Ideas, Ideology, and the Anomalous Problem of Revolutionary Causation

jack n. rakove

VER forty years of teaching, I have assigned The Ideolog- O ical Origins of the American Revolution dozens of times. In Stanford’s graduate introductory course, which emphasizes recent works, young scholars in Colonial and Revolutionary history must be taught how to appreciate the significance of this book.1 Iusetaught in the active sense, because when one comes to know a work so well, there are critical points that a professor simply wants his students to grasp. A few involve posing obvious questions. What does Bailyn mean by ideology, and how does it operate? What should students know about Revolutionary historiography and alternating currents of Pro- gressive and neo-Whig scholarship (the dullest question of all, but one students need to understand)? These questions can be dispatched quickly, before identifying and exploring more important matters. What are those matters? Students must first recognize how each chapter of Ideological Origins illustrates a different analytical problem or approach in the writing of the history of political ideas. This is true even of Chapters One and Two: “The Literature of Revolution” and “Sources and Traditions.”

1The same is true for Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), and Winthrop Jor- dan, White Over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1585–1815 (Chapel Hill, NC: Institute of Early American History, 1968). These books along with Ideological Origins are reminders of why it was exciting to enter the field of early American history in the late 1960s, which was also when seminal community and demographic studies, first of New England, then of the Chesapeake, began to appear.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00659 by guest on 24 September 2021 THE PROBLEM OF REVOLUTIONARY CAUSATION 37 Surprisingly, many students read Chapter Two without glimps- ing its critical argument about the relative importance of the different types of sources on which the American pamphlet writers relied.2 Only when these points are understood, does it become possible to explore the central arguments of Ideological Origins. Those arguments pivot on the final three chapters of the original edition. I ask students to focus on two sets of questions. First, Chapter Four (“The Logic of Rebellion”) ends in 1776, with the Americans on the verge of independence and Thomas Paine exhorting them to “receive the fugitive” of Freedom “and prepare in time an asylum for mankind.” Yet when one turns to Chapter Five (“Transformation”), we are back in 1765, wrestling with the problems of “Representation and Consent,” “Constitution and Rights,” and “Sovereignty.” Why does Bai- lyn present two stories of how the revolutionaries moved from 1765 to 1776, and how do these separate stories illustrate the differences between ideologies and political ideas in explaining the origins of the Revolution? And why would a scholar as interested in narrative techniques as Bernard Bailyn (a fan of bothE.H.Carr’sRomantic Exiles and the television series Hill Street Blues) offer two complementary accounts retracing the same chronology?3 My second question hinges on the original final chapter, “The Contagion of Liberty.” This chapter opens with sections de- scribing how the Revolution began to challenge two prominent aspects of colonial life: chattel slavery and the legal establish- ment of religion. But the chapter raises two further questions:

2The key departure occurs at page 34. Then again, the more one teaches, the more one recalls the opening sentence of Oscar Handlin’s essay, “How to Read a Word”: “Few discoveries bewilder the teacher more than the revelation that students can more easily learn to read a book than a chapter, a chapter than a sentence, and a sentence than a word.” Handlin, TruthinHistory(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 165. 3Bernard Bailyn, “The Narrative Line in History and ‘Hill Street Blues,’” The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 12, 1995. Bailyn notes that the graduate students he asked to watch the program initially found the story lines confusing to follow; and my late colleague Jay Fliegelman told me his colleagues at the Modern Language As- sociation had a similar response when Bailyn made this point at their annual meeting.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00659 by guest on 24 September 2021 38 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY the relevance to American society of the classical mixed government ideal of the one, the few, and the many; and the Rev- olution’s deeper challenge, to the idea that every society must have a basis for acknowledging the unitary superiority of some visible elite. As Bailyn pursues this most important final subject, his narrative perspective shifts. The voices we hear no longer belong to the revolutionaries, but to their opponents, those stal- wart loyalists and defenders of empire who cannot conceive how all these colonial upstarts could spout such arrant non- sense. Perhaps anticipating his future work on that most tragic loyalist of all, Thomas Hutchinson, Bailyn closed Ideological Origins with a remarkable shift in viewpoint that emphasizes the Revolution’s critics rather than its advocates. What analytical purpose does this striking shift in perspective serve? These are my standard questions for discussion. Readers of this essay who have taught Ideological Origins surely have their own approaches. A rewarding and valuable aspect of teaching history is to inspire (even demand) that students not only grasp the analytical logic of a historical narrative, but also understand how the narrative itself works. That was the true lesson Bai- lyn’s students learned in his legendary seminar, which actually showed little interest in the substance of early American history. Yet there is a more fundamental way to assess how Ideolog- ical Origins relates to more recent writings on the Revolution. In this essay my analysis pivots on the concept of causation: why the Revolution occurred, and why it possessed the “transforming” consequences Bailyn celebrates. These problems of causation, I argue, define the main purposes of Ideological Ori- gins. At first glance, this observation hardly seems a great revelation. What could a story of origins be if it is not a study of causation? Whatever else they may do, historians actively seek the causes of events. But in fact the dominant themes in recent interpretations of the Revolution, especially those written by American scholars, show little interest in explaining why it occurred. They are much more concerned with asking what the experience of Revolution meant for those who were caught up in it. That

