A collection of essays addressing aspects of Bernard Bailyn’s
- Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
, on the occasion of its 50th anniversary of publication. The work has stood up quite well, notwithstanding the radical changes in historical fashion.
• Bailyn: the author writes of his continuing interest in those moments when familiar words / constructs take on new meanings, and still holds the Revolution’s primary interest was safeguarding liberty against power and corruption
• Rakove: Bailyn cut the Gordian knot of ideas versus economics as the tumult’s driver by demonstrating attitudes had already changed and how these changes explain actual events
• Slauter: Perry Miller influenced Bailyn to consider Puritan writings along with classical and Enlightenment documents
• Wood: The Patriots were more involved in social revolution than Ideological Origins acknowledges, since in the 18th century society and government were indivisible. (French Revolutionary theorists faced the problem of ‘modern’ private property separate of government power.) He got the political thought right not but the social change. That is, Bailyn’s student is enunciating the thesis of his Radicalism of the American Revolution
• Even if ideas don’t cause behavior, one needn’t entirely concede the impetus to materialist or psychological factors (i.e., hidden motivations)
• Bilder: Bailyn pinpointed the process of America’s discovery the virtue of written constitution
• Nelson: For Burke, the American Revolution was borne not of theory but by practice and consequently of the people’s character
• Political though and political consciousness are distinct. 18th-century America saw the world as it di not because it was an ideological support for its way of life and society but because they were 18th-century Americans
• Pincus: In an interesting comparison to contemporary Irish politics, asserts the upheaval of the 1770s-80s exhibits political discourse very similar to the American Revolutionary era (e.g., corruption, liberty, virtue). Grattan’s failure to push through a Billing of rights in 1780 marked the turning from Stormont to the Volunteers, analogous to the Committees of Correspondence. But Pincus carries too far in suggesting the American process was ‘not exceptional’ – there is no record of 150 years, as in America