ABSTRACT
Vernon Louis Parrington was a virtually unknown professor of English at the University of Washington in Seattle in his late fifties when he published the first two volumes of what quickly became the most popular history of ideas ever written in the United States. Colorfully written, and saturated with vehement moral judgments, Parrington's interpretation of American thought strikingly complemented Beard's political history. His economic interpretation was part of his pragmatic conception of the role of ideas in history. The most important of all the social forces, said Parrington, in agreement with Beard, was the economic. According to Parrington, private self-interest and consolidation largely smothered the liberating impulses set loose by Revolutionary thought. Parrington expressed his criticism of the materialism and political selfishness of the dominant late-nineteenth-century mood, and he explained the lack of social idealism in terms of the capitalistic environment.
