what such armies were: gangs of restless mercenaries, responsible only to the whims of the rulers who paid them, capable of destroying all right, law, and liberty that stood in their way. This fear of standing armies followed directly from the colonists' understanding of power and of human nature: on purely logical grounds it was a reasonable fear. But it went beyond mere logic. Only too evidently was it justified, as the colonists saw it, by history and by the facts of the contemporary world." Yet these same "colonists" venerated peacetime "militias" and Minutemen. By the same token, Bailyn continued, "the colonists" praised "the spread of freehold tenure" in British North America as much as they did an "ancient, prefeudal [English] elysium," where a medieval notion of "political liberty [was] based on a landholding system."[26]
The Democracy Unleashed[]
Between December 1964 and October 1966, during and after publication of Bailyn's pamphlet introduction, Gordon S. Wood, a student of Bernard Bailyn, published two reviews on intellectual biographies for the New England Quarterly and William and Mary Quarterly, in addition to his oft-cited 1966 articles "Rhetoric and Reality in the American Revolution" and "A Note on Mobs in the American Revolution" for the William and Mary Quarterly.
Gordon S. Wood's 1966 "Rhetoric and Reality in the American Revolution" 1) explicated Bailyn's previous criticism of Carl Becker; 2) connected (what Wood described as) "ideas" with "reality;" 3) critiqued "progressive" depictions of such "ideas" as "frenzied rhetoric" to disguise "hidden interests;" 4) argued for "the ideas, [as] the rhetoric of the Americans" by considering that "Revolutionaries" believed their own "rhetoric" as "always psychologically true;" and 5) urged Bailyn as well as "neo-Whig" historians to further explore the "progressive" historians' contribution of "social reality" in studies of "ideology." Wood later argued that "the ideas, the rhetoric" culminated in an "American science of politics," with government as an "umpire" of (ir)rational "interests" that subsumed and transformed any disinterested publics associated with "positive liberty" into, for instance, interpretations of the United States public interest.[27] Yet any equation of words with ideas in Wood's conception of "the ideas, the rhetoric" or nascent criticism thereof by scholars in discursive psychology, critical discourse analysis, cyberfeminism, affect theory, and ideographs that examine "power" not solely as the crucial "sado-masochistic flavor" of "force, compulsion" in, e.g., representations of a physical "rape," in addition to reformulations of power-knowledge intersections in 1977-84 Foucauldian frameworks for governmentality and New Historicism, warrant further examination and evidence. Wood's attempt to address this criticism in intellectual history as well as the history of ideas can be found in The Radicalism of the American Revolution.[28] More recently, Carli Conklin argued for "the pursuit of happiness" as a typology of "virtue" that may or may not include "property" (or possessive individualism, anti-covetousness, etc.): "...the pursuit of happiness, as used in both works, refers to man's ability to know the law of nature and of nature's God as it pertains to man, and man's unalienable right to then choose to pursue a life of virtue or, in other words, a life lived in harmony with those natural law principles. The result would be eudaimonia or man's own real and substantial happiness." In 2019, Conklin revised and expanded these arguments to include a variety of historical actors, including James Wilson, in The Pursuit of Happiness in the Founding Era: An Intellectual History. These contentions on constructed "happiness," cameralist or otherwise, do not necessarily undermine, and may or may not advance, Wood's approach to "liberty," as well as his concomitant history of "feeling," including "happiness," in Radicalism. The reconfiguration of Jürgen Habermas's public sphere for "early America" also does not necessarily undermine Wood's framework, particularly if historians revise Habermasian (and even Lockean) notions of "good[s]." Such historians often upbraid Wood for not thoroughly addressing Native Americans, African-Americans, the politics of "meaningful silence" in Constitutional compromises and articles that rest in part on representative apportionment by population (regardless of neoconservative and Third Way applications of the same as well as John C. Calhoun's antebellum contentions on the Senate and territoriality), various ethnonyms (excepting the debate over Giorgio Agamben's statements on the COVID-19 pandemic), and a variety of historical actors.[29]
Power and Liberty: A Theory of Politics[]
One year after publication of his student's "Rhetoric and Reality," in The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Bernard Bailyn challenged what he described as a "progressive" school of thought on the American Revolution. He argued that "the 'progressive' historians of the early twentieth century and their successors of the post-World War I era adopted unknowingly the Tory interpretation in writing off the Revolutionary leaders' professed fears of 'slavery' and of conspiratorial designs as what by then had come to be known as propaganda. They implied when they did not state explicitly that these extravagant, seemingly paranoiac fears were deliberately devised for the purpose of controlling the minds of a presumably passive populace in order to accomplish predetermined ends--Independence and in many cases personal advancement--that were not openly professed."[30]
Bailyn's crucial intervention was that pamphlet writers sounded the same themes in their private writing as in public, and that their expressed fears of "slavery," "corruption," and a "conspiracy" of "power" against "liberty" were genuine. In accordance with Bailyn's emphasis on "the meaning and uses of words" in diachrony and synchrony (even discourse particles), please note that this wiki attempts to encompass the half-dozen references to "political liberty" and "personal liberty" (and "natural rights") in Ideological Origins.[31] Bailyn distinguished "political liberty" and its civic virtue corollary in "neo-Harringtonian" pamphlets collected by John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon from the "theoretical liberty that existed in a state of nature...'personal security, personal liberty, and private property'...[in contrast] political liberty...was the capacity to exercise 'natural rights' within limits set not by the mere will or desire of men in power but by non-arbitrary law--law enacted by legislatures containing within them the proper balance of forces." But British "laws, grants, and charters...marked out the minimum not the maximum boundaries of right." His "colonists" and "Revolutionary leaders" transitioned from the initial goal of "political liberty" in "neo-Harringtonian" pamphlets to a "theory of politics" that conceived of "liberty, then, as the exercise, within the boundaries of the law, of natural rights whose essences were minimally stated in English law and custom." Bailyn's "liberty" challenged dichotomies, yet also became an ontological singularity that defied multifaceted reductionism, its absolute holistic antithesis, and even Neoplatonist henosis. A number of, but certainly not all, impulses for advancing this "liberty" likewise may or may not be found in 1) the neo-Kantian pursuit of transcendental apperception as well as the ontological unity of opposites in categorical epistemology; and 2) the presumption (or potentially deleterious acceptance) of enlightened unmündigkeit in apperception and schemata.[32]
