The Conceptualization of American Life

The Autobiography of a Republic, Part 2

Declaration of Independence by John Trumbull, 1819. What were these guys really up to?

To celebrate America’s 250th anniversary, I’m going through Bernard Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution chapter by chapter to draw out lessons for today.

I’ve already talked about why I think this is important. This book was part of a mini-Renaissance for the ideas of the Founders, which influenced our politics substantively for the better—for a while. Going back to this source is a good place to start if we need to rebuild our political system and our political culture.

The introduction of Bailyn’s book, like my introduction to this series, talks about the origins of the project. Chapter 1, “The Literature of the Revolution,” is almost a second introduction, in the sense that it doesn’t really talk about the content of the pamphlets that shaped the American Revolution, but instead talks about the literary qualities of these pamphlets and about pamphleteering as a medium.

The pamphlet…was spacious enough to allow for the full development of an argument—to investigate premises, explore logic, and consider conclusions…. It was in this form, consequently, that “the best thought of the day expressed itself”; it was in this form that “the solid framework of constitutional thought” was developed; it was in this form that “the basic elements of American political thought of the Revolutionary period appeared first.” [These are all quotes attributed in a footnote to other scholars.]

And yet pamphlets of this length were seldom ponderous; whatever the gravity of their themes or the spaciousness of their contents, they were always essentially polemical, and aimed at immediate and rapidly shifting targets: at suddenly developing problems, unanticipated arguments, and swiftly rising, controversial figures. The best of the writing that appeared in this form, consequently, had a rare combination of spontaneity and solidity, of dash and detail, of casualness and care.

When I read this passage, I felt a shock of recognition. This is what I do. Articles long enough to deal with big ideas and fully develop an argument—but connected to fast-moving events and short enough to be easily readable by the public. Basically, the Revolutionary-era pamphlet was a Substack post.

Bailyn observes that the American pamphlet writers were literarily less polished and professional than the British counterparts from whom they clearly took inspiration, simply because the average American writers was an amateur, someone who took up writing to promote the cause of the day but had not pursued it as a profession. (Bailyn adds ruefully: “The poetry—or, more accurately, the versification—is almost uniformly painful to read.”)

But they were also different in another respect that seems really relevant now.

The American writers were profoundly reasonable people. Their pamphlets convey scorn, anger, and indignation; but rarely blind hate, rarely panic fear. They sought to convince their opponents, not, like the English pamphleteers of the eighteenth century, to annihilate them…. The communication of understanding, therefore, lay at the heart of the revolutionary movement, and its great expressions, embodied in the best pamphlets, are consequently expository and explanatory: didactic, systematic, and direct, rather than imaginative and metaphoric…. The pamphlets aim to persuade.

But something else emerges, specifically from the medium of the pamphlet. The American writers were seeking to persuade, but also to understand real issues and problems that were confronting them. And more: They were seeking to understand the unique conditions of American life that had already been established, but of which the American had not become self-conscious.

Bailyn begins this chapter with a quotation from a letter by John Adams: “What do we mean by the Revolution? The war? That was no part of the Revolution. It was only an effect and consequence of it. The Revolution was in the minds of the people, and this was effected, from 1760 to 1775, in the course of fifteen years before a drop of blood was drawn at Lexington.” (This is from a slightly different source than another famous version of the same idea.) But Bailyn goes on to make a wider point. In the fifteen years Adams talks about, the American were developing the political ideas to match 150 years of prior experience.

The great social shocks that in the French and Russian Revolutions sent the foundations of thousands of individual lives crashing into ruins had taken place in America in the course of the previous century, slowly, silently, almost imperceptibly, not as a sudden avalanche but as myriads of individual changes and adjustments which had gradually transformed the order of society. By 1763 the great landmarks of European life—the church and the idea of orthodoxy, the state and the idea of authority: much of the array of institutions and ideas that buttressed the society of the ancient régime—had faded in their exposure to the open, wilderness environment of America. But until the disturbances of the 1760s these changes had not been seized upon as grounds for a reconsideration of society and politics.

In short, Americans had built a society no longer based on concepts of religious and political authority. But they were not yet conscious of what they had built, they did not yet have a developed anti-authoritarian social and political theory, and this is what Bailyn suggests they accomplished in the pamphlets of the Revolutionary Era. He concludes by describing this as “the conceptualization of American life.”

Those who are familiar with my theory of history may remember that I place a lot of emphasis on this kind of process of “conceptualization,” in which people find the explicit philosophical terms that sum up the cultural conditions they have already implicitly created. So you know how my ears perked up at this.

Particularly on America’s 250th anniversary, what strikes me as the most important thing we have to learn from the Founders is this method of thinking—the epistemological example they set: the ability to observe, to understand, to persuade, to apply and develop big ideas that illuminate the crises of their time.

This is what seems most revolutionary about the Founders, particularly compared to today, and it is the first thing we need to learn from the people who made the American Revolution.

When we look at the next chapter, we will continue what the Founders discovered when they employed this thinking method.