ABSTRACT
Bernard Bailyn, the author of The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, was born in the US city of Hartford, Connecticut, in 1922. As an undergraduate, he attended Williams College in Massachusetts before serving in the US Army during World War II. A central argument of Ideological Origins was that English radical political thought was central to revolutionary politics. While many scholars had examined English domestic politics, Bailyn's application of this literature to the American colonies was novel. This highlights the nature of Bailyn's originality and influences: he seems to have read widely and developed an eye for introducing scholarship into new contexts. Prior to Ideological Origins, it was generally believed that the ideas of the English philosopher John Locke and the Enlightenment were key to revolutionary ideology. The Enlightenment was an eighteenth-century movement that promoted science, liberty, and rationality over tradition and religion. Locke, one of its key thinkers, proclaimed that all men were born with inalienable rights.