Bailyn's "liberty," along with substantive or attributive monism, simultaneity, as well as Gordon S. Wood's "Lockean sensationalism," rested on modifications to, but not rejection of, the "social question" in the "liberty" of assembly and association. Antebellum practices such as voluntaryism, liberal nationalism, and cultures of domesticity did not figure largely into Bailyn's "liberty," although Gordon S. Wood later countered his critics that Bailyn's "liberty" and his own interpretation of "classical politics" persisted, in various guises, amidst a storm of "liberalism" and "interests" during the nineteenth century. Bailyn's approach to the "social question" paralleled Hannah Arendt's arguments in On Revolution, but diverged from Carl Becker's "liberties" in the Beckerian variant of social democracy. Becker struggled with the "free trade in ideas" and its doctrinal dissolution of dichotomies in Progressive Era "negative freedom." Bailyn, in a "unity[?]" of (varieties of) "political liberty" and "personal liberty," resulting in an ontological singularity of "liberty," argued that " 'power' to them meant the dominion of some men over others, the human control of human life: ultimately force, compulsion. And it was, consequently, for them as it is for us, 'a richly connotative word': some of its fascination may well have lain for them, as it has been said to lie for us, in its 'sado-masochistic flavor,' for they dwelt on it endlessly, almost compulsively...what gave transcendent [non-pejorative and non-transitory] importance to the aggressiveness of power was the fact that its natural prey, its necessary victim, was liberty, or law, or right...Liberty was not, therefore, for the colonists, as it is for us, professedly the interest and concern of all, governors and governed alike, but only of the governed." He cited Kenneth Minogue's 1959 "Power in Politics" from the journal Political Studies and elaborated on the "sadomasochistic flavor" of "force, compulsion" in his footnotes: "the implicitly sexual character of the imagery is made quite explicit in passages of the libertarian literature, e.g., in Marchamont Nedham's Excellencie of a Free State (1656): 'the interest of freedom is a virgin, that everyone seeks to deflower'; if it is not properly protected '(so great is the lust of mankind after dominion) there follows a rape upon the first opportunity' (in Richard Baron's 1767 ed., pp. 18-19)."[33]
Only months after publication of Ideological Origins, Bailyn fulfilled his promise from the conclusion of "Politics and Social Structure in Virginia" and, in three Charles K. Clover lectures delivered at Brown University, traced the trajectories and "common characteristics" of the "politics and social structures" of the British North American colonies. Except for a handful of notable instances, royal and proprietorial governors exercised more jurisdiction over seventeenth-century colonial legislatures than King-in-Parliament did within the unwritten "mixed and balanced constitution" of Great Britain. But patronage networks and Anglican institutions increasingly centrifuged as "sources of authority in London," providing opportunities for a "social and economic leadership" in the colonial legislatures to periodically censure these governors. Such opportunities increased as socio-cultural and economic contests over the "identity of the natural political leaders" ended in resolutions and absolutions, as was the case with the "Leislerian rebellion in 1689" New York. This was one example of "a society dominated by the sense that the natural social leaders of society should be the political leaders" amidst the expansion of a "wide-open franchise," however neglected by male voters initially confused over which issues "seemed properly determinable at the polls." In a contention that paralleled his previous studies on Virginia, Bailyn held that, as victorious merchants and landed gentry from Connecticut to South Carolina began to jockey for eighteenth-century legislative office, they simultaneously attempted to eliminate governors (and their councils) who distinguished "social and economic leadership" by provincials from "political leadership" by royal and proprietorial magistrates. These local insurgents also rebelled against British statutory law, especially when it came to the policing of land speculation. Interspersed throughout the first two essays were brief forays into the role of Montesquieu, Sir William Blackstone, and related figures in disseminating and apotheosizing ideas on the separation and balance of powers in the "mixed and balanced constitution." Despite mounting local dissidence, British magistrates continued to assume that "the colonial constitutions corresponded in their essentials" to this "mixed and balanced constitution," which exacerbated sociopolitical conflicts to a greater degree. The stage was thus set for Bailyn to introduce the sociopolitical tenets of his interpretation of Revolutionary ideology and "libertarian doctrines," derived from Country Party tracts published in England by "coffeehouse pamphleteers and journalists." In this manner, the three lectures, published in the 1967 Perspectives in American History and collected in the 1968 Origins of American Politics, served as a sociopolitical prelude to, and framework for, his interpretation of The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution.[34]
On April 13, 1970, less than a year before Richard Hofstadter's death, he wrote Bailyn, expressing concerns about scholarly depictions of recent studies by both of them as "consensus." Bailyn's arguments relied on categories such as "the colonists" and "Revolutionary leaders." What prompted this disclosure, and Bailyn's response(s) to ideological "consensus" across harmonious "classes" and sociopolitical "ranks" or the appropriation of the same ideology by "classes" to challenge each other in consonant dissonance (ala studies by Gary B. Nash nearly a decade later), remains a subject of scholarly inquiry.[35] In Ideological Origins, Bailyn held to, but did not elucidate, change through linear time (he did not discuss notions of historical time and acceleration) in this particular facet of his book: "...in no obvious sense was the American Revolution undertaken as a social revolution. No one, that is, deliberately worked for the destruction or even the substantial alteration of the order of society as it had been known. Yet it was transformed as a result of the Revolution...What did now affect the essentials of social organization—what in time would help permanently to transform them—were changes in the realm of belief and attitude. The views men held toward the relationships that bound them to each other—the discipline and pattern of society—moved in a new direction in the decade before Independence."[36] Bailyn further explicated his contentions on the category of "loyalists" in his 1974 The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson, concluding that the "increasingly irrational situation" stymied Royal Governor Thomas Hutchinson's efforts to cultivate, and appeal to, a mutual "self-interest" for both the British government and "extremists" in the colonies.[37]
In 1973, Bernard Bailyn published his "The Central Themes of the American Revolution: An Interpretation," frequently cited for its clarification of the "concept of ideology" in Ideological Origins. In this essay, an expanded version of a 1971 conference paper, Bailyn explained that "...formal discourse becomes politically powerful when it becomes ideology: when it articulates and fuses into effective formulations opinions and attitudes that are otherwise too scattered and vague to be acted upon; when it mobilizes a general mood, 'a set of disconnected, unrealized private emotions,' into 'a public possession, a social fact;' when it crystallizes otherwise inchoate social and political discontent and thereby shapes what is otherwise instinctive and directs it to attainable goals; when it clarifies, symbolizes, and elevates to structured consciousness the mingled urges that stir within us." His endnote for that particular passage cited the 1964 "Ideology as a Cultural System" by Clifford Geertz.[38] This Geertzian seminal essay in symbolic anthropology was published three years after Bailyn's initial argument, in the conference paper that became the article "Political Experience and Enlightenment Ideas in Eighteenth-Century America," that the "divergence between habits of mind and belief on the one hand and experience and behavior on the other was ended at the Revolution."[39]
Fifteen years after his 1960 presentation in Stockholm, Bailyn presented a conference paper on sociopolitical frameworks and "ideological" approaches to the American Revolution, "Lines of Force in Recent Writings on the American Revolution," once more at the International Congress of Historical Sciences XIV, this time held in San Francisco, California.
