Between Bailyn and Beard: The Perspectives of Gordon S. Wood

Abstract

R 5 EREADING Gordon S. Wood's The Creation of the American RePublic, I was reminded that it had been conceived and written as a dissertation. That itself makes the achievement all the more remarkable. Most dissertations are narrow and monographic and sustained more by perseverance than perception. In recent times it has also become unfashionable to examine the thoughts of leading thinkers lest one be accused of elitism. Wood's subject is nothing less than the American founding, an experience that covered approximately a dozen years and requires a close examination of what leading political philosophers taught and, to the extent possible, what the masses of people felt. Few historians have illuminated so brilliantly the way in which intellectual history intersects with social developments in order to demonstrate how mind and society shaped the nature of America's political institutions. The conservative philosophers Edmund Burke and G.F.W. Hegel insisted that the origins of government must remain veiled in secrecy and that a country's constitution must never be regarded as something made by human beings. Wood's Creation forces us to consider that no government can enjoy legitimacy unless its citizens have knowledge of the origins of its authority. Yet one does not read Wood to find simple answers. Thanks to the rich complexity of his book, the original intent of the framers is not as obvious to historians as it is to the attorney general. A fertile tension runs through Creation, possibly because the book was influenced, at least in part, by the three Bs of American historiography: Boorstin, Bailyn, and Beard. Like his former mentor, Bernard Bailyn, Wood was not quite prepared to accept Daniel J. Boorstin's dismissal of the American Enlightenment as having little significance for the Revolution and the Constitution.1 But Wood does acknowledge that a certain consensus emerges out of the conflicting debates over the Constitution, a sense of shared values about democracy that, as we shall see, may have had