The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

...For, although the current generation of scholars has established the importance of political theory for the American Founders, there are many unanswered questions and even unsolved mysteries about the manner in which great Framers like Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton, and Madison understood thinkers like Locke and Montesquieu...

...This thesis is Bailyn's most original contribution, but the most important part of his work comes later, as he shows how this essentially English theory was transformed and deepened as Americans applied it to their own political problems...

...He even allows that the colonials paid great attention to Montesquieu's extended discussion of the subject (which John Adams, for one, bragged that he committed to memory in its entirety...

...Yet it must be added that in spite of the book's great virtues, it does not tell the whole story...

...The chapter "Transformation" in fact should make truly exciting reading for anyone with a spark of interest in the origin of the American political order...

...Becker, Charles Beard, and Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., tried to fit the debates of the Revolution and Convention periods into their own preoccupation with class conflict and the twentieth-century struggle for democracy...

...Although these radical Whig attacks on parliamentary corruption and declining civic virtue were peripheral to English politics, they had broad influence on the more austere colonial audience...

...The footnotes show too much McIlwain and not enough Montesquieu...

...Thanks to Bailyn's careful reading and sensitive interpretation, one can see the great constitutional ideas of 1787 emerge in embryo from the pre-Revolutionary polemics...

...A thoughtful look at this work, in the spirit of Bailyn, is the best way any citizen can celebrate the Bicentennial...

...Professor Bailyn is a member of the Bicentennial generation of scholars who have rescued the political thought of the Founding Fathers from a sort of Dark Ages of "liberal" historiography...

...the representation of the people in the legislature by deputies of their own election—these are either wholly new discoveries or have made their principal progress towards perfection in modern times...

...Both groups of scholars are pursuing the same goal...

...7172) that a similar transition is visible in Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws, in what Bailyn calls a "partial and confused mingling of the idea of the mixed state with the modern idea of the separation of powers...

...Their historical writing The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution by Bernard Bailyn The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (1967) $2.95 (paper) also served an immediate political purpose: because the programs of the Progressive movement had been repeatedly attacked in the name of the Constitution, Progressive scholars sought to weaken the intellectual authority of the leaders of the Constitutional Convention...

...Thus, Carl *Perry Miller's major work dealt with seventeenth-century Puritan thought, not with the Founders, but he demonstrated brilliantly that the American intellectual heritage was richer and deeper than anyone had realized...

...In his first section, following up the sources that these pamphlets 30 The Alternative: An American Spectator August/ September 1976 most frequently cited, Bailyn delineates a coherent body of colonial thought, derived from the writings of the early eighteenth-century Opposition in England...

...It is a weakness of modern historical writing...

...Bailyn's book, as recent American history students must know, is based on an intensive reading of the vast pamphlet literature that led up to and surrounded the events of 1776...

...His contribution has been too massive to be noticed much by the media...

...if the word is used in its modern, Marxian sense, a body of epiphenomenal thought generated by underlying social and economic relations, then it interferes fatally with the attempt to understand eighteenth-century Americans as they understood themselves...

...As Progressives and New Dealers, they were more interested in the social and economic interests for which (they thought) principled arguments were merely a cover...

...Even in its limited sense, the study of the origin and nature of ideas, "ideology" is an artifact of an outlook somewhat alien to the American colonial and revolutionary spirit...

...But the matter rests there...

...From 1900 until about 1950, leading professional historians gave astonishingly crude and slipshod treatment to the theoretical political debates of the eighteenth James Ring Adams is on the editorial staff of the Wall Street Journal...

...They are bringing to light the peculiar force of political ideas on the origin of the American Republic...

...We have here a concise account of part of that development that Alexander Hamilton acknowledged in Federalist Number 9: "The science of politics...

...From their work, and from Bailyn's book in particular, one derives a sense of wonder at the Founding...

...Bailyn in return has provided the political scientists with a broad range of fresh and highly interesting material...

...century...

...like most other sciences has received great improvement...

...Yet it's ungenerous to criticize Bailyn on points which are somewhat out of his domain...

...It may derive ultimately from the tenuous and tricky ways in which political philosophy influences public opinion...

...For example, Bailyn makes the sensible argument that the colonials, who at first admired the liberty-preserving balance of the English constitution, based on an equilibrium of different social orders, gradually came, because of their egalitarian condition, to seek that balance by assigning separate types of power to separate institutions of government...

...His work, however, stands as a final, comprehensive refutation of the notion, expressed by the eider Schlesinger, that the men who "dominated colonial opinion" were, like "all practical men of affairs...

...Bailyn has shown decisively what Morgan and Perry Miller first began to argue, that the American colonials and revolutionary leaders were men who took political ideas seriously and whose ideas had consequences...

...This revolutionary generation was forced to confront the most basic political problems, on both a practical and theoretical level, in circumstances almost without historical parallel...

...The regular distribution of power into distinct departments—the introduction of legislative balances and checks...

...It was quite precisely a matter of life or death whether they would solve them...

...To the extent that this progress grew out of the American experience, Bailyn has given us the story...

...As a result, Bailyn too quickly attributes ideas to a vague climate of opinion when they can be traced fairly precisely to The Spirit of the Laws...

...No one can pass judgment on their solutions without admitting that, 200 years later, their work is still around to examine...

...This generation includes political scientists like Martin Diamond, Harry V. Jaffa, and 'Herbert J. Storing, historians like Edmund S. Morgan, and, above all, the late Perry Miller (possibly the greatest American historian of this century...

...Leave those questions to the political scientists like Diamond and Storing and respect the historians for remaining open to the suggestions that these other scholars have offered...

...This problem, however, is not Bailyn's fault...

...The problem appears in the book's anachronistic title, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution...

...contemptuous, if not fearful, of disputes upon questions of abstract right...

...Promising lines of thought too often stop short with the phrase, "it was generally agreed...

...The word "ideology" itself, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, first came into use in 1796, at the tail end of the French Revolution...

...This year's festivities are shallow and beside the point compared to the truly worthy acts of commemoration and rededication performed in academic cloisters during the past twenty-five years, acts of which Bernard Bailyn's scholarship is an outstanding example...

...He admits in a passing footnote (on pp...

...they simply ignored the considerable body of material that confuted this approach...

...This distorted and occasionally dishonest interpretation started to fall apart in the early 1950s under the pressure of work like Edmund Morgan's study of the Stamp Tax Crisis, so Professor Bailyn, publishing this book in 1967, is a relative latecomer...

...Even though he had the courage to read the colonials' pamphlets unblinkered by current scholarly opinion, he shows an unsettling willingness to rely on secondary sources when he comes to the great political thinkers on whom the Americans drew...

...however these men might span the political spectrum in their personal beliefs, they have all helped restore intellectual vitality to a field rendered arid since the turn of the century by the ideological prejudice of the Progressive Era and the New Deal...

...The efficacy of various principles is now well understood, which were either not known at all, or imperfectly known to the ancients...

...The reader is left unaware that even the modern idea of separation of powers has its ambiguous features, with which, thanks to Montesquieu, some Founders were thoroughly familiar...

...And, in spite of Bailyn's admirable and mostly successful attempt to rise above this prejudice, which so blinded the Progressives, even he has paid a price...

...The Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 1976 31...