Bernard Bailyn

February 8, 2016|Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood, Herbert Butterfield, Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Joyce Appleby, Leopold von Ranke, republican synthesis, Sometimes an Art, The Whig Interpretation of History

The Paths of the Historian

by Michael Zuckert|

The recent publication of Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History by Harvard Emeritus Professor Bernard Bailyn provides a welcome opportunity to reflect on Bailyn the historian and his contribution to the understanding of the 17th and 18th centuries. One cannot always trust the blurbs on the back covers of books, but in this case Jonathan Yardley’s judgment is no mere piece of puffery: “For approximately half a century, Bailyn has been the country’s most distinguished and influential scholar of the Revolution.” The one place where Yardley goes wrong is in limiting Bailyn’s portfolio to the American Revolution. It’s true that…

March 26, 2015|Bernard Bailyn, Common Law, duty of clarity, Enlightenment, James Bradley Thayer, Philip Hamburger

The Common Law Roots of the Duty of Clarity

by John O. McGinnis|

In his brilliant book The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution Bernard Bailyn wrote: “English law—as authority as legitimizing precedent, as embodied principle, and as the framework of historical understanding—stood side by side with Enlightenment rationalism in the minds of the Revolutionary Generation.” The Constitution itself was a product of those same minds caught between the traditions of the common law and the axioms of the Enlightenment. Understanding the Constitution correctly depends on giving appropriate weight to its common law background.

The judicial duty of clarity along with judicial methods of clarification reflects the common law background of judicial review.

April 7, 2014|Bernard Bailyn, original methods originalism, Originalism, Richard Epstein

Thick Originalism as a Constraint on Ideology

by John O. McGinnis|

My last post described the most important recent trend in originalism—the thickening of meaning by reference to the pervasiveness of the Constitution’s legal background. Legal rules at the time of the Framing help clarify its ambiguities and make more precise its occasional surface vagueness. The most important implication of the thickening of originalism is to challenge ideologically comprehensive originalism—the use of an ostensibly originalist vision of Constitution to suggest that it almost invariably favors one ideology.

By putting the Constitution’s legal background front and center, thick originalism makes a comprehensive victory for any ideology less likely for three reasons. First, the legal background is a complex one given by the tradition of law, including the common law and in some cases the law of nations over centuries. This law is very unlikely to line up with any contemporary ideology, not least because of complexity and its accretion in a past even more distant than that of the Framing itself.

Second, in one sense the common law background of the Constitution is distinct from and in opposition to the Enlightenment thinking that gave rise to modern ideology. Bernard Bailyn, the famous historian of the ideas behind the American Revolution once stated: “English law—as authority, as legitimizing precedent, as embodied principle, and as the framework of historical understanding—stood side by side with Enlightenment rationalism in the minds of the Revolutionary Generation.”

The Constitution itself was product of those same minds caught between the traditions of the common law and the axioms of the Enlightenment.

August 23, 2013|Bernard Bailyn, Document No. 9, Econ Log, Federalism, Originalism

Friday Roundup, August 23rd

by Richard M. Reinsch II|

Reading Bernard Bailyn in this week's feature review essay: Seeing Colonial North America through a Glass, Darkly. Congratulations to Econ Log for being ranked 12th in the most influential economic blogs rankings. Randy Barnett: Can lawyers ascertain the original meaning of the Constitution? Adam Freedman writes on federalism's virtues that even progressives are discovering to be lovely. Speaking of federalism, if you are in Indy on September 17th, then come to this symposium "Liberty, Federalism, and the American Constitution," sponsored by Liberty Fund and the Sagamore Institute. Federalism maestro Michael Greve is a featured speaker. Paul Caron has a roundup of posts on disciplining…

August 18, 2013|Bernard Bailyn, Colonial British North America, Jamestown, John Smith, New Netherlands, New Sweden, Plymouth

Seeing Colonial North America through a Glass, Darkly

by Matthew Hale|

The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 is a decidedly unromantic account of seven decades of life in seventeenth-century British North America. Rather than seeing the earliest colonial settlements as stable, coherent, rapidly maturing communities, Bernard Bailyn, the Adams University professor emeritus at Harvard University, views them as brutish, nasty, disordered outposts that were quite often lucky to survive. That they did survive, Bailyn suggests, is largely because just enough new migrants arrived at just the right time and because Europeans committed acts of unspeakable violence against indigenous peoples. Native Americans contributed to…

A Mirror of the 20th-Century Congress

by Joseph Postell

Wright undermined the very basis of his local popularity—the decentralized nature of the House—by supporting reforms that gave power to the party leaders.

The Graces of Flannery O'Connor

by Henry T. Edmondson III

O'Connor's correspondence is a goldmine of piercing insight and startling reflections on everything from literature to philosophy to raising peacocks.

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