The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution

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. 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."[1] 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" that fueled the singular "New England mind."[2]

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.[3]

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..."[4] 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."[5]

At the time of writing The New England Mind review, Bernard 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."[6]

During 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. 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.

Bailyn described his 1950s colleagues at the center as an "excellent group." They were "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, however slight, 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." [Drafting]

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." [Drafting]

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.

In 1957, Bernard 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 Royal 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.[7]

After 1676, kinship and intermarriage between Royal Council gentry families and gentry in the House of Burgesses rendered said 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."[8]

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.

[Research Restructuring]

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. The study of an "ideology" that deemphasized pre-linguistic cognition, reemphasized linguistic determinism, and included "libertarianism" as a paleonym, instead of an anachronistic homograph or a descriptive and pre-Kantian ontological reduction to free will, have yet to be fully substantiated. In Ideological Origins, Bailyn adhered to change through linear time as well, although he did not discuss notions of historical time and acceleration.[11] Late twentieth-century articles on the eighteenth-century Country Party, published in the Journal of Libertarian Studies, additionally touted "libertarian republicanism" and "Libertarian Republicans" within temporality, which may or may not reconfigure understandings of Libertarian Republican partisanship.[12] Please note, however, that "classical republicanism" derived from res publica and that Hannah Arendt, author of On Revolution, and J.G.A. Pocock, author of The Machiavellian Moment, claimed that literati Zera S. Fink's 1945 study, The Classical Republicans, on a "Venetian vogue" for "stability" by mixed government, and the 1942 article in which Fink examined il Discorsi passages translated in the works of James Harrington, partially germinated their research into "republican" ideas.[13] Likewise, 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. During the 1940s, Adair had authored a series of essays on what he described as "republican" thought as well as the notion of famous "founding fathers."[14]

In 1994, Bailyn responded to inquiries regarding his own expression of "American exceptionalism," specifically in the Peopling of British North America series. Bailyn observed that "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."[15]

The notion of subjective, rather than linguistic determinist, contexts and "utterances" revealed conflicts between Bailyn and additional intellectual historians of the American Revolution. In 1995, Bailyn delivered a lecture at La Trobe University, published the next year in Quadrant as "Context in History," later rejoined by Cambridge School historian J.G.A. Pocock, author of The Machiavellian Moment, as well as by critics of Cartesian doubt ad infinitum as a vehicle for challenging contextualism. 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. The association between Cambridge School contextualism, positivism in empirical philosophy, and concepts in historical anthropology such as cultural relativism---"contextual relativism"---also remain subjects of scholarly inquiry.[Drafting][16]

After the 2000 United States presidential election and the advent of manifold neoconservatism, Gordon S. Wood cited and recapitulated Bailyn's arguments on "Context in History" in reviews for The Weekly Standard, a vessel for neoconservatism during the demise of The Public Interest. Editors for the latter periodical had previously excluded their own writings 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 Weekly Standard. [Continued]

In a 2006 paper read at the British Academy, Bailyn contended that Isaiah 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", which paralleled atomic age Kreminology prior to the transitology of Putin political economy. Bailyn decried "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---including left-wing populism, right-wing populism, populist libertarianism, and "elite" significations---this conclusion addressed. That stated, the paper focused on "perfectionist ideas" in his interpretation of positive liberty.[17] 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."[18]

In 1967, 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."[24]

Bailyn rested his interpretation on modifications to, but not rejection of, the "social question" in the "liberty" of assembly and voluntary association (including Gordon S. Wood's initial interpretation of "the people out-of-doors"). 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. In Ideological Origins, Bailyn noted that "...in no obvious sense was the American Revolution [deliberately] 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."[25]

Only months after publication of his approach to "society" in Ideological Origins, Bailyn fulfilled a promise from the conclusion to a 1957 presentation on "Politics and Social Structure in Virginia." In three Charles K. Clover lectures delivered at Brown University, Bailyn 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 roles 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 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 his sociopolitical prelude to, and framework for, "society" in The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution.[26]

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. 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 challenged dichotomies, yet also posed an ontological singularity of "liberty." This "liberty" derived from a pre-Socratic unity of opposites in linguistic determinism, rather than reductionism or contemporary associations of unity with common examples of syncretic politics. These examples may or may not be appropriate for the "syncretic" designator and have been the subject of critique.[27]

The "colonists" interpreted and appropriated ideas in tracts by Country Party pundits on all sides of the eighteenth-century "left" 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."[28]

Bailyn further examined the meanings of "power" in the pamphlets of the American Revolution. " 'Power' to them," Bailyn maintained, "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)." Yet any equation of words with ideas, or nascent criticism thereof in studies of "power," by scholars and critics of discursive psychology, critical discourse analysis, cyberfeminism, affect theory, ideographs, governmentality, and New Historicism, warrant further examination and evidence.[29]

An offshoot of "power" was "sovereignty," the pamphlet meanings of which Bailyn held as "the question of the nature and location of the ultimate power in the state..unqualified, indivisible power was, however, only one part of the notion of sovereignty as it was understood by Englishmen on the eve of the American Revolution. The other concerns its location. Who, or what body, was to hold such powers?" According to Bailyn, this question, along with inquiries into "internal" and "external sovereignty," generated countless deliberations over "sovereignty" and the solecism of an imperium-in-imperio, sovereignty-within-sovereignty, which Bailyn elucidated further in his 1992 Postscript, advancing "fulfillment" instead of a "Federalist Persuasion." He updated his approach to "sovereignty" in "Politics and the Creative Imagination" as well. Nevertheless, the first edition of the book concluded with " the belief that ' imperium in imperio ' was a solecism and the assumption that the 'sovereignty of the people' and the sovereignty of an organ of government were of the same order of things would remain to haunt the efforts of those who would struggle to build a stable system of federal government. But the initial challenges to the traditional eighteenth-century notion of sovereignty had been made."[30]

Bailyn examined pamphlets on "slavery" for his book. [Continued]

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.[39]

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.[40]

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.[41] 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."[42]

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 section. 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 1993, Bernard Bailyn presented a paper at the American Philosophical Society on "Jefferson and the Ambiguities of Freedom." Bailyn's aim, stated at the beginning of the presentation, was to reconcile Thomas Jefferson, the "fabled egalitarian" and "ultimate libertarian," with Thomas Jefferson, an aging advocate for the "expansion of slavery into the southwestern states" as well as the supporter of loyalty oaths, university curriculum that only accorded with his own perspectives, and endorser of executive orders for "the threat of armed force."

In February 1998, shortly after Congressional passage of the Taxpayer Relief Act, and on the eve of Operation Desert Fox as well as U.S. New Democrat proposals for the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, Bernard Bailyn delivered the inaugural White House Millennium Lecture on the "deeper past" and the "founding of the nation." Jack N. Rakove, Bailyn's doctoral student, had served as an advisor to Chelsea Clinton at Stanford University. The lecture explained how "we Americans" were, are, and will be "contemporaries of," and contemporaneous with, figures such as John Adams and the "American Revolutionary ideology." Bailyn went "straight to the point: that in our public life we Americans, though we are often described as a young nation, with a shallow history, in fact live remarkably close to our past, and I mean the deeper past, reaching back 400 years to the first settlements of Europeans on mainland North America and 200 years to the founding of the nation." He reminded his audience that, "despite all the differences that separate our world from the eighteenth century, we are contemporaries of Adams in venerating government but fearing power, and in protecting rights that can never be finally defined or limited in number. But we are contemporaries of our deeper past in an even more complex and profound way." Bailyn argued that [continued][43]

In October 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. 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."[44]

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."[45]

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."[46]