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00659 by guest on 24 September 2021 THE PROBLEM OF REVOLUTIONARY CAUSATION 39 concern has surely had a liberating and broadening effect on our conceptions of the Revolution. From Elizabeth Fenn’s Pox Americana, to Kathleen DuVal’s Independence Lost, to Maya Jasanoff’s Liberty’s Exiles, to the opening chapters of Alan Tay- lor’s The Internal Enemy—all cleverly titled books—we get a view of the Revolution that often emphasizes the racial and ge- ographical peripheries of British North America.4 Yet impact and experience, diversity and disappointment, though important themes, do not explain why or when the Revolution occurred, nor how it acquired its defining characteristics. Bailyn’s approach to causation obviously begins with ideology, that concept he borrowed from social science to explain how the colonists moved from resistance to revolution in a single decade. But ideology is not his sole explanatory mechanism. The “Transformation” chapter follows a different logic. And if one links the concluding sections of “The Contagion of Lib- erty” to the argument of The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson, then one can argue that three kinds of causal schemes give Ideological Origins its persuasive power. Equally important, comparing these different motifs demonstrates that Ideological Origins has a more complex structure than is often perceived. That complexity is reflected in Bailyn’s title change between the publication of Pamphlets of the American Revolution in 1965, where he called his introduction “The Transforming Rad- icalism of the American Revolution,” to his revision two years later, Ideological Origins. Bailyn has always been a problem- solving, anomaly-resolving historian,5 and examining the causal

4Elizabeth Fenn, Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775–1782 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001); Kathleen duVal, Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution (New York: Random House, 2015); Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011); Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772–1832 (New York: W.W. Norton, 2013). My preliminary reading of the October 2017 issue of the William and Mary Quarterly, which is devoted to the master subject of “Writing To and From the Revolution,” and which was published with a companion issue of the Journal of the Early Republic, confirms rather than challenges my opinion. 5Bernard Bailyn, “The Problems of the Working Historian: A Comment,” in Philos- ophy and History: A Symposium, ed. Sidney Hook (New York: New York University Press, 1963), 92–101.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00659 by guest on 24 September 2021 40 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY framework of Ideological Origins helps to identify the specific and distinct problems he tackled in these final chapters. Great revolutions could be the one category of human events that best exemplifies how an ambitious theory of historical causation might operate. The idea of “great revolution” here means a set of events more complex, sweeping, and conse- quential than, for example, coups d’etat or civil wars or critical elections. When scholars explain great revolutions, they cannot limit questions of causation to the immediate actions and decisions that push a society into political upheaval. The pro- found shift in political loyalties that great revolutions require can only occur when some combination of social, economic, cultural, or intellectual developments has worked, both man- ifestly and latently, to loosen conventional attachments and un- dermine the authority of institutions. Revolutions must have deep causes embedded in a society’s history, perhaps even “dysfunctions” that operate like tectonic plates moving inevitably toward some great rupture. But they also depend on particular decisions and actions—precipitants and triggers—that propel humans into acts of resistance and rebellion that escalate into overt revolution. Half a century ago, Lawrence Stone wrote an intriguing essay that tried to teach historians the advantages of knowing how social scientists examined the concept of revolution. His “Theo- ries of Revolution” appeared in World Politics in January 1966, but few early American historians saw it. When I read Stone’s essay while researching my dissertation, it helped organize my thoughts about the origins of the Revolution; indeed, there is a faint echo of Stone’s concerns in the opening sentence of my first book. Yet as Stone’s essay appeared after Pamphlets of the Revolution, his perspective could not have influenced Bailyn’s thinking about the origins of the Revolution.6

