America's Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It

by C. Bradley Thompson

Overview

America's Revolutionary Mind is the first major reinterpretation of the American Revolution since the publication of Bernard Bailyn's The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution and Gordon S. Wood's The Creation of the American Republic.

The purpose of this book is twofold: first, to elucidate the logic, principles, and significance of the Declaration of Independence as the embodiment of the American mind; and, second, to shed light on what John Adams once called the "real American Revolution"; that is, the moral revolution that occurred in the minds of the people in the fifteen years before 1776. The Declaration is used here as an ideological road map by which to chart the intellectual and moral terrain traveled by American Revolutionaries as they searched for new moral principles to deal with the changed political circumstances of the 1760s and early 1770s. This volume identifies and analyzes the modes of reasoning, the patterns of thought, and the new moral and political principles that served American Revolutionaries first in their intellectual battle with Great Britain before 1776 and then in their attempt to create new Revolutionary societies after 1776.

The book reconstructs what amounts to a near-unified system of thought—what Thomas Jefferson called an “American mind” or what I call “America’s Revolutionary mind.” This American mind was, I argue, united in its fealty to a common philosophy that was expressed in the Declaration and launched with the words, “We hold these truths to be self-evident.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781641772600
Publisher:	Encounter Books
Publication date:	06/28/2022
Pages:	480
Sales rank:	289,633
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.30(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

C. Bradley Thompson is Professor of Political Philosophy at Clemson Universityand the Executive Director of the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism. He received his Ph.D at Brown University, and he has also been a visiting scholar at Princeton and Harvard universities and at the Universityof London. He is the author of the award-winning John Adams and the Spirit of Liberty as well as Neoconservatism: An Obituary for an Idea.

Table of Contents

Preface to the Paperback Edition xiii

Preface xxi

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 The Enlightenment and the Declaration of Independence 11

Chapter 2 Declaring the Laws of Nature 35

Chapter 3 Self-Evident Truths 69

Chapter 4 Equality 97

Chapter 5 Equality and Slavery 123

Chapter 6 The Nature of Rights 155

Chapter 7 Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness 185

Chapter 8 The Consent of the Governed 221

Chapter 9 Consent and the Just Powers of Government 253

Chapter 10 Revolution 285

Chapter 11 Rebels with a Cause 317

Conclusion 345

Epilogue Has America Lost Its American Mind? 359

Notes 387

Index 437

Editorial Reviews

From one of America’s most astute scholars comes an extraordinarily rich study of the ideas that propelled the United States into existence, and to greatness. C. Bradley Thompson understands not just that ideas have consequences, but that, a quarter of a millennium later, the revolutionary mind retains its relevance.”—George F. Will, columnist and author of The Conservative Sensibility

“A bold new interpretation of the political and moral theory of the American Revolution. It is sure to be provocative.”—Gordon S. Wood, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Radicalism of the American Revolution

“Behind the American Constitution is the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln’s ‘apple of gold’ in a ‘picture of silver.’ Brad Thompson here explains the apple of gold, the American revolutionary mind, and how to recover its moral power as well as its principles from the studied denigration current today. With strong argument, broad evidence, and shining clarity, this is a book that will last.”—Harvey C. Mansfield, Kenan Professor of Government, Harvard University; Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford

“Since Bernard Bailyn’s and Gordon Wood’s work a half century ago, no study has appeared that takes us on so fruitful a voyage of rethinking, at a deep level, the moral, civic, and cultural causes and meaning of the Revolutionary era. At once eloquent and erudite, this book argues for and exemplifies a refreshingly distinguished method, or way of practicing the historian’s craft: ‘the new moral history’—emphasizing the thinking, judging, choosing, and acting of individuals as the true moral agents of history, rather than large-scale social processes moved by unseen tidal forces.”—Thomas Pangle, Joe R. Long Chair in Democratic Studies, Universityof Texas at Austin

From the Publisher