Bailyn, Bernard. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967.

== Summary ==
Examining
the various pamphlets that were published in the lead up to the Revolutionary
War, Bailyn’s book looks at the ideological origins of the revolution. He
argues that these pamphlets confirm the view that “the American Revolution was
above all else an ideological, constitutional, political struggle and not
primarily a controversy between social groups undertaken to force changes in
the organization of the society or the economy.” (vi) Further, he contends, the
intellectual developments in the decade before the Revolution re-interpreted
the previous century and a half of American Experience and “it was this
intimate relationship between revolutionary thought and the circumstances of
life in 18th century America that endowed the Revolution with its
peculiar force” and made it such a transformative event. He points to various
strands of intellectual legacies (classical antiquity, Enlightenment
rationalism, English common law, New England Puritans), but for him the most
important was a strain of anti-authoritarian, Whig opposition political thought'''
that originally stemmed from the period of the English Civil War and resulting
Commonwealth in the 1640s-1650s. Colonists interpreted British actions through this
lens and saw them as a conspiracy against liberty. This was the heart of the
Revolutionary movement. Colonists then faced the challenge of transforming this
legacy to fit their circumstances. First, through representation and taxation,
colonists challenged the idea of virtual representation, one that
Bailyn says originated from their long-standing experience of decentralized local
autonomy. Second, they had to reconfigure an older idea of the constitution,
moving away from an abstract system of how a society was ordered to one that
specifically placed limits and boundaries on different spheres of government.
Finally, they had to make the most radical departure with the idea of
sovereignty. This posed the greatest challenge for colonists, as they had to
overturn a longstanding orthodoxy about the absolute and final authority of
Parliament and move towards the idea of imperium in imperio, or having separate
spheres - for example, the growing idea of "internal" vs.
"external" taxation. These ideas thus spilled over in the areas of
slavery, religion, democracy, and equality.'''
Example: Commonwealth and
Radical Whig Opposition writings such as those of John Trenchard and Thomas
Gordon (oppositional/libertarian ideas from English Civil War). He argues that
these thinkers provided a framework in which “Enlightenment abstractions and
common law precedents … could all be brought together into a comprehensive
theory of politics.” (54)
See also: Gordon Wood, Daniel T. Rodgers, David Armitage