6Lawrence Stone, “Theories of Revolution,” World Politics 18 (1966): 159–76. To quote myself: “Although great revolutions do not spring from transient causes, they are often launched amid conditions of confusion, uncertainty, and surprise.” Jack N. Rakove, The Beginnings of National Politics: An Interpretive History of the Continental Congress (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), 3.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00659 by guest on 24 September 2021 THE PROBLEM OF REVOLUTIONARY CAUSATION 41 Jack P. Greene’s essay in the Institute of Early American His- tory’s Essays on the American Revolution (1973) illustrates a Stone-like approach to a causal explanation of the Revolution. Greene called his essay “An Uneasy Connection: An Analysis of the Preconditions of the American Revolution,” and the critical word in this title was preconditions.7 Greene sought to shift the causal and chronological locus of explanation to the period before overt post-1763 British initiatives and the colonial responses they provoked set the usual narrative of the coming of independence. Was the structure of the imperial relationship before 1763 really as satisfactory as historians had long supposed, Greene asked? If conditions were so favorable, why would the British government alter its policies? Greene identified an array of conditions that collectively provided amodel of the complexities of the Anglo-American relationship. Greene spoke of “sufficient strain,” “discrepancies,” “dysfunction,” “il- lusion,” and “disjuncture,” all emerging within the empire by the 1740s.8 But, he argued, the critical departures that marked “the salient precondition of the American Revolution” arose only in the decade after 1748, when “one long-run and two short-run [conditions]” came into play: “the extraordinary territorial, demographic, and economic growth of the colonies”; the restoration of domestic political stability in Britain; and “the growing anxiety and heightened sense of urgency” sparked by “a series of severe political and social disturbances in many of the colonies.”9 These were the deep structural causes of the Revolution—Greene’s preconditions for the familiar actions and decisions following the Seven Years War. The opening chapter in Essays on the American Revolution that preceded Greene’s survey of preconditions was Bailyn’s

7Jack P. Greene, “An Uneasy Connection: An Analysis of the Preconditions of the American Revolution,” Essays on the American Revolution, ed. Stephen G. Kurtz and James H. Hutson (Chapel Hill, NC: Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1973), 33. 8Greene, “An Uneasy Connection,” 45–46, 56, 59. But Greene hedged his bets by confessing that some of these phenomena amounted to “extremely elusive com- ponent[s] of this substructure of implicit operating assumptions.” 9Greene, “An Uneasy Connection,” 66–68.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00659 by guest on 24 September 2021 42 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY “The Central Themes of the American Revolution: An Inter- pretation.” It could easily have been entitled “Central Prob- lems of the Revolution,” for Bailyn’s approach to causation is grounded on identifying and exploring the central problems that require explanation. Bailyn showed little interest in Greene’s “disparities” and “dysfunctions”: “the ‘dysfunctions’ that existed,” he quipped, “could have continued to function ‘dysfunctionally’ for ages untold.”10 The true challenge was to identify the specific problems required for scholarly understanding and assessment of the Revolution. Foremost among these problems lay the familiar division between ideas and interests that dominated so much Revolution- ary historiography. Scholars argued either that the “cogency” or “quality” of ideas about constitutional law or natural rights possessed animating power for political action, or that economic self-interest provided the real motivating force that abstract ideas could never attain. Bailyn resolved this stale impasse by arguing that political ideology was the mobilizing force that drove the revolutionaries. This ideology was deeply rooted in English and colonial historical experience, in the great quar- rels between Stuart monarchs and their parliamentary opponents, in opposition attacks on Walpolean government, and in the active abuse of royal prerogative in the colonial governments. Going outside the discipline of history by invoking Clifford Geertz (much as Lawrence Stone drew on Chalmers Johnson and Harry Eckstein, and Jack Greene drew on Ed- ward Shils), Bailyn defined ideologies as “shifting patterns of values, attitudes, hopes, fears and opinions.” They functioned as a device that “crystallizes otherwise inchoate social and political discontent and thereby shapes what is otherwise instinctive and directs it to attainable goals.”11 This approach identified Bailyn’s primary method for explaining “the origins of the Revolution.” In addition, Bailyn

10Bailyn, “The Central Themes of the American Revolution,” 24. Embedded in this critique is the idea that the concept of dysfunction is itself analytically dysfunctional because it fails to identify what functions any given condition or relationship actually serves. 11Bailyn, “The Central Themes of the American Revolution,” 10–11.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00659 by guest on 24 September 2021 THE PROBLEM OF REVOLUTIONARY CAUSATION 43 continued, this argument also made it possible to understand “the meaning of the Revolution as a whole” and its significance for American history. Bailyn’s next task was to understand the Revolution’s losers. They mattered, in part, because without their story we could never see the Revolution as a whole, or reach that point of understanding where its partisan- ship would fade. But understanding the loyalists posed a more specific causal problem. Their inability to grasp the challenge they faced might itself partially explain why the Revolution occurred, because their misperceptions guided the British government’s response to the erosion and ultimate collapse of royal authority.12 Other problems also merited attention. One involved trac- ing the ways in which the impulses released by the Revo- lution “slowly filtered through the ordinary activities of life.” In Bailyn’s telling, the age of ideology—or at least ideological intensity—tapered off after 1776. Americans confronted new problems, some created by the Revolution itself, so the radical ideology that had carried them from resistance to revolution was no longer adequate to the issues they now faced. To understand this new situation, historians would have to trace the “gradually evolving interplay between a libertarian ideology and the circumstances of life in a wildly expanding frontier world.”13 Finally, there were two other realms of behavior where the Revolution constituted a radical break. One involved the problem of constitutional governance, where Americans wrote documents and established institutions that limited government as well as empowering it, a critical transformation reflecting the dominant fear of self-aggrandizing power that ruled pre-revolutionary thought. The other concerned the attack on inherited privileges that elites had wielded in order to maintain their authority to control society. This deliberate emphasis on problem solving is one defining characteristic of Bailyn’s approach. It is also one of the great lessons his students gained in his seminar. One never knew