For the United States Bicentennial, Bailyn elaborated on shifts in political economy and corresponding changes in ideas that (he contended) substantiated his approach to the sociopolitical contours of the American Revolution in "1776: A Year of Change--A World Transformed," published in the October 1776 Journal of Law & Economics. Bailyn doctoral students such as Mark Peterson cite this article as a transitional point in Bailyn's scholarship, from a focus on The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution to his Peopling of British North America series, the latter of which falls outside the scope of this wiki. The article, however, demonstrated connections between Bailyn's impulses for Peopling and his sociopolitical underpinnings of Ideological Origins. Bailyn introduced the article with a synopsis of his arguments on Thomas Paine's Common Sense, based on a 1973 published paper (published again, along with previous essays, in the Faces of Revolution collection) from the "Fundamental Testaments of the American Revolution" conference in Washington, D.C.:
In 1998, Bernard Bailyn delivered the annual Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities on "Politics and the Creative Imagination," which expanded his source base and categories of analysis for the sociopolitical Origins of American Politics. The same year as Bailyn's lecture, Robert Blair St. George published his Conversing by Signs: Poetics of Implication in Colonial New England Culture, which included, but was certainly not limited to, seventeenth-century witchcraft narratives, eighteenth-century crowd upheaval, churches, myriad built environments, vernacular architecture, and portraiture in a study of semiotic "poetic implication." This book is not cited in the published version of Bailyn's lecture on the eighteenth century. In the lecture and subsequent publication, Bailyn ascertained the causes of the "creative imagination" of the "founders," at least in politics, as "their provincialism." Indeed, it was "the sense they derived from it [provincialism] of their own moral stature, [that] nourished their political imaginations. Uncertain of their place in the established, metropolitan world, they had never felt themselves bound by it and were prepared to challenge it and build on the world they knew." This "imagination" allowed the "founders" to "conceive of something closer to the grain of everyday reality, and more likely to lead to human happiness." In words reminiscent of his 1957 Omohundro Institute conference paper, Bailyn argued that the "founders" had "weeded out anachronisms in the received tradition, discarded elements that were irrelevant to their provincial situation, and built, with great imagination, a new structure on the actualities of the world they had known...[this structure] gave them a moral advantage in politics...America had taken Britain's place as the guardian and promoter of liberty."[40]
Bailyn began the substantiation of his Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities thesis with John Adams, a man whose arguments often were, according to Gordon S. Wood, exemplars of "relevance and irrelevance." Adams "spoke with bitter envy of the rich and powerful in his world, of a smug, arrogant almost unreachable American aristocracy, of great American mansions, of grand estates and grand prospects. But what was the scale? How grand was grand?" Bailyn evaluated Adams's statements, comparing built environments and proprietary landscapes that were "typical houses of the American aristocracy," with those of the "English nobility or higher aristocracy." In his estimation, what distinguished the built environments of the "American aristocracy," including Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, from the estates of English aristocrats such as William Weddell's Newby Hall, was the latter's "cultural awareness, the worldliness of his sensibilities, in a word, his sophistication...Jefferson was, in fact---despite our present obsession with his supposed relationship with a slave woman---a provincial Puritan." Bailyn then asked, "...what of the people, the American aristocracy, the local elites that so intimidated Adams---what of their style, their manner, the images they projected?" In his response to this research question, Bailyn compared and contrasted "American aristocracy" portraiture in British North America with portraiture of aristocrats in England. He concluded that, "again, there is a different level of worldliness and sophistication---not so much a matter of wealth, but of style, and the sense of what Edmund Burke called the necessary condition of any true aristocracy---'uncontending ease, the unbought grace of life.' " In the final analysis, Bailyn neither agreed nor disagreed with John Adams. Rather, Bailyn observed that "if these people formed an aristocracy it was not a very secure, graceful, or elevated aristocracy. Their acquisitions were within the reach of everyday competition; they lacked the magnificence by which a ruling order in the 18th century reinforced itself. Striving, searching, and tense, they were, and were aware of being, provincials."[41]
Bailyn explained how the "founders" reconfigured their "provincialism" abroad. In Europe, Benjamin Franklin established "his cosmopolitan credentials by exaggerating, caricaturing, hence implicitly denying, his provincialism. He knew that by projecting himself as a gifted backwoods innocent, he would become nature's own scientist and philosopher, and thus the very embodiment of the fashionable ideas of the philosophs." The frame identification for Franklin's final portrait, Vir (mankind), captioned a visual culture not only of "Franklin the Pennsylvania printer turned philosoph, but a portrait of the rich fulfillment of a humanity which provincials and cosmopolites shared equally...the founders were provincials, alive to the values of a greater world, but not, they knew, of it---comfortable in a lesser world but aware of its limitations." The "founders" themselves were not "content with a simple, consistent image of themselves. Their view of the world and of their place in it was ambivalent, uncertain; and that ambivalence tended to shake their minds from the roots of habit and tradition...never having been fully immersed in, never fully committed to or comfortable with, the cosmopolitan establishment, in the crucible of the Revolution they challenged its authority, and when faced with the great problems of public life they turned to their own local, provincial experiences for solutions." Federalism was the solution to the solecism imperium-in-imperio, sovereignty-within-sovereignty; recasting "legalized social orders---crown, nobility, and commons---which had never been a direct part of their lives, to functioning branches of government---executive, legislative, judicial---which had been," was a partial solution to the "social question;" the "actual representation of interests and people" ended debates over the territorial scope of a "republican" polity and the purposes of such representation; and, of course, natural rights that Bailyn equated with "human rights can be seen to exist independent of privileges, gifts, and donations of the powerful, and that these rights can somehow be defined and protected by the force of law" as civil liberties. The lecture featured a litany of additional "solutions" that Bailyn traced to "provincial experiences." He concluded that "we do have the obligation, as inheritors of their success, to view every establishment critically, to remain in some sense on the margins."[42]
Slavery[]
[Research Restructuring]
The Contagion of Liberty[]
In 1994, Bernard Bailyn responded to questions on how "[partisan?] politics as such" shaped his research and publications. "I don't think I'm a particularly political person," he replied, because "this kind of reduction of what one does as a historian to some rather simplistic notions about one's own political views may apply to some people--surely to the Marxists of the 1930s who are now radical conservatives: at one extreme or another they're consistently doctrinaire, and their politics controls their writing--but to others it doesn't apply really in any effective way." In a surprising admission, he acknowledged that "nobody, of course, is free from the influence of the life around," yet he still didn't "think politics as such has shaped the things that I've tried to write." He did not address questions on how his historical contentions, in turn, shaped "politics as such."[43]
