Bernard Bailyn's The Ideological Origins Of The American Revolution

Bernard Bailyn’s book, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, is a study into where the intellectual ideas behind American revolutionary thought originated and from where the revolutionaries took their inspiration. It is based on Baily’s extensive research and study of pamphlets in the decades preceding 1783. Bailyn’s main thesis is that the revolution was an ideological and political struggle rather than a desire for economic or social upheaval, caused in main by the influence of English thought mainly via religious ideas, common law and classical literature. Principally, through his study of the pamphlets Bailyn reaches the conclusion that the revolution was driven by a deep fear of a plot against liberty which had been ‘nourished

He claims that the fears, complaints and insecurities found in the authors of these publications represented popular opinion across the country. In chapter one, he points out the importance of the pamphlets he studied and what they offer for an historical understanding of the period. A polemic medium, the pamphlet for Bailyn represented the popular resentment driven by the imported ideologies of England. He shows that they were set out to be persuasive rather than literary appreciated, and that the period before independence marked some of the best creative output in American history, with everything politically orientated built upon this. Bailyn repeatedly pushes his thesis that the revolution sought to preserve liberty than overthrow the social order, using it to synthesis his ideas and impress upon the reader his overall conviction. In chapter two, Bailyn goes into greater detail on the specific ideas that the revolutionaries took with fervor from European Enlightenment figures, particularly from England. He claims that they took aspects of Enlightenment rationalism to justify a synthesis of liberal reform and enlightened conservatism, resulting in the libertarian ideology associated with the revolutionaries and the constitution. He shows how voraciously the pamphlets took hold of opposition thought, blending ancients like Cato with

While revolutionaries acknowledge the necessity of power within certain parameters of restraint, their central fear, according to Bailyn, was how the nature of man historically ends up corrupting and inflating this power. Furthermore, he adds that they feared the British use of a veteran standing army and the threat that posed to American and even British liberties.
Chapter four, the logic of rebellion, sets out to show how the events initiated by the British served to reinforce the radical ideology gripping the pamphleteers. It seems that the development of the revolutionary ideology became cyclic, in that as the hypothetical fears of the pamphleteers were confirmed by the accumulation of British actions, the ideology strengthened itself and the cycle continued until the revolution itself. Bailyn claims that the breaches on liberty via “the total degeneration of the moral qualities”, pushed English radicals into promoting and distributing their opposition thoughts in