Books, Arts & Manners: Traditional Revolutionaries

Faces of Revolution: Personalities and Themes in the Struggle for American Independence, by Bernard Bailyn (Knopf, 296 pp., $29.95)

FOR THE past 25 years Harvard’s Bernard Bailyn has been our most influential historian of the American Revolution. Before his Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967) and his subsequent Origins of American Politics, there had been persuasive explanations of these American beginnings which emphasized economic and institutional factors or constitutional disputes between England and her colonies. But all such constructions, as Bailyn has properly pointed out, neglect the explosion of theorizing about government and political organization that swept the English-speaking world in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—a plethora reflected in the voluminous pamphlet literature generated on these shores and in the passionate declamations of American orators who pushed their more cautious neighbors toward revolution.

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M. E. Bradford

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Declaration of Independence

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Faces of Revolution: Personalities and Themes in the Struggle for American Independence, by Bernard Bailyn (Knopf, 296 pp., $29.95)

FOR THE past 25 years Harvard’s Bernard Bailyn has been our most influential historian of the American Revolution. Before his Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967) and his subsequent Origins of American Politics, there had been persuasive explanations of these American beginnings which emphasized economic and institutional factors or constitutional disputes between England and her colonies. But all such constructions, as Bailyn has properly pointed out, neglect the explosion of theorizing about government and political organization that swept the English-speaking world in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—a plethora reflected in the voluminous pamphlet literature generated on these shores and in the passionate declamations of American orators who pushed their more cautious neighbors toward revolution.