To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders (review)

For nearly five decades, Bernard Bailyn has enlightened readers about the complexities and contradictions, the problems and pitfalls, and the sheer tenacity and virtuosity of the leaders whose writings have informed liberal and conservative traditions in British North America. Bailyn's To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders does, for today's history buffs and general readers, what his Ideological Origins of the American Revolution did for undergraduates, graduate students, and scholars back in the mid-1960s—it probingly seeks, with a sense of awe and exhilaration, to elucidate the "foundational" circumstances from which key elite-group figures of the American Revolution against Great Britain and the new United States developed, with a combination of sheer idealism and rigorous pragmatism, formulations that could, they hoped, sustain a nation.

Bailyn came of age when the "character" model of American intellectual history was in its heyday, so it comes as no surprise that the essays are, in effect, a collection of studies on character. Bailyn is fascinated that presumably "provincial" men established for themselves and for generations to come a remarkably complicated governmental system, one notably adaptable, indeed protean, in its capacity for continued refinements and adjustments across time. After a long and noteworthy career of intellectual discovery, Bailyn retains his tone of awe, of sheer wonder, that these provincials found ways to consolidate the colonists and to create such profoundly powerful documents as the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.

In the opening chapter, "Politics and the Creative Imagination," Bailyn elucidates his sense that "[t]he Founders of the American nation were one of the most creative groups in modern history" (4). Eschewing interest in the work of social historians of the last three decades, Bailyn argues that, whatever the failings of the "founders" in terms of social understanding, "we are privileged to know and to benefit from the outcome of their efforts" (4). He points out that because "we inherit and build on their achievements, we now know what the established world of the eighteenth century flatly denied . . .—that absolute power need not be indivisible but can be shared among states within a state and among branches of government, and that the sharing of power and the balancing of forces can create not anarchy but freedom" (4). Bailyn thus speaks with clear wonder and awe about the extent to which the "founders" put their thoughts and their very lives and estates on the proverbial line in an effort to find a better way to govern, as when he remarks, "One comes away from encounters with that generation, not with a sense of their failings and hypocrisies—they were imperfect people, bound by the limitations of their own world—but with a sense of how alive with creative imaginings they were; how bold they were in transcending the world they had been born into" (6).

For Bailyn, their provincialism was the central cause of the success of the Revolutionary generation. In this, Bailyn is adapting for his work in intellectual and political history a position Kenneth Clark once (in 1962) argued regarding provincialism in art. Provincial painters are, Clark said, "concrete in their visualization, committed to the ordinary facts of life as they know them rather than to an established style that has taken on a life of its own."While he agreed that "dangers" such as "insularity; regression into primitivism; [and] complacence in the comforting familiarity of local scenes" lurk in the provincial woods, Clark nonetheless assessed that "the most skillful provincial artists have the vigor of fresh energies; they are immersed in and stimulated by the ordinary reality around them; and they transcend their limited environments by the sheer intensity of their vision, which becomes, at the height of their powers, prophetic" (7). Bailyn finds that similar things "might be said of provincialism in politics and the political imagination." "The vocabulary of politics in...