12Bailyn, “The Central Themes of the American Revolution,” 15–18. 13Bailyn, “The Central Themes of the American Revolution,” 19–22.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00659 by guest on 24 September 2021 44 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY on any given day what the actual subject matter was. But one learned some fresh and powerful insight into the essential nature of historical exposition, such as the use of adjectives (as in Lord Denning’s report on the 1963 Profumo scandal) or the composition of transitional sentences (as in David Cecil’s Melbourne), and what mattered most: the proper definition of a historical problem. “True historical problems” arise, Bailyn once wrote, from “questions raised by the observation of (1) anomalies in the existing data”—typically, visible change over time—“or (2) discrepancies between data and existing explanations.”14 To assess the causal framework of Ideological Origins, then, we must identify the anomalies it resolved and the explanatory “discrepancies” it corrected. In the long decade after the close of the Seven Years War, successive British governments enacted measures that culminated in the crisis of American independence (1774–1776). American leaders, and the population who supported them, had to ascertain the aims of these initiatives. Did they represent episodic, not necessarily consistent responses to particular issues, undertaken by a government that lacked any coherent imperial policy? Or were they the product of a systematic design to subvert colonial rights, seeking to turn Americans into political slaves of a Parliament where colonists were not and never could be actually represented? Colonial efforts to make sense of British politics were complicated by the decade of factional instability following the accession of young George III in 1760. Individual colonies had relied on their agents to decipher ministerial and parliamentary factionalism; but the rotating min- istries of the 1760s made that task daunting.15 In 1770 George III finally found a durable chief minister in Lord North, and for the next few years the colonies retreated to their usual sec- ondary position in British politics. Reasonable observers plau- sibly concluded that the charged disputes over the Stamp Act

14Bailyn, “Problems of the Working Historian,” 96. 15Michael G. Kammen, A Rope of Sand: The Colonial Agents, British Politics, and the American Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00659 by guest on 24 September 2021 THE PROBLEM OF REVOLUTIONARY CAUSATION 45 and Townshend duties were merely passing controversies that taught the British government the limits of imperial power. Most politicized Americans could have adopted that reading of events had they been so inclined; and this opinion would have directed them along a non-revolutionary path. The British government had made errors, and rested its policies on flawed premises and data. But lessons had been learned in Lon- don, and the desire to avoid further clashes would work—as Benjamin Franklin, among others, believed—to improve the colonists’ situation with every passing year. Yet that understanding of events was actually the opposite of the self-confirming lesson most colonists were absorbing, precisely because Commonwealth or Real Whig ideology led them along a different, ominous path. The challenge of interpreting British policy made the case for ministerial conspiracy against American liberties more, not less, compelling. The great viola- tions of colonial rights, like the parliamentary taxes imposed in 1765 or 1767, easily fit into this theory, but so did lesser events, like the repeated expulsion of John Wilkes from his seat in the House of Commons. This news “shattered the hopes of many that the evils they saw around them had been the result not of design but of inadvertence,” Bailyn notes, “and it portended darker days ahead.” And darker days there surely would be. There were not only “major evidences of a deliberate assault of power on liberty[,]” but, in addition, “Lesser testimonies were also accumulating at the same time: small episodes in them- selves, they took on a larger significance in the context in which they were received.”16 The analytical purpose of “The Logic of Rebellion” chapter, therefore, is to provide a persuasive account of why colonial leaders, and free colonists generally, found this explanation of British behavior more coherent and compelling than Franklin’s more benign view and imperial officials’ defensive explanations. Rounding out that story was, of course, the task Pauline Maier took on in her first book, From Resistance to Revolution (1972).

16Ideological Origins, 112, 117.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00659 by guest on 24 September 2021 46 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Maier had questions of her own to pursue, notably the history and rationale for extra-legal crowd violence described in her opening chapters, the role of the Sons of Liberty, and the relation between the workings of “the Body of the People” and the relatively easy transition to republican government after 1774. Even so, her book amplified Bailyn’s “The Logic of Re- bellion” chapter. Rather than rely on pamphlets alone to make her point, Maier treated her “radicals” as a coherent body of political collaborators, a network relying on correspondence as well as polemics to fashion a coherent strategy of resistance.17 An ideological explanation gains probative value as it un- folds over time, for two reasons. First, it confirms and re- inforces the beliefs, attitudes, and commitments of its initial adherents—Maier’s “radicals”—narrowing the explanatory op- tions available for the events they were trying to comprehend. In the early 1770s, this group felt it could only wait to see what future developments in British politics might bring; but that reactive posture did not shake their underlying perceptions. Second, and equally important, the value of the ideological understanding is that it provides a sufficient explanation of the growing militancy of colonial public opinion. The ideological explanation assumes there was a public waiting to be mobi- lized, but that public could be open to multiple explanations of the course of events. Thomas Hutchinson acted on precisely that assumption in January 1773, when he used his address to the General Court to reach beyond his jaundiced detractors in the legislature to try to influence their constituents. Hutchin- son’s speech—which was itself a response to the agitations of the Boston Committee of Correspondence18—plunged Mas- sachusetts into a full year of political turmoil that culminated in the Boston Tea Party and the British government’s draco- nian response to the Bay Colony’s adversarial politics. Voila la

