Bailyn's dissertation and first publications dealt with
New England merchants. He argued that
international commerce was an uncertain business, given the high risk of losses at sea in the very long turnaround times, which meant that information was often too old to be useful. Merchants reduced the uncertainty by pooling their resources, especially with marriages to other merchant families, and placing their kinfolk as trusted agents in
London and other foreign ports. International commerce became a chief means of growing rich in
colonial Massachusetts. However, there was an ongoing tension between the
entrepreneurial spirit on the one hand and traditional
Puritan culture on the other. The world of merchants became an engine of social change, undermining the
isolationism,
scholasticism, and religious zeal of the Puritan leadership. Bailyn pointed the younger generation of historians away from Puritan theology and toward broader social and economic forces. Bailyn expanded his research to the social structure of
Virginia, showing how its leadership class was transformed in the 1660s. Like
Edmund Morgan at
Brown University and
Yale, Bailyn emphasized the multiple roles of the family in the colonial social system.
Libertarian roots of the American Revolution In
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution Bailyn analyzed pre-Revolutionary political
pamphlets to show that colonists believed the British intended to establish a tyrannical state that would abridge the historical British rights. He thus argued that the Revolutionary rhetoric of liberty and freedom was not simply
propagandistic but rather central to their understanding of the situation. This evidence was used to displace
Charles A. Beard's theory, then the dominant understanding of the American Revolution, that the American Revolution was primarily a matter of
class warfare and that the
rhetoric of liberty was meaningless. Bailyn maintained that
ideology was ingrained in the revolutionaries, an attitude he said exemplified the "transforming
radicalism of the American Revolution." Bailyn argued that
republicanism was at the core of the values
French radical thinkers had striven to affirm. He located the intellectual sources of the
American Revolution within a broader British political framework, explaining how English
country Whig ideas about
civic virtue,
corruption, ancient rights, and fear of
autocracy were, in the colonies, transformed into the ideology of republicanism. According to Bailyn, In Bailyn's assessment, contested libertarian meanings change through time as "the colonists" struggled to define, and to pursue, the property of independence. Recent historians hold that more than any other "colonist," Boston waterfront rebels channeled their "
cosmopolitanism into a belief that 'the cause of America' was a libertarian 'cause for all mankind." In a 1976 article for the libertarian
Reason magazine, economist
Murray Rothbard claimed that Bailyn's work was the "now dominant school of historiography on the American Revolution" which stressed radical libertarian ideology as a main cause of the American Revolution, particularly a (justified)
conspiracist view of the British government.
Two Concepts of Liberty In her memorial tribute, Harvard historian
Joyce Chaplin noted Bernard Bailyn's resistance to "dichotomies" and his attention to "granular" records and culture. In that context, Bailyn did not publish on political philosopher
Isaiah Berlin until a 2006 assessment of "perfectionist ideas" found in "Two Concepts of Liberty." He contended that Berlin's framework for "liberty" was "formally cast as a discourse on the permissible limits of coercion; 'force' and 'constraint" are repeatedly referred to, and Berlin denied that all historical conflicts are reducible to conflicts of ideas." Berlin's "comments on the dangers of perfectionism had begun with his discussion of
positive liberty...While at times, he then wrote, it might be justifiable 'to coerce men in the name of some goal (let us say, justice or public health), which they would, if they were more enlightened, themselves pursue,' once one claims that one knows what others need better than they know it themselves, one is 'in a position to ignore the actual wishes of men or societies.' " Bailyn triangulated his own approach with Berlin's "embattled position in defense of a
liberal alternative" and "perfectionist ideas." For the latter, Bailyn distinguished his approach to "liberty" from the "unity" precepts of
Actual idealism in
Totalitarianism. Thus he decried "the repressive power of the Soviet state, the annihilatory power of the Nazi regime, the mind-blinding power of Maoist gangs, [and] the suffocating power of Islamic fundamentalism." He declared that "no one knew better than Berlin or expressed more brilliantly the genealogy and structure of perfectionist ideas. But their threat to civilisation, in the most general terms, lay not in their intrinsic malevolence but in the brutality of those who implacably imposed them: the populist thugs, the fanatical monopolists of power." ==Social history==