The National Review’s brief notice of Bailyn’s passing has a few problems worth pointing out about his historiographical significance and what it thinks it says about contemporary partisanship and the legacy of the American Revolution. (h/t @markdboonie) https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/bernard-bailyn-r-i-p/

It concludes: “The work of him and his peers kept this quadrant of history safe from the storms of theory that battered the other humanities in the Seventies & later.... Now it looks as if popular interest in the Founding must protect it from the newest wave of leftist disdain.”

But rather than being some kind of bastion for the history of the Revolution against radical left-wing theorists, Bailyn’s “Ideological Origins of the AmRev” was deeply influenced by (indeed, grounded in) Clifford Geertz’s anthropological theory of ideology.

Bailyn as conservative protector of the Revolutionary legacy also makes little sense because his interpretation based the origins of the Revolution in a classical republican ideology that defined virtue as seeking the “public good” of the community over that of the individual.

The individualism & self-interest that still predominates in conservative memories of the AmRev came historically not from Bailyn’s radical Whigs but from the liberalism so aptly explored by Joyce Appleby and historiographically from the materialist Beardian Progressive school.

Indeed, it was one of Bailyn’s more impressive achievements that he found (and SOLD) a communitarian tradition (with all of its attendant problems, of course) as the basis of the Revolution despite researching and writing at the height of the Cold War.

Also ironically, Bailyn’s legacy as a conservative protector of the legacy of the Revolution seems to be derived more from the approach in his sympathetic treatment of arch-loyalist and fierce revolutionary critic Thomas Hutchinson than the Revolution itself.

This should not be surprising though as much of contemporary conservative rhetoric surrounding the Constitution does not jibe with the document’s original purpose of creating a stronger centralized government and therefore has been far more antifederalist in its nature.

Similarly, in the early national period, “Founders Chic” books have tended to identify with Federalists like Hamilton and Adams over that of the more agrarian, popular, & individualist Republican Party (leading @jlpasley to refer to it as “Federalist Chic”).

It is true that some academic historians have been & continue to be committed to expanding the scope of the Revolution (in ways that challenge the nationalist role of its memory). It’s also true that academic interest in the global turn is decentralizing the AmRev & nation-state.

However, despite the typical NR kind of contemporary rhetoric, conservatives & conservatism are not proprietary owners of the legacy of the AmRev (especially given making them so ironically relies on their getting in bed w/ loyalists, antifederalists, and Progressive historians).