In this excerpt, Bailyn explores the way contemporary skeptics in the 1770s, such as Loyalist Reverend Jonathan Boucher, depicted the American Revolution as nothing short of ushering in anarchy, or a complete absence of authority, coercion or deference. In the spiraling disagreement, Americans’ attacks on traditional institutions of government, first on the legitimacy of Parliament in the 1760s and later of the king in the 1770s, left the very idea of authority shattered and in need of rebuilding. The central issue was taxation by that body when the colonists had no representatives in it – “no taxation without representation.” It grew to include a fear, driven by a paradigmatic understanding Americans had absorbed from radical Whig literature of how power corrupts a society, and of the Parliament subverting all treasured English liberties, from jury trials to the right not to have one’s home invaded by the army. It retained, since the English Revolution of 1688, the power of the purse and the ability to deprive the Crown of funds for its army.īailyn’s work charted how American colonists had to reconfigure these ideas during their conflict with Parliament in the 1760s. In England, Parliament was the bulwark of liberty against the encroachment of the king’s power. In this fight, the Crown had the standing army with its violent power and its temptations of status and income for young men. Its central axiom was that power was in a constant struggle with liberty that the king represented power and the people liberty and that the preservation of liberty against power required the cultivation of civic virtue, or a willingness to give up one’s own self-interest, and resist the seductions of power and favors from the king, for the mutual preservation of shared rights. Primarily a study of American political pamphlet writing between 17, Bailyn’s book discovered a root of the American Revolution in a particular strain of political literature that American colonial political writings seemed to constantly reference, the “radical Whig” or “Commonwealth tradition” that had emerged from the bitter English Civil War of the seventeenth century. The resonance of his Ideological Origins, therefore, seems its own evidence that the Revolution he described has not ended, that the American Revolutionary project, as he laid it out in these pages, was alive in the 1960s when he originally wrote them, and remains alive and even larger and loftier in its aspirations today, though it also remains fragile and always in danger of perishing, like all living creations. Bailyn studiously avoided and constantly denied any direct engagement between his work and contemporary politics, either in the 1960s or in the sixty more years before his death. Though published over fifty years ago, in 1967, the themes charted in Bernard Bailyn’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, are so crucial to the American experiment in governance and the nation’s ongoing Revolution of equality, liberty, and self-government that they seem almost as if they might have been written to pointedly address our current concerns. Bernard Bailyn (1922-2020), who died on Aug. Mead, reflects on the influential work of Harvard University professor Dr. In this special installment of Read the Revolution, our chief historian, Dr.
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