17Pauline Maier, From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Develop- ment of American Opposition to Britain, 1765–1776 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1972). 18Richard D. Brown, Revolutionary Politics in Massachusetts: The Boston Commit- tee of Correspondence and the Towns, 1772–1774 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00659 by guest on 24 September 2021 THE PROBLEM OF REVOLUTIONARY CAUSATION 47 revolution! Once one reaches the crisis year of 1774, getting to the decision for independence is easy work.19 Other scholars balk at accepting so tight an argument. They assume that any analysis giving causal primacy to political phenomena lacks full explanatory power. Other factors must be invoked—patterns of consumer behavior or the fear of Na- tive American uprisings, rebellious slaves, or ruthless foreign mercenaries. These working assumptions inform T. H. Breen’s The Marketplace of Revolution,20 Woody Holton’s Forced Founders,21 and Robert Parkinson’s The Common Cause.22 In contrast, Bailyn’s ideological account rests on a different presumption: that ten years of pounding controversy in a society equipped with effective mechanisms for the transmis- sion of ideas—most notably an open press, and especially the pamphlet literature described in Chapter One of Ideological Origins—could do the required work of mobilization without reliance on other concerns or mechanisms. For an ideological explanation to be persuasive, however, one other condition must be satisfied. Even when the force of ideology grows stronger over time, with successive events serv- ing a self-confirming function, the requisite ideology has tobe present and well entrenched from the outset. Its prior existence must be, in Jack Greene’s language, a precondition of revolutionary controversy; because if that is not the case, the driving convictions of the ideology will operate only as expe- dient means—rhetorical tropes—to pursue some other set of

19Mary Beth Norton, “Bernard Bailyn’s Ideological Origins: A Perspective from 1774,” New England Quarterly 91 (2018). 20Subtitled, How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), the argument of this book may not square with his, American Insurgents, American Patriots: The Revolution of the People (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), which presumes a high degree of political mobilization that is not dependent on prior consumer consciousness. 21Subtitled, Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, NC: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1999). It remains a puzzle to me to understand why a fear of Indian warfare or slave revolt would drive the colonists toward independence rather than a continued reliance on the force of the empire. 22Subtitled, Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, NC: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2016).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00659 by guest on 24 September 2021 48 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY political ends. In cruder terms, this is the notion that ideas are bullets, something one fires at a designated target. If one kind of weapon fails, then you pick another, and fire again. That is why Bailyn’s The Origins of American Politics is logi- cally essential to the argument of Ideological Origins.23 What these three lectures demonstrate is that the Commonwealth or Real Whig ideology that was applied to revolutionary ends after 1765 had already been flourishing in colonial politics for decades. In a sense, then, the first causal problem is to explain why the arguments of Trenchard and Gordon, Bolingbroke, and other writers had originally come to inform the vocabulary of colonial political discourse. The critical causal link is that the perceived disparity between the exercise of the prerogative in colonial America and in Georgian Britain gave the anti-Stuart arguments of the seventeenth century and the criticisms of ministerial corruption under the Walpolean regime a continued vitality in the American provinces. The first task of the ideological explanation, then, is toex- plain why the colonists were inclined from the outset to read the intentions of the British government in the most sinis- ter light. What plausible set of motives and intentions could offer a basis for concrete action that a principled commit- ment to constitutional norms could not provide by itself? With- out this animating cause of action, it would be hard to understand how theoretical disagreements over representation or rights or sovereignty could produce a revolution. Yet widening disagreements over exactly these points also constituted the forum within which the controversy escalated. A causal explanation therefore has to explain why these points of princi- ple proved so intractable; and that entails understanding why colonists adopted the principles they did, and why these attachments proved so durable. In historiographical terms, the decisive move was taken by Edmund Morgan, first in his influential 1948 article on “Colo- nial Ideas of Parliamentary Power, 1764–1766,” and then (with

