Political Economy and Reality: Problems in the Interpretation of the American Revolution

Political Economy and Reality: Problems in the Interpretation of the American Revolution JOSEPH ERNST There are two theories on the subject of "Political Economy" 1 and the ideological origins of the American Revolution, both put forward by members of the "Ideological School," and both false. The first holds that economic considerations have little place in any ideological interpretation of the colonial rebellion against the mother country. The second, and adverse, theory holds that economic developments are central to any explanation of revolutionary rhetoric and behavior . The first, and older, view is associated primarily with Bernard Bailyn, who contends that the outbreak of revolution took place in "a basically prosperous if temporarily disordered economy," and that matters of economic distress or "rising misery" are irrelevant to any inquiry into "why at a particular time the colonists rebelled." The answer to the question of rebellion, as Bailyn understands it, has to do with a body of English libertarian beliefs that struck deep roots in early America because they seemed to account for, and even offer a solution to, the disorders and "noisy dissatisfactions" that characterized colonial political life. But as these ideas became established, they also were changed by the different conditions that prevailed in America. Thus, Bailyn points out that the conflict arising out of the realities of British assertions of executive power and ofgrowing colonial legislative strength created a fear of a plot against American freedom. Bailyn asserts, however, that following the end of the French and Indian War further changes in ideology took place in the inner lives of Americans . To minds already firmly in the grasp of libertarian ideals, and obsessed with the threat of British corruption and tyranny, a conspiracy against freedom seemed everywhere to be confirmed by events that were misconceived. This widening circle of irrationality and resistance to the postwar policies of Britain evoked new fears and called forth ever more extreme ideas that made accommodation with the mother country at first difficult and finally impossible. 2 Those of the Ideological School who began years ago to criticize the Bailyn view as too narrowly political and subjectivist have gone on to issues more inclusive than social psychology. Historians like Gordon Wood, J. G. A. Pocock, Kenneth Lockridge, and Jack Greene have called for an enlargement of Bailyn's conception ofthe social realities underlying ideology and for greater attention to the findings of the new social history. For example, Wood, the earliest of these critics, has argued that a closer reading of revolutionary rhetoric would likely" eliminate the unrewarding distinction between conscious and unconscious motives" of THE CANADIAN REVIEW OF AMERICAN STUDIES VOL. VII, NO. 2, FALL 1976 Americans and lead us "back to where the Progressive historians left off in their investigation of the internal social sources of the Revolution," that is, back to the wellsprings ofrevolutionary ideas "lying deep in the social structure."3 Despite their insistence on a need to view the principles of the Revolution as part of some larger social construct, these same historians have divided over the matter of the integration of ideological and economic dimensions of reality. Economics, for instance, is as conspicuously absent from Wood's discussion asit is from Bailyn's. Likewise, Pocock, in his latest study of the development of modern republican thought, has declared that colonial America "constituted a Country without a Court." He has suggested that not until after Independence and the rise of the Federalists did a Court ideology - an ideology symbolized by "Commerce" and the "mercantile and specialized world" of Augustan England wherein interest increasingly guided men's actions - take hold in America. 4 Lockridge and Greene have shown more willingness to explore the economic side of the changing social patterns that helped shape revolutionary ideas. The framework for much of their analysis is "modernization" theory, a ready-made model borrowed from the social sciences that seeks to describe and explain the socio-economic shift from medieval to modern forms of organization and thought. For different reasons, and in different ways, Lockridge and Greene, however, have tended to split off, or separate, the modernization process from the Revolution. In his "inventory" of the possible social changes taking place at the end of...