by Bernard Bailyn
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Product Description
In this 25th anniversary edition, Bailyn has added a substantial essay, "Fulfillment", as a Postscript to the original text. In it he discusses the intense, nation-wide debate on the ratification of the constitution, stressing the continuities between that struggle over the foundations of the national government and the original principles of the Revolution. This study of the persistence of the nation's ideological origins adds a new dimension to the book and projects its meaning forward into vital present concerns. Bailyn is author of "The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson" which won the National Book Award and "Voyagers to the West" which won the Pulitzer Prize for History.
Amazon.com Review
The leaders of the American Revolution, writes the distinguished historian Bernard Bailyn, were radicals. But their concern was not to correct inequalities of class or income, not to remake the social order, but to "purify a corrupt constitution and fight off the apparent growth of prerogative power." They wished, in other words, to mend a broken system and improve upon it. In doing so they drew on many traditions of political and social thought, ranging from English conservative philosophers to exponents of the continental Enlightenment, from backward-looking interpretations of ancient Roman civilization to forward-looking views of a new American people. Bailyn carefully examines these sources of sometimes conflicting ideas and considers how the framers of the Constitution resolved them in their inventive doctrine of federalism.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
The great conspiracy, 2008-11-09
No phase of American history has attracted such talented and distinguished historians and produced such quality scholarship as the revolutionary period. This Pulitzer Prize winning history by Bernard Bailyn is a significant proof point.
Bailyn crafts his thesis around the concept of liberty and what it meant to the colonists. He frames the issue of liberty as being a tenuous balance between power, an aggressive force that had an insatiable appetite, and law or natural rights, an inherently passive force that requires vigilant protection. Bailyn maintains that the colonists developed their worldview from four primary sources: 1) the ancients, especially Cato and Cicero; 2) the Enlightenment, especially Locke and Rousseau; 3) English common law, especially Coke and Bacon; and 4) the radical English writers after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, especially Algernon Sidney and John Trenchard. Given their reading and understanding of these authors, a number of separate events and trends were perceived by the colonists as increasing evidence of conspiracy to deprive them of liberty and this is what ultimately led to the revolution, or so Bailyn argues. There were no less than seven such warning signs.
First, in 1763 the Anglican Church attempted to establish an American episcopate. Although many colonists were members of the Church others, such as Bostonian Jonathan Mayhew, saw the proposed episcopate as a veiled attempt to root out Presbyterianism and establish greater Crown control in the colonies. And the influential Enlightenment writers, such as Locke, warned of the oppressive effects of clergy on liberty.
Second, the Stamp Act of 1765 was seen as a danger signal of encroaching monarchal and ministerial authority. Some saw it as merely a pretense to incite revolt and thus provide a reason for intervention, while others argued it was a first small step in implementing wide-ranging restrictions on colonial behavior.
Third, extension of executive patronage throughout the colonies smacked of the corruption debilitating the home government back in London. Moreover, the officials were largely an inferior lot only too willing to bend to any and all ministerial demands.
Fourth, around this time attempts were made by colonial executive governments to undermine the colonial judicial system by refusing lifetime tenures to local judges and requests to have jury decisions open to appeal by the colonial executive authority, which was part of the colonial executive patronage system cited above.
Fifth, the power and jurisdiction of the vice admiralty courts overseeing the new rules regulating colonial trade were expanded. This issue was exacerbated by the fact that appointees were again part of the patronage system and often held multiple offices in the colonial administration, thus tightening the grip of the ministry on colonial affairs.
Sixth, the prosecution of political radical John Wilkes in London had a profound affect on the colonists' perceptions of government intension, Bailyn writes. Wilkes had fought tirelessly against Parliament's infringement on liberty and he used many of the same arguments as the colonists in excoriated the patronage system. Wilkes was deprived of his seat in Parliament even though he was fairly elected several times and he was ultimately imprisoned for his beliefs. Wilkes' arrest served as a harbinger of what was to come to those who opposed the ministry's new actions.
Finally, the arrival of British troops in Boston in 1768 at the request of colonial governor Bernard was viewed as definitive proof of a governmental conspiracy against liberty. Indeed, the presence of a standing army was widely perceived as a prerequisite for the imposition of tyrannical rule. The course of events in Denmark a century before when parliamentary liberties were curtailed still shone as a cautionary tale on the danger of executive power.
Thus, unconstitutional taxes, an invasion of placemen, encroachment of the established church, multiple office-holding by non-colonists, diluting the power of the local judiciary, the forceful suppression of Wilkes, and then a standing army - it all added to a conspiracy against liberty that needed to be opposed at the risk of life and home.
For anyone interested in gaining a better understanding of the events that led to the creation of the United States, there is no better place to start than here.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
The Story of America Begins With Bernard Bailyn, 2008-04-19
Bernard Bailyn's seminal Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece is the starting point to understanding the central theme of American political thought -- the struggle of Liberty versus Power.
In particular, it demonstrates the crucial role Cato's Letters played in shaping the minds of our Founders in formenting our American Revolution.
Read Murray N. Rothbard's four volume history of Colonial America, Conceived In Liberty, as a magnificent follow up to Bailyn's beginning.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
 Brilliant - for its time, 2007-09-22
Bernard Bailyn's Ideological Origins of the American Revolution is a centerpiece in much, if not all, of contemporary historians' viewpoints and methodologies for understanding the philosophical constructs and ideological underpinnings of the American Revolution. It was, according to Bailyn and many learned historians, after this writing first appeared in 1967, a revolution of ideas. What Bailyn did was to read prodigious amounts of writings of the time, mostly in the form of pamphlets and synthesize the thoughts that were being discussed and written about at the time. Essentially, he put the revolution of ideas into the context of the time. That was, some forty years ago, revolutionary within of itself.