Bailyn also answered questions regarding the application of "theory" in his historical interpretations. On the one hand, "theory" can suggest "all kinds of problems that you otherwise wouldn't think about and in different forms. You may be aware of content analysis as a procedure of the sociologists, and while you have no intention of doing content analysis systematically, it does suggest ways in which you can read certain documents." On the other hand, "I don't think I have ever explicitly used a social science notion to frame a historical argument or used the technical language of the behavioral sciences...The behavioral sciences, or the social sciences more loosely, are full of ideas, many of them very suggestive for understanding history, but I have never thought that history is a social science, and I've avoided the explicit use of systematic concepts or the language of social sciences." He provided the example of a critical comment on his 1957 presentation at Williamsburg to elucidate his rationale: "When I presented the paper 'Politics and Social Structure' at a conference in Williamsburg, a very distinguished sociologist was there, and when it was over he said, 'You realize that what you've been explaining really is the shift from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft.' Perhaps--but that isn't what I was talking about. I was talking about what happened in Virginia in the seventeenth century, and to think of it as an illustration of a systematic notion didn't seem to me to help." Bailyn did not address his citations to Kenneth Minogue's 1959 "Power in Politics" in Ideological Origins and, later, his citation to Clifford Geertz's 1964 "Ideology as a Cultural System" in "The Central Themes of the American Revolution: An Interpretation."[44]
In her memorial tribute, Harvard historian Joyce Chaplin noted Bernard Bailyn's resistance to "dichotomies" and his attention to "granular" records and culture.[45] Bailyn introduced his final collection of essays by asserting that "Isaiah Berlin was wrong in his entertaining game of classifying writers and thinkers into hedgehogs, who focus on one great theme, and foxes, who study and write about many themes and see the world through many lenses--wrong at least as far as historians are concerned. Many, like me, are both."[46] In a 2006 paper read at the British Academy, Bailyn contended that Berlin's 1958 "Two Concepts of Liberty" was "formally cast as a discourse on the permissible limits of coercion; 'force' and 'constraint" are repeatedly referred to, and Berlin denied that all historical conflicts are reducible to conflicts of ideas." Berlin's "comments on the dangers of perfectionism had begun with his discussion of positive liberty...While at times, he then wrote, it might be justifiable 'to coerce men in the name of some goal (let us say, justice or public health), which they would, if they were more enlightened, themselves pursue,' once one claims that one knows what others need better than they know it themselves, one is 'in a position to ignore the actual wishes of men or societies.' " Bailyn triangulated his own approach with Berlin's "embattled position in defense of a liberal alternative" and the "perfectionist ideas" in governance that became Hannah Arendt's "totalitarianism", formulated amidst Kreminology before the transitology of Putin Russia, in "the repressive power of the Soviet state, the annihilatory power of the Nazi regime, the mind-blinding power of Maoist gangs, [and] the suffocating power of Islamic fundamentalism." He declared that "no one knew better than Berlin or expressed more brilliantly the genealogy and structure of perfectionist ideas. But their threat to civilisation, in the most general terms, lay not in their intrinsic malevolence but in the brutality of those who implacably imposed them: the populist thugs, the fanatical monopolists of power." Bailyn did not clarify which categories of populism this conclusion addressed, although his paper focused on "perfectionist ideas" in his notion of positive liberty.[47]
A Note on Conspiracy[]
Douglass Adair, who spearheaded the third series of The William and Mary Quarterly, sat on the WMQ editorial board, along with Bernard Bailyn and Caroline Robbins, that accepted Gordon S. Wood's "Rhetoric and Reality in the American Revolution" for publication. In the 1940s, Adair authored previous essays on what he deemed "republican" thought,
Forrest McDonald did self-identify as "conservative" and "paleo" (-conservative? -libertarian? Yale School paleonymy? all the above?). For any strain of libertarianism, current research examines the comparative application of one or more such modalities to interpretations of eighteenth-century variants of republicanism, in a "classical" temporal key or otherwise. For instance, scholars frequently compare and contrast frameworks for paleolibertarianism with libertarian socialism in a left-right divide that may or may not include diachronic synchronicity and "libertarian" as a paleonym rather than solely an anachronistic homograph, or additional categorical homonyms and metonyms, highlighting the linguistic determinism inherent in references to "libertarianism" and, in turn, "libertarian" conflicts over the purposes of intellectual property law. Late twentieth-century articles published in the Journal of Libertarian Studies additionally touted "libertarian republicanism" as similar paleonymy, which may or may not reconfigure understandings of certain Libertarian Republicans.[48]
A left-right binary, however, seems antithetical to the entire notion of "libertarianism" and could result in the ontological singularity of "liberty" to potentially collapse, particularly with modalities such as libertarian socialism, libertarian Marxism, and minarchism. Green libertarianism is not commonly cited as a left-right example for multifarious reasons, but that may or may not change in prospective application, particularly for positive liberty and environmental fiscal policies in tragedies of the commons. The left-right divide also results in either side (or both) embracing, rejecting, or attempting to reclaim the "true" iteration of "libertarianism" in the United States. Conflicts stem from degrees of emphasis on, and in, principles frequently classified as "libertarian," such as "liberty" of assembly, association, and economy, as well as explication and implication in "libertarian" dialectics, which again seemingly threaten the ontological singularity of "liberty," premised on a modified "social question." In the modified "social question," ideological "consensus" can exist across harmonious groups and "classes" or, alternatively, groups and "classes" potentially appropriate "libertarianism" to rebel, or to challenge each other, in consonant dissonance. Schisms over principled degrees of emphasis overlap with Third Way and neoconservative quandaries on the purposes of self-identification that likewise foment discord within the Libertarian Party. Certain "libertarian" iterations similarly shared a Third Way and neoconservative identification with syncretic politics, especially during the demise of The Public Interest and after neoconservative socio-political departures from, as well as commentaries on, Laffer conceptions of New Right "supply-side economics" in defense expenditures (the Laffer stage of the so-called "reconciliation with capitalism" and deficit). The "second stage" departures also served as tentative resolutions to debates over "public interest" and the role of "post-industrial" ideas in countering criticisms of neoconservative social imperialism, which did not necessarily extend to a "culture of poverty discourse" and kulturkampf found in the Moynihan Report. The "second stage" also included elements of what would become Third Way sociology, especially in the wake of voter revolts against real estate taxes as well as industrial and fledgling "post-industrial" property taxes. This connection persists regardless of whether syncretism is, and was, an appropriate designation, especially given that all three have also been disparaged (not solely within one particular "geopolitical" context), and joined with, the mid- to late twentieth century variant of "relativist philosophy" identified by "pragmatic relativist" Carl L. Becker.
