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Title: To Begin the World Anew : The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders by Bernard Bailyn ISBN: 0-375-41377-4 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 07 January, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.33 (6 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Meditations
Comment: Bernard Bailyn is an important scholar of the American Revolution, and most anything of his is worth checking out. His "Ideological Origins of the American Revolution" is immensely valuable, but I have also enjoyed his smaller collections of essays, including "Faces of the Revolution" and this new title, "To Begin the World Anew."
In this book, Bailyn offers meditations on a number of different Revolution-related subjects, including very interesting pieces on Benjamin Franklin's manipulation of his own image in pre-Revolutionary France, the challenges Jefferson faced in applying pure political theory to the give-and-take of daily politics, and the impact of the American Revolution on Europe and Latin America (it's greater, Bailyn argues, than many people believe it to have been).
Most interesting to me, and perhaps most immediately applicable to modern politics -- if that's something you're looking for -- is his chapter on "The Federalist Papers." Bailyn notes that "The Federalist Papers" have acquired a level of sanctity approaching even that of the Constitution itself. They are often cited in Supreme Court decisions, and are seen by many as perhaps the definitive explication of what the Founders truly intended the Constitution to mean and achieve. And yet, as Bailyn points out, "The Federalist Papers" were newspaper columns, written in haste and for polemical purposes by a group of men who themselves didn't agree on a number of important matters. Bailyn's narrative of how these writings were elevated from political journalism to secular Scripture is very interesting. The implications of the ways today's government has veered far from the intention of the Founders should set us all to thinking, as should the author's clear rejection of the modern (and Lincolnian) argument that the nation preceded the states and not vice-versa (p. 114).
Bailyn also has a number of larger themes that are touched on, to a greater or lesser degree, in each of these essays. One is the influence on the Founding generation of occupying the political, social, and geographic periphery of the Western world, and how that both fueled and emphasized the divisions between colony and metropolis. In a day when the Founders are often attacked and derided -- or worse -- for the ways in which they failed to anticipate twenty-first century political and social sensibilities, Bailyn again urges us (as he has elsewhere) to recognize the Founders' energy and imagination. We should be willing to give them credit for being able to step as far outside the orthodoxies of their time as they in fact did.
As ever, Bernard Bailyn's writing is both thought-provoking and entertaining. Readers who already have a certain familiarity with the Founding and the Constitution will, I think, enjoy and appreciate these meditations.
Rating: 4
Summary: How the North America provicials created a new world order.
Comment: This is a hard read for such a short book. The subject matter in these essays show how the provicials (Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, Hamilton) created a new world order with their ideas and writings. Such writings as the Federalist papers are now more quoted today than they were when they were created. These ideas revolutionized how other countries changed their societies. That is the essence of this book.
Bailyn describes these ideas in this short book. The concepts are good in terms of how the founders poured the foundations which the United States stands on today. What is missing is how other events (the American and French Revolutions) also changed the Atlantic states. Ideas can help change societies, but force and political power have more relevance in change.
I would not suggest this book to the average reader interested in the American Revolution. These concepts are perhaps too deep for the average reader. Bailyn is writing for the academic audience.
Rating: 5
Summary: A Holograph of Cultural Complexity
Comment: Historical research of the highest quality is frequently driven by a determination to answer questions of compelling importance. That is especially true of this volume in which Bailyn offers five separate but related essays which, together, examine a theme which its subtitle suggests: the nature and significance of "the genius and ambiguities of the American founders." In his Preface, Bailyn identifies two convictions which remain constant throughout all five chapters: that those founders were "truly creative people, and that their creative efforts, the generation-long enterprise that elevated these obscure people from their marginal world to the center of Western civilization, were full of inconsistencies, logical dilemmas, and unresolved problems."
With regard to questions of compelling importance, several can be summarized as follows:
1. Which ambiguities "beset" Jefferson's career? What were their nature and impact?
2. What is revealed by the "strange interplay between lofty idealism and cunning realism in Franklin's spectacular success in Paris"? Meanwhile, what can be learned from the interplay between Franklin and Adams?
3. What is the significance of the fact that the authors of the Federalist papers struggled to reconcile "the need for a powerful, coercive public authority with the preservation of the private liberties for which the Revolution had been fought"? To what extent was such a reconciliation achieved?
These are indeed compelling questions, ones which probably need to be asked today as our nation struggles to decide what its appropriate role is in the global community. After I read this book but before I began to formulate this review, I read Joseph Stiglitz's Globalization and Its Discontents. In it, Stiglitz offers a heartfelt but rigorous examination of globalization, "the removal of barriers to free trade and the closer integration of national economies," asserting that it can and should be a force for good "and that it has the potential [in italics] to enrich everyone in the world, particularly the poor." However, given how globalization has been managed thus far, it should be rethought. Focusing primarily on the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (the World Bank) during the past decade, Stiglitz responds to the basic question: "Why has globalization -- a force that has brought so much good -- become so controversial?"
I had Stiglitz's book in mind as I re-read Bailyn's. Granted, no one knew in the late-eighteenth century that the coalition of thirteen colonies (if it achieved independence) would one day become the single most powerful nation in the world. For me, the single greatest benefit of Bailyn's is his analysis of the nature and significance of "the genius and ambiguities of the American founders," how they created a foundation on which the original thirteen colonies evolved over more than two centuries into the 50 states and their federal government which now, during arguably the most volatile period since the 1770s, struggles to the support the natural rights of humanity by advocating and supporting what Jefferson once referred to as "the sacred fire of freedom and self-government" throughout the world. Challenges of various kinds will, of course, continue to present themselves. Bailyn duly acknowledges that reality while suggesting that "I think an equally important challenge is our own responsibility to probe the character of our constitutional establishment, as the eighteenth century provincials probed the establishment they faced, to recognize that for many in our own time and within our own culture, it has become scholastic in nits elaboration, self-absorbed, self-centered, and in significant ways distant from the ordinary facts of life."
Bailyn's brilliant examination of "the genius and ambiguities of the American founders" is in essence an examination of the heritage of those founders, revealing the humanity of their talents and imperfections, to be sure, but also suggesting the standards of measurement by which we determine the extent to which we have proven worthy of that heritage.
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Title: The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution by Bernard Bailyn ISBN: 0674443020 Publisher: Belknap Pr Pub. Date: March, 1992 List Price(USD): $19.50 |
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Title: Faces of Revolution : Personalities & Themes in the Struggle for American Independence by Bernard Bailyn ISBN: 0679736239 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 01 September, 1992 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: A Leap in the Dark: The Struggle to Create the American Republic by John E. Ferling ISBN: 0195159241 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: April, 2003 List Price(USD): $30.00 |
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Title: Gentleman Revolutionary : Gouverneur Morris, the Rake Who Wrote the Constitution by Richard Brookhiser ISBN: 0743223799 Publisher: Free Press Pub. Date: 03 June, 2003 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
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Title: The American Revolution: A History (Modern Library Chronicles) by Gordon S. Wood ISBN: 0679640576 Publisher: Modern Library Pub. Date: 22 January, 2002 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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