Many of today's more serious readers of the period have read much of Bailyn and Gordon Wood indirectly, if not directly reading their own work. Both have been that influential in the field. The "disappointment" in this book is caused by Bailyn's own success, ironically enough. It was his work, along with select others, who began to pay attention to history within its own context - that is what was occurring in life and politics at the time rather than a chronological and linear view of the time. More of an interdisciplinary viewpoint and, as such, more accessible to the reader. Since the time of its first publication, many others have emulated its style (a good idea) but made its rather seismic effects at the time, feel much less so today. Effectively so much hype over the years (deserved then and de rigor today) makes for more than a bit of a letdown for today's readers. That said, those truly interested in the ideas, the philosophies, and their interpretations and misinterpretations of the day are well served reading Bailyn. Others should approach the read with caution as it is fairly dense but filled with moments of sheer academic brilliance.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Still a standard!, 2007-05-30
Research on a previous project provided Bernard Bailyn an intellectual treasure trove of over 400 pamphlets, written between 1763 and 1776, from which he crafted his Bancroft and Pulitzer Prize-winning The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992). This work, first published in 1967, remains a standard volume for students of early American studies at all university levels. Bailyn crafted a pointed examination of thoughts of American colonial leaders that culminated into the Revolution. Not only is his analysis wide-ranging, but it explores the depth and fallaciousness of eighteenth-century American revolutionary rationale with force and clarity.
Bailyn lays out the basic argument in the book's sixth sentence: "The ideology of the Revolution, derived from many sources, was dominated by a peculiar strand of British political thought" (v). Around this central thought, Bailyn details the convergence of thought that formed the colonists' case for a break from the British empire; he explains the change over time in American thinking on long-held political views; he highlights contemporary issues, i.e. chattel slavery and established religion, that gained argumentative force from the colonials' complaints against the British Parliament; and he illustrates the difficulties that Revolutionary thinking posed for participants of the Constitutional Convention who sought to replace British authority with a central American government.
The first part of the book describes the vehicle, voice, and ideological basis of the Revolution. The leaders of the Revolution propagated their thoughts through newspapers, broadsides, and almanacs. The primary writing form of the Revolution, however, was the pamphlet, which allowed polemicists of all different vocations to broaden the political debate. The American revolutionary pamphlets, though a "distinctive literature of the Revolution," had roots in seventeenth-century American sermon publishing and early eighteenth-century English polemical pamphleteering techniques.
The Revolutionary crisis did not originate during the crisis period from 1763 to 1776. Elements of the discourse had been long present in the colonies, but the post-1763 turmoil fused the ideas into "a comprehensive view, unique in its moral and intellectual appeal" (22). Bailyn nods to the intellectual influences on colonial leaders from quotations of classical writers, a rather superficial knowledge of the Enlightenment, citations of English common law, and the covenant theology of New England Puritanism. One of Bailyn's significant contributions to the present thinking on eighteenth-century American revolutionary thought is his understanding that "the ultimate origins of the this distinctive ideological strain lay in the radical social and political thought of the English Civil War and of the Commonwealth period" (34). He identifies early eighteenth-century English radical writers, such as John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, as shaping the mind of the American Revolutionary generation more than any other single group.
Change in America did not begin to happen only with the Revolution; it began a century before and progressed slowly. Bailyn constructs an intellectual chronology of Revolutionary thought that consists of three phases, beginning with the years of Anglo-American struggle before 1776, the execution of state constitutions from 1776 through the 1780s, and the crafting and ratifying of a national constitution. The final section of the book exquisitely displays the difficulties encountered by participants at the Constitution Convention to form a federal system of government in the wake of the force of argument put forth at the Continental Congress against the encroaching powers of a central government. Bailyn's discussions of imperium in imperio bookend with sheer mastery his understanding of the entangling intellectual obstacles which American colonists laboriously yet successfully maneuvered to produce the Revolution and the Constitution.
Throughout the Revolutionary period corruption served as the greatest threat to liberty, and, according the federalist view, a constitution establishing a government endowed with the separation of powers would ensure the existence of virtue, the necessary attribute for the sustenance of liberty within a republic. One area of frustration throughout the book is the use of terms like "corruption" and "virtue" that portrays an almost given denotation of such enigmatic expressions.
A true gem within the book is Bailyn's demonstration that the colonial leaders could not contain revolutionary fervor. Opponents of chattel slavery in America and proponents of religious disestablishment used the American leaders' own arguments for freedom from the British Parliament and taxation without representation to assail the continuation of the slave trade and ecclesiastical taxation against religious dissenters.
Bailyn's The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution is nothing less than a most persuasive, brilliantly crafted work that will influence the way Americans think about the Revolution for years to come.
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
A spark in the study of the Revolution, 2006-03-22
This is a book that all students of the American Revolution should be forced to read. Without understanding Bailyn's argument, that the "conspiracy against liberty" was the main reason why America decided to break away from the British Empire, a student will be forever lost in trying to understand the roots of the American Revolution. Almost all of the books on the outbreak of the American Revolution have had to take Bailyn's argument into consideration; so, if you're interested in the study of the American Revolution, then this book is an imperative read. Read T.H. Breen's "The Marketplace of Revolution" after this book, and you'll have a decent grasp of the roots of the American Revolution.
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