Behavioral economics joined with "libertarian" variants, referred to as "libertarian pa/maternalism," features "possible options" and respects "freedom of choice" in education, health care, businesses, recreational activities, etc. Importantly, the "possible options" offered by these "public and private institutions" operate within "libertarian" sociopolitical spheres (hence the "pa/maternalism"). The "possible options," or promotion of the same in myriad settings, aim to psychologically "nudge" individuals and groups into decisions that in turn substantiate "libertarian" imposition. The "possible options," that is, psychologically "nudge" individuals and groups to participate in "libertarian" imposition. "Libertarian" as potential paleonymy and "liberty" as an ontological singularity ostensibly circumvent the fallacies of circular reasoning and confirmation bias in "nudge" heuristics with 1) the "freedom of choice" to participate in "libertarian" imposition; and 2) the "freedom of choice" to pursue a given option within this imposition. The "possible options" element additionally stirs debates among self-described (and not self-described) "libertarians" over socioeconomic circumstances, pscyhographics, disability, medical treatments, neuropsychology, transportation, health care, supply, redistribution, etc., that potentially impact the roles of government and law, access to such "options," and, in turn, the modified "social question" in "liberty" of assembly and association (including Sunstein's "beyond groupthink"). In the modified "social question," ideological "consensus" can exist across harmonious groups and "classes" or, alternatively, groups and "classes" potentially appropriate "libertarianism" to rebel, or to challenge each other, in consonant dissonance.
Forrest McDonald and his cohort—including and excluding Bailyn—launched their revisions to the American Revolution at the mid-century mark. During this period, their engagement with constellations of ideas and methods that contributed to Bailyn's early (1960–61) formulations of "radically libertarian," and any specific strain of "radically libertarian" at play in 1940-50s interpretations of republican thought, warrant further research. The question of a left-right divide became particularly salient after Bailyn's own 2006 assessment of "perfectionist ideas" in his notion of positive liberty. Likewise, the role of ideas on revolutions in "post-industrial" political economy, such as schöpferische Zerstörung, that have incidentally come under scrutiny by historians of neoliberalism and neoconservatism, is an ongoing subject of scholarly inquiry. The transmutation of industrial market segmentation, industrial production, and cyclical mass consumption into "post-industrial" hypersegmentation and the impact of microcredit in globalized niche markets, is frequently the focus of studies on ideas pertaining to these "revolutions" in enterprise and potentially fiscal, as well as monetary, policy.[49]
In any case, the study of an "ideology" in cognition that deemphasizes pre-linguistic cognition, is often associated with a handful of structuralist and most post-structuralist disciples of Johann Gottfried Herder. Likewise, connections between debates over "hard [linguistic] relativism," "objective relativism," linguistic determinist opponents of historical determinism as well as social determinism, or "[Hofstadter and critical] instrumentalism" with "radically libertarian" frameworks and definitional selections have yet to be fully substantiated. That stated, subjectivities in contextualization and "utterances" revealed conflicts within the historiography. In 1973, Bernard Bailyn advanced the notion that "formal discourse" became "ideology" when it "mobilized a general mood," positing a system of ideas as springing from such discourse.[50] Over two decades later, Bailyn responded to inquiries regarding his own expression of "American exceptionalism," specifically in the Peopling of British North America series: "...all of these categories and categorizations--exceptionalist, consensus, idealist, whig, civic humanist, etc.--with all their neo's and post's, jam together all sorts of writings into crude formulas and focus on abstractions. There are general themes that run through various histories, but categories like this can take on a life of their own and distort what is really being said. If I'm a neo-whig exceptionalist idealist, I'm also a neo-Marxist pragmatist realist quasi-tory, plus existential essentialist and a few other things. And if I'm not, as a historian, I should be."[51]
In June 2021, Bailyn's student, Mark Peterson, published a review essay entitled "The Social Origins of Ideological Origins: Notes on the Historical Legacy of Bernard Bailyn," for Reviews in American History. In the first section of the essay, Peterson criticized a number of retrospectives on Ideological Origins and certain obituaries for Bernard Bailyn. He also discussed the persistence of "Progressive" interpretations before and after the Second World War, the devotion to "individualism and private property" at the heart of the "consensus school," and contributors to the "republican synthesis." In the second section, Peterson argued that Bailyn's book reviews as well as "articles on ideas" were by no means the first in the mid-twentieth century. This appraisal rested on multiple articles and book reviews published in the William and Mary Quarterly, which he duly cited. Peterson further argued that Bailyn's early emphasis, again in book reviews (works by Braudel and Miller), books (merchants in his dissertation and "family" in Education in the Forming of American Society), and articles on "social and political structures" as well as "altered condition[s] of life" in British North America, shaped his principal contribution to historiography--"taking ideas seriously." This emphasis, rather than "grandiloquent theoretical statements," demonstrated Bailyn's belief (according to Peterson) that "language and rhetoric are not the only forms through which human beings express their thinking or convey their ideas," presumably even if ideas initially derived from Bailyn's notion of "formal discourse." Bailyn's early 1960s book reviews and the 1962 article clarified the insight that, in Peterson's words, "colonists' political behavior had slowly adapted to changing circumstances, but habits of mind lagged behind, until the imperial crisis jolted them to view their world in a new light." Bailyn's 1965 introduction to the Revolutionary pamphlets held that the ideas of "relatively obscure English radical scribblers" entrenched "radical whig ideology" in the 1750s "colonies." In Ideological Origins, however, Bailyn pushed the transmission date " 'as far back as the 1730s', " centering " 'dark thoughts' " as well as a "conspiratorial logic" as causes for the break between Great Britain and the "colonies." Peterson reiterated that "Bailyn focused readers' attention as nearly as possible on the exact point where gradual changes in colonial structures of economy, society, and politics, when triggered by events, forced the abandonment of older habits of mind...this was the border between experience and intellection that Bailyn's work had been aiming to find all along." Bailyn selected a "verb that he would return to repeatedly to embody this meeting point of experience and thought—to grope, as if in the dark, at the very edges of comprehension." As for the " 'contagion' of liberty," Peterson pointed out that the combination of "economic interests and racial prejudices" rendered chattel slavery "mostly immune from liberty's contagion." The second section of the review essay ended with the observation that "the separate publication of The Origins of American Politics, with its overview of the social circumstances that shaped the development of colonial political culture, distanced these arguments from Ideological Origins, when ideally they might have been a single book."[52]