23Bernard Bailyn, The Origins of American Politics (New York: Knopf, 1968), first published in Perspectives in American History 1 (1967): 7–120.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00659 by guest on 24 September 2021 THE PROBLEM OF REVOLUTIONARY CAUSATION 49 Helen Morgan) in The Stamp Act Crisis (1953). Morgan chal- lenged, indeed destroyed, the familiar contention of the Pro- gressive historians that colonial writers had opportunistically skipped from point to point with little concern for consis- tency.24 The remarkable feature of the colonial arguments of the mid-1760s, the Morgans argued, was not that Americans were fumbling to formulate a coherent response to Britain’s doctrine of parliamentary authority and supremacy; rather, it was that the colonists quickly reached a durable consensus on their essential claims. Bailyn’s discussion of the “Transforma- tion” of American political ideas in Chapter Five rests on this judgment. To some extent, this chapter might seem an ex- tension and elaboration of Morgan’s argument. In fact, Bai- lyn was pursuing a different agenda. His emphasis is less on the colonists’ underlying constitutional consensus, but on the ways in which the imperial controversy carried Americans to new ground. Often, Bailyn describes this movement of thought in territorial terms: it is a matter of touching, probing, and pushing beyond “the boundaries of traditional thought,” or “the boundaries of received political wisdom,” to explore the “fron- tiers” of a modern world.25 Chapters Five (“Transformation”) and Six (“The Contagion of Liberty”) restate and greatly elaborate the argument of Bai- lyn’s 1962 essay, “Political Experience and Enlightenment Ideas

24Edmund S. Morgan, “Colonial Ideas of Parliamentary Power, 1764–1766,” Will- iam and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser. 5 (1948), 311–41; Edmund S. Morgan and Helen M. Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution (Chapel Hill, NC: Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1953). Bailyn’s specific interest in this article, however, pivots on a close dispute over the exact nature of the internal-external distinction and its relevance to colonial ideas of the possibility of divided sovereignty, one of those “technical” questions scholars wrangle over in solving highly specific problems. See Ideological Origins, 213n55. At some point while writing my dissertation, I knocked on Bailyn’s office door and launched a 45-minute discussion of whether the Continental Congress actually conceded that Parliament had a right to regulate colonial commerce, or was only tendering that proposition as a basis for negotiation. See Ideological Origins, 222–23 for my point of departure. 25Jack N. Rakove, “‘How Else Could It End?’ Bernard Bailyn and the Problem of Authority in Early America,” in The Transformation of Early American History: Society, Authority, and Ideology, ed. James Henretta et al. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 62–63 and passages cited at 275n32.

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in Eighteenth-Century America.”26 Bailyn opened that essay with a summary criticism of the assumptions of Progressive historians—Carl Becker and Charles Beard foremost among them—and the recent scholarship that had undermined their central claims. But the more important challenge involved re- assessing the importance of Enlightenment ideas for the var- ious reforms commonly associated with the Revolution. Two “primary and contradictory sets of facts” stood out, posing “an apparent paradox,” Bailyn argued. On the one hand, there was no question that educated colonists were well read. “No dark age” had deprived them of their knowledge of European ideas and writers, including classic works by such great illuminati as Locke, Beccaria, Montesquieu, and Voltaire, as well as writings by “the transmitters of English nonconformist thought” and the “radically libertarian” Trenchard and Gordon. The Americans knew these ideas well, and deliberately applied them to the reforms the Revolution made possible.27 Thus far, there is no paradox to explain. The true paradox arose instead from the social and political reality that made these reforms so easy to achieve: “many, indeed most, of what these leaders considered to be their greatest achievements during the Revolution—reforms that made America seem to half the world like the veritable heavenly city of the eighteenth- century philosophers—were already in place before they were matters of theory and revolutionary doctrine.”28 It was not the force of Enlightenment ideas that made these changes possible. Colonial conditions and historical circumstances had already completed much of the necessary work. What the

26American Historical Review, 67 (1962), 339–51, based on prior lectures Bailyn presented at the XIth International Congress of Historical Sciences and the Mas- sachusetts Historical Society. The essay is reprinted, with a few revealing changes, in Bailyn, Faces of Revolution: Personalities and Themes in the Struggle for American Independence (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1990). In the title Bailyn substitutes “Radi- cal” for “Enlightenment,” and in the first sentence, “The political ideas of eighteenth- century British radicalism” replaces “The political and social ideas of the European Enlightenment.” Similar changes appear later, and Bailyn deletes and adds a few sentences. 27Bailyn, “Political Experience and Enlightenment Ideas,” 343–45. 28Bailyn, “Political Experience and Enlightenment Ideas,” 345.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00659 by guest on 24 September 2021 THE PROBLEM OF REVOLUTIONARY CAUSATION 51 Revolution did permit (or even require) was the opportunity “to complete, formalize, systematize, and symbolize what pre- viously had been only partially realized, confused, and disputed matters of fact.”29 Bailyn developed the leading points sketched in this essay more robustly in the concluding chapters of Ideological Ori- gins. As in his other writings, Bailyn arrayed these points in ascending order of importance.30 The discussion in “Transfor- mation” begins with the debate over representation, which, following Charles McIlwain, is presented as “a mere incident,” an opening motif, in the great constitutional controversy to follow. The arguments for “actual representation” that colonists presented during the Stamp Act crisis reflected the practical, attorney-like functions colonial legislators had long served as agents of their constituents. Against that experience, Ameri- cans treated the theory of virtual representation as an absur- dity. James Otis ridiculed the entire idea. “To what purpose is it to ring everlasting changes to the colonists on the cases of Manchester, Birmingham, and Sheffield, who return no mem- bers,” Otis asked in 1765. “If those now so considerable places are not represented, they ought to be.”31 Similarly, in citing the sources of their constitutional claims and rights, colonists were not conjuring arguments drawn from time immemorial, but relying increasingly on charters of government and declarations of rights that often accompanied their settlements. Finally, and with the greatest difficulty, the colonists had to confront the central problem of parliamentary sovereignty, an issue that first appeared in the mid-1760s, but which acquired increasing importance the closer they approached independence. Here the critical moment came in January 1773, when Thomas Hutchinson deliberately, yet impetuously, decided to debate the whole problem of parliamentary sovereignty with

