• The Social Origins of Ideological Origins:Notes on the Historical Legacy of Bernard Bailyn
• Mark Peterson (bio)

Bernard Bailyn, the influential and prolific historian of colonial and revolutionary America and the Atlantic world, died on August 7, 2020, at the age of ninety-seven. During his long teaching career at Harvard, he supervised more than seventy doctoral dissertations, my own among the last of them. In his retirement he served as mentor to hundreds more young scholars (366 to be precise), inviting them by the dozens to Cambridge each summer for the International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, which he founded and ran from 1995 to 2010. Bailyn's passing marks the end of a long scholarly era, associated with the enormous expansion of American higher education and the explosion of intellectual energy in the United States after the Second World War.

Upon his death, obituaries and editorials repeated a "just-so" story about Bailyn's career and his influence on early American history. This story originated, I suspect, in graduate historiography seminars following the 1967 publication of Bailyn's The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, and has been reified across subsequent decades in review essays, doctoral dissertations, and the introductions to monographs.¹ The most simplistic version claims that Bailyn overturned a then-dominant Progressive interpretation of the Revolution's causes focused on economic interests and class conflict, and "put ideas back in" at the center of a new paradigm. Variations on this story appeared in popular media after Bailyn's death. The New York Times obituary (Aug. 7, 2020), by Renwick McLean and Jennifer Schuessler, noted that Bailyn's book "challenged the then-dominant view of Progressive Era historians like Charles Beard, who saw the founders' revolutionary rhetoric as a mask for economic interests." The Washington Post obituary (August 7, 2020), by John Otis, likewise had Bailyn offering a "strong riposte" to Beard's Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (1913) by portraying the colonists as "deeply principled and driven by radical ideas." Right-wing media outlets in particular favored this story. The editorial board of The Wall Street Journal (August 11, 2020) described Bailyn as "the most accomplished historian of early America's dazzling world of ideas" and claimed that Ideological Origins "overthrew the early-20th century [End Page 360] Progressive view of the revolution, which argued that elite Americans rebelled more out of economic self-interest than to vindicate political ideals." And in the National Review (August 10, 2020), Richard Brookhiser repeated the overthrowing-the-Progressive-paradigm claim, then suggested that the mere title of Ideological Origins "says it all: Men think, and sometimes they follow where their thoughts lead." That's an absurd caricature of Ideological Origins. It closely resembles the formerly prevalent form of decontextualized intellectual history that Bailyn was, in fact, supplanting.

More subtle historians who have written review essays in academic journals and scholarly monographs know full well that Bailyn's title does not "say it all." In addition to offering more complex renderings of Ideological Origins, they also frequently interpolate an additional analytical paradigm—a "Consensus" school—between the Progressive historians and the "republican synthesis" that Bailyn supposedly inaugurated. In this more elaborate version, historiography between the end of World War II and Ideological Origins was dominated by a conservative reaction against the Progressives, but one that also neglected or even denigrated the "ideas" of Enlightenment thinkers as dangerous speculative nonsense. Works such as Daniel Boorstin's The Americans: The Colonial Experience (1958), often cited as central to the "Consensus" school, celebrated the good sense of practical, experience-driven Americans who fought a revolution without dogma, rejected European philosophes' blueprints for remaking society, and ultimately saved America from the horrors generated by intellectual schemes of "garret-spawned European illuminati like Lenin, Mussolini, and Hitler" (p. 154). For Boorstin, any philosophical basis for colonial resistance to crown authority lay in an already pervasive Lockean liberalism. In The Liberal Tradition in America (1955), Harvard political scientist Louis Hartz similarly argued that the absence of a feudal past and entrenched social classes accounted for the overwhelming presence of Lockean liberalism as a de facto and essentially unthinking philosophy of Americans. For...

