The Social Origins of American Revolutionary Ideology

Abstract

HE reigning ideas of American Revolution are now being characterized as premodern. This judgment comes at end of a decade of scholarly probing into ideological origins of colonial resistance movement. The origins that Neo-Whig historians Bernard Bailyn, Richard Buel, Jack Greene, and Gordon Wood have discovered are not simple and Lockean, as once believed, but complex and atavistic growing out of rich English intellectual traditions of Dissenters, radical Whigs, Classical Republicans, Commonwealthmen, Country party, or more simply, Opposition.1 Dramatically reorienting scholarship on Revolution, Bailyn has reconstructed interpretive scheme which dominated colonists' minds, triggered their emotions, and pushed them into resistance.2 The revolutionary force of this scheme lay, in Wood's words, with obsession with corruption and disorder, its hostile and conspiratorial outlook, and its millennial vision of a regenerated society.' These, of course, are qualities that have prompted J. G. A. Pocock to question whether American Revolution ought not to be considered as the last great act of Renaissance rather than 'the first political act of revolutionary enlightenment. '4 Originally undertaken as a corrective to shallow economic determinism of Progressive historiography, revisionary work of Neo-Whigs has ended up sapping foundation of their alma mater,