Reconsidering the Sources of American Liberty

In 1966, Bernard Bailyn initiated a fifty-year historiographical debate when he published The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Bailyn’s pathbreaking book took the ideas of the American Revolution seriously, breaking with Progressive historians who saw the founders as self-interested elites manipulating the people.

Ideological Origins discerned several different strains of thought that influenced the American revolutionaries: ancient Greece and Rome, the English tradition and colonial experience of liberty, and the modern ideas of the European Enlightenment. He may have discounted the profound influence of the dissenting tradition of Protestantism, but Bailyn successfully reshaped the dominant understandings of the American Revolution and founding.