The last third of Mark Peterson's review essay sustained the foregoing observation, primarily with assessments of books and articles in Bailyn's Peopling of British North America series. Peterson crucially cited the review essay, "1776: A Year of Challenge--A World Transformed," as "foreshadowing a new direction" in Bailyn's scholarship. The 1976 essay, that is, contained "elements of his future project on 'The Peopling of America.' " In an endnote, Peterson mentioned that Bailyn "returned to the Revolution" with the 1990s republication of previous essays and his Constitutional postscript, as well as "sketches of individual figures or topics as in To Begin the World Anew (2003) [which included an expanded version of the Jefferson Lecture], but never with the sustained intensity or interpretive ambition of the 1960-74 period." He concluded that "no further perfection of the union as framed by the articulated ideologies of the rebellion against Britain and 'fulfilled' in the U.S. Constitution will solve our most pressing problems, for the underlying premises about property and liberty of these eighteenth-century arguments lie at the heart of our altered condition of life."[53]
Any "republican synthesis" warrants reconsideration, including, but not limited to, debates over periodization for "the end of classical politics." Internal discordance seems manifest in the history of the idea of the Cambridge School, especially in regards to J.G.A. Pocock's dialectical call for both "global" contextualism as well as critical examination of the various "multiculturalism" iterations. Despite the conflict with Bailyn-Wood, linguistic determinism may or may not have circulated in Cambridge School contextualism as well. Similarly, Cambridge School entanglements with linguistic determinism in the contexts of the Cartesian drive for clarity ad infinitum as well as the connected, yet distinct, association between Cambridge School contextualism and concepts in historical anthropology such as cultural relativism---"contextual relativism"---also remain subjects of scholarly inquiry.[54] In a 1981 methodological essay, Pocock critiqued deconstruction, expressed "surprise" at pundits and scholars who "denounced [him] as party to a conspiracy of American ideologues," and attempted to use Raiders of the Lost Ark character interpretations of the Ark of the Covenant to illustrate his approach to history. He thought it "clear that I am not supposing a state of things in which each idiom or paradigm defines a community of persons who speak in its terms and whose thinking is governed by its presuppositions." The aims of reconstructing discourse were to illuminate political thought, not to foreclose the possibility or probability of political thought independent of a given discourse.[55] In 2004, Pocock also confirmed that "[Quentin] Skinner and I agree in a certain sympathy for the 'positive,' or as will appear, the 'republican' position." The latter "position" usually, but not always, signified modes of government rather than, for example, industrial and post-industrial North American "progressive business", free market mutualism, or collectivism in stateless societies and subcultures.[56] Mira Siegelberg maintains that the ideas of Hannah Arendt, rather than serving "as a source for the normative implications of his [later] argument—as some of his critics have claimed—Pocock placed himself in critical relation to her valorization of civic republicanism."[57]
In 1995, Bailyn delivered a lecture at La Trobe University, published the next year in Quadrant as "Context in History."
Gordon S. Wood recapitulated these arguments in reviews for The Weekly Standard, a vessel for neoconservatism during the demise of The Public Interest. Editors for the latter periodical had barred articles on U.S. civic and military action in Vietnam, publishing their perspectives on civic and military excursions abroad in Commentary instead. These barriers were lifted in the pages of the The Weekly Standard. The periodical became a forum for attempts to reconcile the domestic public interest and social imperialism with "post-industrial" critique and the securing of natural capital (related to, but distinct from, more recent GOP debates over U.S. green economy and foreign policy vis-à-vis Israel and the Middle East). The aftermath of the September 11 Attacks and War on Terror, in conjunction with the earlier Operation Desert Fox and revisions to the Clinton Doctrine, facilitated this second-stage neoconservative "reconciliation with capitalism."
J.G.A. Pocock rejoined that similar methodological criticisms of contextualism precipitated his multivolume Barbarism and Religion series, published from 1999 to 2015, on historiography drafted during the Enlightenment and its benefaction to the history of political thought. In "Theory in History: Problems in Context and Narrative," Pocock posed the most common question elicited by the application of contextualism: "What exactly are the conditions it specifies, and why does it specify these and not others?" For Pocock, "this question becomes all the more pressing as we enter the realms of practice and history, where the conditions under which, and the contexts in which, we operate can never be defined with finality...the historian has begun to resemble a post-Burkean moderate conservative, reminding us that there is always more going on than we can comprehend at any one moment and convert into either theory or practice. One has become something of a political theorist in one’s own right, advancing, and inviting others to explore, the proposition that political action and political society are always to be understood in a context of historical narrative." Pocock therefore accepted the Bailyn-Wood criticism of contextualist pasts and, in dialogical fashion, proposed that scholars study "historiography as itself a branch of political thought and theory, literature and discourse," casting this methodological criticism as an argument for a given "political theory" over another "political theory" or a variation of the same "political theory." He reflected on historians, past and present, "who study and narrate what goes on in this world; it is possible that there may be a 'political theory' which addresses the same phenomena."[58] Yet Pocock refuted, and refutes, any contention that his primary contribution to the Cambridge School was the dialogical appraisal of historiography as political thought and representations thereof.
