Two works in intellectual history demonstrate how academics have engrained libertarian understandings into historical scholarship: Bernard Bailyn’s Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967)and Gordon Wood’s Creation of the American Republic (1969). Bailyn’s work, generally treated as the start of the “republican synthesis” in early American history, overturned decades of progressive scholarship which posited that the American Revolution was driven by economic factors by carefully arguing for the importance of ideas in American history. Bailyn demonstrated that colonists’ revolutionary activity was driven by the development of a particular ideological approach to politics, grounded in the “country opposition” language of British politics. He argues that revolutionaries were concerned that there existed a conspiracy of British ministers against colonial rights and freedoms. His Ideological Origins thus concludes that revolutionaries justified independence from Britain in order to combat creeping British authoritarianism and preserve the liberty that colonists had long cherished.
Wood’s work can largely be viewed as a continuation of Bailyn’s –– he extends Bailyn’s argument in order to understand the dynamic process of constitution-making occasioned by the Revolution. Wood argues that in the process of writing constitutions, Americans developed new understandings of critical terms including sovereignty, representation, and the relationship between power and liberty. These new conceptions transformed political understandings, ending the “classical era” of politics which Bailyn argued defined thought during the 1760s. They instead occasioned a new liberal political understanding which focused intently on the individual and on the competition of interests and factions in society.
This conception of the Revolution, built on the need to limit government and fulfilled by the final promotion of the needs of individuals, has been enormously influential. It complements wider arguments, offered by scholars like David Wootton, regarding eighteenth-century thought, which hold that the Enlightenment subjectivized moral understandings to a point where morality as a concept became little more than competing arguments regarding what is pleasurable. When combined with Bailyn and Wood’s arguments regarding revolutionary causality and institutional formation, this approach imagines the American republic as an arena of pure individual freedom. Within this conception, men have the latitude needed to act as they choose, and government exists only to provide minimal refereeing and protection for the boundaries of action.
New approaches in both intellectual history and the history of the American Revolution question the absolute validity of this picture, while also suggesting avenues for new understandings of the conflict. The first concerns the Enlightenment. Traditional approaches to Enlightenment thought emphasize it as an “age of reason” in which thought became secularized and predicated on the dispassionate pursuit of empirical evidence. It is easy to see how this staid intellectual approach has molded the scholarship on events like the American Revolution –– Wood’s work in particular reflects this reading of the trajectory of Western thought. A recent work by Ritchie Robertson, however, suggests a new paradigm for synthesizing the Enlightenment, one predicated on human happiness and improvement. The Enlightenment contained a vast array of geographic and disciplinary strands of thought, so much so that it is sometimes difficult to conceptualize it with any sense of coherence. Tying all of these strands together, Robertson argues, was a collective desire to improve the human condition and increase worldly happiness. The various thinkers of the Enlightenment believed that by applying careful reason and study to the world around them, they could uncover its inner machinations and ultimately improve its functioning. Reason still plays a critical role in this process, but it is a means rather than an end. Inverting this traditional structure places happiness at the forefront of eighteenth-century intellectual ambitions.