Bailyn describes the creative contributions of the Revolutionary generation, contributions that we today take for granted but that its members could only imagine—that power need not be absolute and indivisible but can be shared among states within a state and among branches of government; that written constitutions, upheld by judicial bodies, can effectively constrain tyrannies of executives and popular majorities; that rights can exist independent of privileges, gifts, and donations of the powerful, and that these rights can be defined and protected by the force of law; and that religion of any kind in the hands of power can be the worst kind of tyranny. “These,” Bailyn concludes, “were extraordinary flights of creative imagination—political heresies at the time, utopian fantasies—and their authors and sponsors knew that their efforts to realize these aspirations had no certain outcomes.” That uncertainty makes their achievement all the more impressive.
From the beginning of his career, Bailyn has been fascinated by the creative imagination not so much of political figures as of professional historians. Although some historians have seen imagination as opposed to scholarship, Bailyn has never done so. Nearly forty years ago he declared that
imagination…lies at the heart of all historical writing; but it must be disciplined imagination, working within the strict confines of facts, linking them and explaining them, not embroidering them, treating them always as restrictive not permissive.
Bailyn has never had sympathy with any fashionable postmodernist blurring of history and fiction.
In the mid-1980s Bailyn spelled out more fully the role of imagination in history-writing in an essay entitled “History and the Creative Imagination.”1 In this essay he defined the modern creative historian as someone who has enriched
a whole area of historical investigation by redirecting it from established channels into new directions, unexplored directions, so that what was once dark, vague, or altogether unperceived, is suddenly flooded with light, and the possibilities of a new way of understanding are suddenly revealed.
He selected four twentieth-century historians who he believes were truly creative in this way—Perry Miller, Charles McLean Andrews, Sir Lewis Namier, and Sir Ronald Syme. In their respective fields each of these scholars, says Bailyn, made a permanent difference in the writing of history. They did not necessarily write “the most widely read kind of history, the most commonly cited, or even the most generally admired.” What they did write, however, was the kind of history that “permanently shifted the direction of historical inquiry not by exhortation or fashionable trend-setting but by substantive and enduring discovery.”