• 意识形态起源的社会起源:伯纳德·贝林的历史遗产笔记
• 马克·彼得森（生物）

伯纳德·贝林 (Bernard Bailyn) 是美国殖民和革命时期的美国和大西洋世界的有影响力和多产的历史学家，于 2020 年 8 月 7 日去世，享年 97 岁。在他在哈佛的长期教学生涯中，他指导了 70 多篇博士论文，其中我自己的也是最后一篇。在他退休后，他担任了数百名年轻学者（准确地说是 366 名）的导师，每年夏天都会邀请数十名青年学者到剑桥参加他于 1995 年至 2010 年创立并主持的大西洋世界历史国际研讨会。 Bailyn 的逝世标志着漫长的学术时代的结束，这与二战后美国高等教育的巨大扩张和美国知识分子的爆发有关。

在他去世后，讣告和社论重复了一个关于贝林职业生涯及其对美国早期历史影响的“一般”故事。我怀疑，这个故事起源于 1967 年 Bailyn 的《美国革命的意识形态起源》出版后的研究生史学研讨会，并在随后的几十年里在评论文章、博士论文和专着介绍中得到了具体化。¹最简单的版本声称，拜林推翻了当时占主导地位的进步主义对革命起因的解释，重点是经济利益和阶级冲突，并将“思想放回”新范式的中心。贝林死后，大众媒体上出现了关于这个故事的变体。在纽约时报由 Renwick McLean 和 Jennifer Schuessler 撰写的讣告（2020 年 8 月 7 日）指出，拜林的书“挑战了查尔斯·比尔德等进步时代历史学家当时的主流观点，后者将创始人的革命言论视为经济利益的面具。” 由约翰·奥蒂斯 (John Otis)撰写的华盛顿邮报讣告（2020 年 8 月 7 日）同样让贝林对比尔德的《宪法经济解释》（1913 年）进行了“强烈反击” ，将殖民者描绘成“具有深刻原则并受激进思想驱动”。右翼媒体尤其喜欢这个故事。《华尔街日报》的编辑委员会（2020 年 8 月 11 日）将贝林描述为“美国早期令人眼花缭乱的思想世界中最有成就的历史学家”意识形态起源“推翻了 20 世纪早期[End Page 360​​]革命的进步观点，该观点认为，美国精英阶层的反叛更多是出于经济利益，而不是为政治理想辩护。” 在《国家评论》（2020 年 8 月 10 日）中，理查德·布鲁克希瑟 (Richard Brookhiser) 重申了推翻进步范式的主张，然后提出，意识形态起源的标题“说明了一切：男人思考，有时他们会跟随他们的想法所引导的方向.” 这是对意识形态起源的荒谬讽刺。它非常类似于以前流行的去语境化思想史形式，事实上，贝林正在取代这种形式。

在学术期刊和学术专着上写过评论文章的更狡猾的历史学家非常清楚贝林的标题并没有“说明一切”。除了提供对意识形态起源的更复杂的渲染外，他们还经常在进步历史学家和贝林据称开创的“共和党综合”之间插入一个额外的分析范式——“共识”学派。在这个更详尽的版本中，二战结束和意识形态起源之间的历史编纂主要是对进步派的保守反应，但也忽视甚至贬低启蒙思想家的“思想”作为危险的投机废话。丹尼尔·布尔斯汀等作品（1958 年），经常被引用为“共识”学派的核心，颂扬了实践的、以经验为导向的美国人的良好意识，他们在没有教条的情况下进行了革命，拒绝了欧洲哲学家的重建社会蓝图，并最终将美国从所产生的恐怖中拯救出来通过“像列宁、墨索里尼和希特勒这样的阁楼式欧洲光明会”（第 154 页）的智力计划。对于布尔斯廷来说，任何殖民抵抗王权权威的哲学基础都在于已经普遍存在的洛克式自由主义。在《美国的自由传统》（1955 年）中，哈佛政治学家路易斯·哈茨（Louis Hartz）同样认为，封建过去和根深蒂固的社会阶级的缺席导致洛克自由主义的压倒性存在成为事实上的和基本上不假思索的美国人哲学。为了...