[Research Restructuring]
Postscript. Fulfillment: A commentary on the Constitution[]
In his postscript to the 1992 edition of Ideological Origins, Bernard Bailyn deviated from Gordon S. Wood's "disingenuous Federalists" and Edmund S. Morgan's "inventing the people" in an ostensibly "national government." Bailyn echoed his student's (Wood's) framework for the "alliance of liberty and power" in various ways, but also narrated the contingent, yet inescapable, outcome of "uncertain tension" within "liberty" as ideological "fulfillment." Recent historians further studied methodologies and ideas on, for example, citizenship, the "Federalist Persuasion," suffrage as a posteriori positive or negative liberty, the Ninth Amendment, and the Eleventh Amendment. Current studies focus on the history of modes of interpretation that later contributed to contentions for strict construction and judicial interpretation of the federal Constitution.[59] A number of these recent scholars do not necessarily diverge from premises set by Bailyn and Wood, particularly for "vocabulary."[60]
During the Obama and Trump Administrations, both Bernard Bailyn and Gordon S. Wood made public comments on debates over the Second Amendment and gun control. Bailyn, for example, insisted that the framers of the federal Constitution " 'were afraid of standing armies, janissaries, or the president forming a palace guard, and they were looking for armed protection against that. The individual right to bear arms wasn't the issue.' " In a 2010 lecture at Boston College, Bailyn also admitted that the Second Amendment had been worded " 'a little ambiguously...if they'd worded it a little differently, there would never have even been a discussion.' "[61] Wood more recently clarified that, "although it's a very poorly worded amendment, the people who wrote the amendment did not draw the distinction that we do between individually owning a gun or belonging to the militia. Back then they would not have understood the distinction that many were trying to draw in the 21st century." Anti-federalist entreaties to enumerate natural rights and the concomitant lack of (slaveholder? partisan?) anti-federalist distinctions between individual gun ownership and militia membership during the Constitutional ratification debates, in conjunction with the "Federalist Persuasion" for a political economy of "liberalism," requires further elucidation. Wood did add that, regardless of whether the U.S. Supreme Court upheld statutes and case law featuring the "right of the people to keep and bear Arms" as a civil liberty, judicial review couldn't completely "stop us from trying to regulate the ownership of guns in various ways."[62]
The fiftieth anniversary of Ideological Origins elicited multiple retrospectives on the book. The wiki will conclude with an attempt to provide a summation of select essays from this pool of publications. In the pages of the 2018 New England Quarterly, Gordon S. Wood reassessed his advisor's book and continued his arguments regarding contexts.
References[]
- ^ See online copy
- ^ Bailyn, Bernard (October 1950). "The Apologia of Robert Keayne". The William and Mary Quarterly. 7 (4): 568–587. doi:10.2307/1917047. JSTOR 1917047.
- ^ Ekirch, A. Roger (October 1994). "Sometimes an Art, Never a Science, Always a Craft: A Conversation with Bernard Bailyn". The William and Mary Quarterly. 51 (4): 625–658. doi:10.2307/2946922. JSTOR 2946922.
- ^ Gradert, Kenyon (2020). Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Imagination. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. pp. 16–73. ISBN 9780226694160.
- ^ Bailyn, Bernard (Summer 1951). "Braudel's Geohistory--A Reconsideration". The Journal of Economic History. 11 (3): 277–282. doi:10.1017/S0022050700084795.
- ^ Miller, Perry (1954). "Review of Perry Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province". New England Quarterly. 27 (1): 112–118. doi:10.2307/362267. JSTOR 362267.
- ^ Ekirch, A. Roger (October 1994). "Sometimes an Art, Never a Science, Always a Craft: A Conversation with Bernard Bailyn". The William and Mary Quarterly. 51 (4): 625–658. doi:10.2307/2946922. JSTOR 2946922.
- ^ Ekirch, A. Roger (October 1994). "Sometimes an Art, Never a Science, Always a Craft: A Conversation with Bernard Bailyn". The William and Mary Quarterly. 51 (4): 625–658. doi:10.2307/2946922. JSTOR 2946922.
- ^ Bailyn, Bernard (1959). "Politics and Social Structure in Virginia" in Seventeenth-Century America: Essays in Colonial History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. pp. 90–115.
- ^ Bailyn, Bernard (1959). Massachusetts Shipping, 1697-1714: A Statistical Study. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. pp. 28, 43–44, 58–62, and 76.
- ^ Fallace, Thomas (August 2018). "The (Anti-)Ideological Origins of Bernard Bailyn's "Education in the Forming of American Society"". History of Education Quarterly. 58 (3): 315–337. doi:10.1017/heq.2018.13. S2CID 150321498.
- ^ Ellis, Jason (October 2020). "Professor Bailyn, Meet Professor Baynton: The "New Disability History" of Education". History of Education Quarterly. 60 (3): 285–294. doi:10.1017/heq.2020.38. S2CID 225481847.
- ^ Peterson, Mark (June 2021). "The Social Origins of "Ideological Origins": Notes on the Historical Legacy of Bernard Bailyn". Reviews in American History. 49 (2): 368–69. doi:10.1353/rah.2021.0034.
- ^ Bailyn, Bernard (1960). Education in the Forming of American Society. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press. pp. 3–29.
- ^ Bailyn, Bernard (1960). Education in the Forming of American Society. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press. pp. 29–49.
- ^ Gerhard, Dietrich (July 1961). "Comparative Study at Stockholm". Comparative Studies in Society and History. 3 (4): 481–483. doi:10.1017/S0010417500001158.
- ^ Sanders, Jane (Fall 1997). "Clio Confronts Conformity: The University of Washington History Department during the Cold War Era". The Pacific Northwest Quarterly. 88 (4): 185–94.
- ^ Miller, Perry (1961). The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Beacon Press ed.). Boston, MA: Harvard University Press. pp. iii–iv.
- ^ Bailyn, Bernard (1962). "Political Experience and Enlightenment Ideas in Eighteenth-Century America". American Historical Review. 67 (2): 341–44. doi:10.2307/1843427. JSTOR 1843427.
- ^ Siegelberg, Mira L. (2013). "Things Fall Apart: J.G.A. Pocock, Hannah Arendt, and the Politics of Time". Modern Intellectual History. 10 (1): 112, 118–19, 121–24, and 127–28. doi:10.1017/S1479244312000364. S2CID 145374992.
- ^ Fink, Zera S. (1945). The Classical Republicans: An Essay on the Recovery of a Pattern of Thought in Seventeenth-Century England (1 ed.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. pp. 10–16 and 53.
- ^ Fink, Z.S. (September 1942). "The Theory of the Mixed State and the Development of Milton's Political Thought". PMLA. 57 (3): 705–736.
- ^ Arendt, Hannah (1963). On Revolution. New York, NY: Viking Press. pp. 316 and 321.
- ^ Pocock, J.G.A. (October 1965). "Machiavelli, Harrington and English Political Ideologies in the Eighteenth Century". The William and Mary Quarterly. 22 (4): 551. doi:10.2307/1922910. JSTOR 1922910.
- ^ Pocock, J.G.A. (October 1965). "Machiavelli, Harrington and English Political Ideologies in the Eighteenth Century". The William and Mary Quarterly. 22 (4): 549–583. doi:10.2307/1922910. JSTOR 1922910.
- ^ Bailyn, Bernard (2017) [1967]. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Fiftieth Anniversary ed.). Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. pp. 36, 63, 81, and 84. ISBN 9780674975651.