29Bailyn, “Political Experience and Enlightenment Ideas,” 351. In the original essay, Bailyn flatly concludes: “this was the American Revolution”; in the slightly revised version, this becomes the more modest “an essential facet of the American Revolution.” Faces of Independence, 199. 30This literary technique, or perhaps art, is well worth teaching students. 31As quoted in Bailyn, Ideological Origins, 169.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00659 by guest on 24 September 2021 52 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY the Massachusetts General Court. Hutchinson recognized that the most difficult conceptual problem the colonists faced was to find some way to explain and limit the doctrine of unitary, absolute sovereignty inherited from Bodin and Hobbes, and enshrined by Blackstone. Puzzling their way toward the complexities and nuances of a Madisonian theory of federalism, the revolutionaries of 1776 were not yet prepared to resolve this problem. Yet as Bailyn argues, the British Empire had long been a highly decentralized polity—one where, as a matter of practice, parliamentary sovereignty was far less important to American governance than the doings of their colonial assem- blies. In reality, from the creation of the Continental Congress in 1774, the American republic’s first inter-colonial or putatively national government had exercised external powers equivalent to those wielded by nation-states while provincial legislatures retained full statutory authority over their “internal police.” In effect, Americans held on to the concept of sovereignty as a mode of argument even while their working systems of governance contradicted it in practice. In a sense, the imperial controversy on these constitutional questions operated as the causal mechanism that gave the Rev- olution its radical character. As circumstances compelled the colonists to discuss representation, constitutional rights, and sovereignty in these advanced terms, their positions became even more adversarial and, to British eyes, heretical and even incomprehensible. The debate itself, so earnestly argued in the learned, yet accessible pamphlets, made the colonists aware of the radical dimensions of their claims. That is why Bailyn’s shift from “Enlightenment Ideas” to “Radical Ideas” in the two ver- sions of the 1962 American Historical Review essay (discussed in note 26, supra) offers such a revealing clue to his intentions. The shift also encourages readers to speculate about the alterative or complementary emphases one can assign to the two other titles of 1965 and 1967, when “The Transforming Radicalism of the American Revolution” became The Ideolog- ical Origins of the American Revolution. The second title ex- plains why the Revolution occurred, but the first one suggests that the constitutional debate itself was what actually made the

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00659 by guest on 24 September 2021 THE PROBLEM OF REVOLUTIONARY CAUSATION 53 Revolution so radical. These two emphases are consistent, but they imply that Bailyn was using alternative explanatory or causal schemes for distinct problems. If history is Sometimes an Art,32 one form of artfulness in- volves the construction of analytical narratives.33 If one rule of good writing is to save the most significant argument for last, then it is worth asking why Ideological Origins ends as it does, by giving the Revolution’s opponents their due and al- lowing them to express their qualms and reservations about the madness the colonists seemed bent on unleashing. “Contagion of Liberty” carries readers into new territory, explaining how “the movement of thought” that the Revolution entailed “swept past boundaries few had set out to cross, into regions few had wishedtoenter....Institutionswerebroughtintoquestionand condemned that appeared to have little if any direct bearing on the immediate issues of the constitutional struggle.”34 Slavery was one such issue, religious liberty another. But then, in the concluding two sections of “Contagion,” the narrator swings his analysis back to the realm of politics. Sec- tion Three, “The Democracy Unleashed,” deals with the puzzle that colonial and imperial commentators faced when they tried to determine why the separate colonial governments had failed to attain the requisite balance that admirers of the British constitution so cherished. In the conventional mixed-government mode of thinking, it was the special responsibility of the aristocratic chamber—the House of Lords in Parliament, the governor’s council in colonial legislatures—to serve this balancing function. But no one who knew anything about American politics could believe that the colonial councils could ever actually fulfill this role. What kind of aristocracy could these march- land bumpkins possibly embody? Even the wealthiest south- ern planters, owning scores or even hundreds of slaves, had to

