The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution by Bernard Bailyn

Richard Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” of 1964 makes a similar, though more historically wide-ranging, point. Just as that 21st century mob believed that the ratification of a supposedly corrupt election needed to be stopped, so too did 18th century republican radicals believe that the Coercive Acts passed by British Parliament in 1774 were designed “to enslave America and the same minister who means to enslave them would, if he had an opportunity, enslave England.” Bailyn was by no means the only distinguished historian of American politics to note this conspiratorial tendency. Indeed one of the principal points that Bailyn makes in The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution is that conspiracies about secret cabals were foundational to the American republic, making the conspiratorial motivation of the mob that recently assaulted the Capitol sadly fitting. Reading his famous book in early 2021, for instance, amid the recent chaos at the US Capitol, raises abiding questions about corruption and empire, conspiracy and ideology, themes that evidently still haunt American politics today. Piranesi’s ‘Views of Rome’ to Trump supporters at the US Capitolīernard Bailyn passed away in 2020, marking the end of one of the great careers of an American intellectual historian. Much like the rebel pamphlets that he studied so closely, Bailyn asserts, Piranesi’s images reveal a fascination with ancient Rome’s tradition of republicanism and with the corruption that brought that tradition to an end. He then goes on to point to Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s famous views of Rome as emblematic of the sentiment towards the ancient world that lurked behind the American colonies’ decision to break with the British crown. Quoting the letters’ assertion that “words are too weak” to express the magnitude of the impact of the history of ancient Rome on the 18th century republican mind, Bailyn wonders if pictures might come closer to the mark. Towards the end of his retrospection, Bailyn underlines the importance of the reception of ancient Roman republicanism among the American revolutionaries and cites one of the most well-known expressions of whiggish sentiment of the time-Trenchard and Gordon’s essays from the 1720s known as Cato’s Letters.

In the preface to the 50th anniversary edition of his Pulitzer prize winning study, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, the Harvard historian Bernard Bailyn reflects back on his book’s original argument of 1967, one based on an unprecedented attention to the language and rhetoric of the manifold political pamphlets that circulated in the American colonies between 17.

The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution by Bernard Bailyn