bailyn the ideological origins of the american revolution

Bolingbroke and Hume are sometimes lumped together with radical reformers, and secondary figures like Burlamaqui are treated on a level with Locke.” The great English legal theorist Sir Edward Coke was frequently, but similarly, cited, an important but not a decisive voice. “Locke is cited often with precision on points of political theory, but at other times he is referred to in the most offhand way, as if he could be relied on to support anything the writers happened to be arguing. “The citations are plentiful, but the knowledge they reflect, like that of the ancient classics is superficial,” Bailyn concludes. Voltaire, Rousseau, and more conservative voices like that of Montesquieu or Locke, all were cited in many pamphlets.

Much the same could be said of the great Enlightenment figures of Europe. They contributed a vivid vocabulary but not the logic or grammar of thought, a universally respected personification but not the source of political and social beliefs.” “The classics of the ancient world are everywhere in the literature of the Revolution,” Bailyn writes, “but they are everywhere illustrative, not determinative, of thought. Plato and Pliny, Sophocles and Cicero, Aristotle and Tacitus, all made their way into the eighteenth century pamphlets. He notes that these late colonial authors almost invariably cited classical writers and thinkers, but sometimes in a superficial way, like window dressing. Bailyn notes the wide range of sources they invoked to make their arguments, first in opposition to imperial controls from London, then for independence, and finally for the kind of government they wished to erect.

The founding fathers were nothing if not literate. This was the genesis of his seminal work The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, published in 1967. And, in going over the pamphlets, Bailyn became fascinated by the sources of the arguments the Americans employed and cited.

They permitted their authors to explain not only what they supported as the crisis with Great Britain unfolded, but why they supported it. Pamphlets were common in those days, the mid-eighteenth century equivalent of a blog: affordable, accessible and, most of all, explanatory. In the 1960s, Bernard Bailyn was invited to edit some late colonial pamphlets for publication.

Bailyn the ideological origins of the american revolution