32Bernard Bailyn, Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015). 33To borrow a phrase used by my Stanford Political Science colleagues, Margaret Levi and Barry Weingast. See Robert H. Bates et al., Analytic Narratives (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). 34Ideological Origins, 231–32.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00659 by guest on 24 September 2021 54 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY work hard to manage their estates; few possessed fully reliable overseers. Yet without such an aristocratic class or estate, whose balancing presence could be embedded in an upper chamber, how could America ever achieve political stability? Even royal governors were merely creatures (colonists would say “tools”) of the British patronage system; they lacked resources of their own to manipulate their local scenes.35 Lurking within this political dilemma was the conceptual puzzle that American republican constitutionalists would have to tackle after 1776. If stability based on the eternal existence of the one, the few, and the many proved irrelevant for American politics, what alternative model of constitutional balance should take its place? The eventual answer would lie, Bailyn proposed, in “that hard clear realism in political thought” that we often associate with The Federalist.36 Whether that realism would rely more on James Madison’s approach to “curing the mischiefs of faction,” or Alexander Hamilton’s more focused efforts to recruit an elite class of property owners, matters less than their insightful political sociology. It is, however, the concluding fourth section of the “Con- tagion” chapter of Ideological Origins that matters most: “‘Whether Some Degree of Respect Be Not Always Due from Inferiors to Superiors?’” What the loyalist critics of the Revo- lution who control this section grasped, Bailyn argues, was the horrid possibility that none of the established sources of authority would ever again be secure in this new republican or democratic world. Where the language of consent and equality predominated, the traditional conventions of deference would evaporate. What kind of stability would such a society ever maintain? And that, exactly, was the promise that the Revolu- tion came to offer in the concluding paragraph that reportedly moved Daniel Ellsberg to tears.37

35This echoes the argument of Chapter Two of The Origins of American Politics, which stresses the manifest disparity between the excessive prerogative of royal governors, on the one hand, and their actual political feebleness, on the other. 36Ideological Origins, 301. 37J. Anthony Lukas, “After the Pentagon Papers—A Month in the New Life of Daniel Ellsberg,” New York Times Sunday Magazine, December 12, 1971, 98–99.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00659 by guest on 24 September 2021 THE PROBLEM OF REVOLUTIONARY CAUSATION 55 Thomas Hutchinson does not appear in these final pages of the first version of Ideological Origins, but read retrospectively, his presence and brooding concerns haunt the conclusion. For as both The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson and Bailyn’s later reflections on that book make clear, no one better perceived the depth of the revolutionary challenge than the Bay Colony’s last royal governor. Two concerns led Bailyn to write Hutchin- son’s biography, he later noted. One was his own puzzlement at the depth of the “hatred he evoked,” which seemed surprising given Hutchinson’s “evident ability and patriotism.” This historical “anomaly” needed explanation. Bailyn’s other concern was to write a “tragic” history of the Revolution, that is, a multilay- ered account that would portray the “limitations that bound all the actors.” Time has only deepened Bailyn’s appreciation for the power and depth of Hutchinson’s thinking.38 Though all this may be true, the Hutchinson who emerges from The Ordeal, arguably the most insightful psychological political biography in American history, remains a tragic figure in the more conventional sense. There is such deep pathos in Hutchinson’s final years in London—the loss of his children; his ghastly presence at court, reading the king yet another letter from cousin Foster; his permanent exile—that even a patriot historian like myself feels sympathy for Hutchinson’s decline. But he was also a tragic actor in a more specific sense that I have tried to convey to my students. This essay thus ends, as it should end, on a personal note: It has been a great intellectual advantage to me, trained as an old-fashioned historian, to have become a member of my university’s political science department. That has allowed me to compare the intellectual advantages and disadvantages of two disciplines whose interests often overlap, but which also have very different agenda. There is no obvious way for political science to deal adequately with the role of accident in history. This is especially true of the idiosyncratic ways in which individuals

38Bernard Bailyn, “Thomas Hutchinson in Context: The Ordeal Revisited,” in Some- times an Art, 149–52, 155–56. For my comments on the significance of the Hutchinson biography, see Rakove, “‘How Else Could It End?” 58–64.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00659 by guest on 24 September 2021 56 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY alter the flow of events. There are moments in historical time when individual decision-makers must select a single option from a finite range of choices. That was the situation con- fronting Hutchinson in December 1773, when he had to de- cide whether he should let the tea ships return to England or require obedience to the law and allow the landing of the tea. Hutchinson chose a path different from that taken by fel- low imperial officials in other towns; and his decision became the trigger that led to the adoption of the Coercive Acts, with their catastrophic results for the empire. Only if one has read The Ordeal can one understand how that decision, so personal and so climactic, became Hutchinson’s choice. That is why it serves as the true causal conclusion to The Ideological Origins; because it restores individual agency to the transformations of history, demonstrating why the best history requires the narrative skill Professor Bailyn has always displayed, and which his legendary seminar was designed to teach his students to acquire.

Jack N. Rakove is William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies, and professor of Political Science, at Stanford University.

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