- ^ Wood, Gordon S. (1969). Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (1 ed.). Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute. pp. 519–564 and 593–618.
- ^ Wood, Gordon S. (1966). ""Rhetoric and Reality in the American Revolution"". William and Mary Quarterly. 23 (1): 31–32. doi:10.2307/2936154. JSTOR 2936154.
- ^ Conklin, Carli (2015). "The Origins of the Pursuit of Happiness". Washington University Jurisprudence Review. 7 (2): 198, 202, and 260–62.
- ^ Bailyn, Bernard (2017) [1967]. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Fiftieth Anniversary ed.). Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. pp. 157–58. ISBN 9780674975651.
- ^ Ekirch, A. Roger (October 1994). "Sometimes an Art, Never a Science, Always a Craft: A Conversation with Bernard Bailyn". The William and Mary Quarterly. 51 (4): 625–658. doi:10.2307/2946922. JSTOR 2946922.
- ^ Bailyn, Bernard (2017) [1967]. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Fiftieth Anniversary ed.). Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. pp. 55–56, 58–59, and 72–74. ISBN 9780674975651.
- ^ Bailyn, Bernard (2017) [1967]. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Fiftieth Anniversary ed.). Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. pp. 55–56, 58–59, and 72–74. ISBN 9780674975651.
- ^ Bailyn, Bernard (1968). The Origins of American Politics. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf. pp. 6–23, 60–63, and 76–124.
- ^ Kammen, Michael G. (1987). Selvages & Biases: The Fabric of History in American Culture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. p. 129. ISBN 9780801494048.
- ^ Bailyn, Bernard (2017) [1967]. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Fiftieth Anniversary ed.). Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. p. 302. ISBN 9780674975651.
- ^ Bailyn, Bernard (1974). The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. p. 220. ISBN 9780674641617.
- ^ Kurtz, Stephen (editor). (1973). Essays on the American Revolution. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. pp. 11 and 31.
{{cite book}}:|first1=has generic name (help) - ^ Bailyn, Bernard (1962). "Political Experience and Enlightenment Ideas in Eighteenth-Century America". American Historical Review. 67 (2): 350. doi:10.2307/1843427. JSTOR 1843427.
- ^ Bailyn, Bernard. "'To Begin the World Anew:' Politics and the Creative Imagination". The Jefferson Lecture: 1998. The National Endowment for the Humanities.
- ^ Bailyn, Bernard. "'To Begin the World Anew:' Politics and the Creative Imagination". The Jefferson Lecture: 1998. The National Endowment for the Humanities.
- ^ Bailyn, Bernard. "'To Begin the World Anew:' Politics and the Creative Imagination". The Jefferson Lecture: 1998. The National Endowment for the Humanities.
- ^ Ekirch, A. Roger (October 1994). "Sometimes an Art, Never a Science, Always a Craft: A Conversation with Bernard Bailyn". The William and Mary Quarterly. 51 (4): 625–658. doi:10.2307/2946922. JSTOR 2946922.
- ^ Ekirch, A. Roger (October 1994). "Sometimes an Art, Never a Science, Always a Craft: A Conversation with Bernard Bailyn". The William and Mary Quarterly. 51 (4): 625–658. doi:10.2307/2946922. JSTOR 2946922.
- ^ Chaplin, Joyce (March 2020). "Bernard Bailyn, 97 - Memorial Minute".
- ^ Bailyn, Bernard (2020). Illuminating History: A Retrospective of Seven Decades. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company. p. 1. ISBN 9781324005841.
- ^ Bailyn, Bernard (2006). "The Search for Perfection: Atlantic Dimensions". Proceedings of the British Academy. 151: 139 and 157–158.
- ^ Wood, Gordon S. (January 2011). "No Thanks for the Memories: A Review of 'The Whites of Their Eyes' By Jill Lepore". New York Review of Books.
- ^ Stromberg, Joseph (1982). "Country Ideology, Republicanism, and Libertarianism: The Thought of John Taylor of Caroline". The Journal of Libertarian Studies. 6 (1): 35–48.
- ^ Kurtz, Stephen (editor). (1973). Essays on the American Revolution. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. pp. 11 and 31.
{{cite book}}:|first1=has generic name (help) - ^ Ekirch, A. Roger (October 1994). "Sometimes an Art, Never a Science, Always a Craft: A Conversation with Bernard Bailyn". The William and Mary Quarterly. 51 (4): 650–51. doi:10.2307/2946922. JSTOR 2946922.
- ^ Peterson, Mark (June 2021). "The Social Origins of Ideological Origins: Notes on the Historical Legacy of Bernard Bailyn". Reviews in American History. 49 (2): 360–75. doi:10.1353/rah.2021.0034.
- ^ Peterson, Mark (June 2021). "The Social Origins of Ideological Origins: Notes on the Historical Legacy of Bernard Bailyn". Reviews in American History. 49 (2): 374–87. doi:10.1353/rah.2021.0034.
- ^ Pocock, J.G.A. (January 2019). "On the Unglobality of Contexts: Cambridge Methods and the History of Political Thought". Global Intellectual History. 4 (1): 1–14. doi:10.1080/23801883.2018.1523997. S2CID 159264164.
- ^ Pocock, J.G.A. (1981). "The Reconstruction of Discourse: Towards the Historiography of Political Thought". Modern Language Notes. 96 (5): 959–80.
- ^ Pocock, J.G.A. (Fall 2004). "Quentin Skinner: The History of Politics and the Politics of History". Common Knowledge. 10 (3): 542. doi:10.1215/0961754X-10-3-532.
- ^ Siegelberg, Mira L. (2013). "Things Fall Apart: J.G.A. Pocock, Hannah Arendt, and the Politics of Time". Modern Intellectual History. 10 (1): 112. doi:10.1017/S1479244312000364. S2CID 145374992.
- ^ Pocock, J.G.A. (2011). "Theory in History: Problems of Context and Narrative". The Oxford Handbook of Political Science: 102–10. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199604456.013.0004.
- ^ Gienapp, Jonathan (2018). The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. ISBN 9780674185043.
- ^ Bailyn, Bernard (1967). The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. pp. 44 (note).
- ^ Reich, David (Spring 2010). "A More Perfect Union?". bcm.bc.edu. Boston College Magazine.
- ^ Cunningham, Lillian (November 2017). "Transcription of Constitutional Podcast: Episode 11". Washington Post.
 |
Wikiquote has quotations related to: The Ideological Origins... |
- 1967 non-fiction books
- American history books
- History books about the American Revolution
- Works about the history of political thought
- 20th-century history books
- Harvard University Press books
- Pulitzer Prize for History-winning works