GREECE AND ROME IN AMERICA

In: Modern intellectual history: MIH, Band 10, Heft 1, S. 177-192

Abstract

The classics appear conspicuously in the pamphlet wars of the American Revolution, though in the opinion of Bernard Bailyn (written many years ago), their presence is "window-dressing" and their influence "superficial." They are "everywhereillustrative, not determinative, of thought" (my italics). Up the scale in influence comes Enlightenment rationalism, also "superficial" but only "at times"—that removes the foreigners, ancient and modern. Then, further up the scale are English common-law writers, "powerfully influential" though still insufficiently "determinative"; above them, a "major source," New England Puritan thought and culture; and finally, at the top, seventeenth-century British "heroes of liberty" and the "early eighteenth-century transmitters of this tradition," e.g. Commonwealth men, Bishop Hoadly. Who would have thought that the bishop of Winchester weighed in the balance more heavily than Plato and Aristotle? Only once in passing does Bailyn even mention Machiavelli, to whom J. G. A. Pocock, Quentin Skinner, and Harvey C. Mansfield would grant large prominence in the development of Revolutionary thought.