Faces of Revolution: Personalities and Themes in the Struggle for American Independence .

FOR THE past 25 years Harvard's Bernard Bailyn has been our most influential historian of the American Revolution. Before his Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967) and his subsequent Origins of American Politics, there had been persuasive explanations of these American beginnings which emphasized economic and institutional factors or constitutional disputes between England and her colonies. But all such constructions, as Bailyn has properly pointed out, neglect the explosion of theorizing about government and political organization that swept the English-speaking world in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries--a plethora reflected in the voluminous pamphlet literature generated on these shores and in the passionate declamations of American orators who pushed their more cautious neighbors toward revolution.

Now that the work of accounting for this intellectual impetus has been accomplished, Bailyn has collected some of his earlier occasional writings, along with more recent reflections on what are from him familiar themes, including fine portraits of singular American revolutionaries and a group of overviews concerning thematic ways of reading the Revolution. These explanations he links to the next section of our history, the era which produced and ratified the Constitution and thus set an American government into motion.

The portraits are mostly of New Englanders, three of them members of the clergy, but they also include Jefferson the Virginian and Thomas Paine, who was never more than an influential visitor to these shores. There is not much about the South, but Bailyn writes superbly about New England revolutionaries, New England Loyalists, and root-and-branch radicals from all over.

However, the best of the portraits concerns the subject of his most ambitious book, Governor Thomas Hutchinson of Massachusetts. Regarding that prudent, pious, and determined Tory, Bailyn offers useful observations touching the psychology of revolution, and those who cannot understand that fiery spirit. The meaning of any division like the one that separated British North America from the mother country comes not only from its fervent champions but also from its reluctant supporters and its outright opponents: from men who joined in the upheaval in order to shape and direct it, to keep it under control.

The first of these essays in synthesis is about the great year itself as a watershed, "1776 in Britain and America: A Year of Challenge--A World Transformed." By going over a list of books and pamphlets from this annus mirabilis, and combining it with a straight-forward description of events in Britain at the time, Bailyn is able to suggest that what occurred in our Revolution was simply a dramatic rendering of a larger change throughout the British world. Thomas Paine and Edward Gibbon, Richard Price and John Cartwright, Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham did disturb the foundations, although those foundations were under stress before these savants appeared in print.

The next two essays concern the relation of ideas to the social and political circumstances which gave them currency in the American struggle for independence: the rapid growth of population and commerce; the hunger for open land that swept over Europe; and the evolution of religious diversity. "The Central Themes of the American Revolution" persuades us that our "Revolution is an event whose meaning cannot be confined to the past," since "what we make of the history of our own national origins helps to define us for the ages," and forces us to identify the kind of politics we prefer for the Republic as we have come to know it. All of this postulation is well argued, as is Bailyn's conclusion regarding the nation-making conflict: that the Revolution issued from an "integrated set of values, beliefs, attitudes, and responses that had evolved through a century and a half of Anglo-American history" and gathered in the heart of our collective personality until it emerged in a determined will to govern ourselves. "Political Experience and Radical Ideas in Eighteenth Century America" is equally useful in seeing the radical thought of those times as an after-the-fact justification of a revolutionary disposition already a part of our practice into something larger: a language for "lifting consciousness," and for "endowing with high moral purpose . . . elements of change." Thus radicalism is more the apologia for our Revolution than its primary intellectual cause.

But this volume's final essay is less satisfactory. Moreover, its shortcomings are so serious as to alter my generally favorable opinion of the book. The subject is the continuity linking the Declaration of Independence with the Constitution. Unfortunately, Bailyn's version of that continuity is drawn from the radical/abolitionist tradition of America jurisprudence, from the Whig myth of our nation's history as a progressive continuum, and not from any historiography which rests on persuasive contemporary evidence. As Daniel Boorstin has observed, "We have repeated that 'all men are created equal' without daring to discover what it meant [in 1776] and without realizing that probably to none of the men who spoke it did it mean what we would like it to mean . . ."--vast internal transformations within the rebellious colonies, social justice, and freedom for the slaves.

Such criticism notwithstanding, Bernard Bailyn is instructive even at his most doctrinaire and simplistic. He shows where the fault lines are to be found in our culture. His "Commentary on the Constitution" as a "fulfillment" of the Revolution rests in part on this anachronistic error (the promissory note), but depends equally upon a neglected truth: that the Anti-Federalists were the legitimate heirs of 1776; that their "fear of a conspiracy against the fragile structure of freedom" was the same "fear that had lain at the heart of the resistance movement before 1776." But if Federalism is a rejection of the "Spirit of '76," why was it adopted in 1787-88 when the Constitution was ratified? Bailyn answers that Americans were argued out of their habitual distrust and amused by talk of the "good intentions" of public men, and by their own hope for a government of "noble purposes." Gullibility in other words. It is as good an explanation as any other we can devise. What signifies is the consequence of sucn sanguine confidence as we continue to repeat the same choices on the same grounds after two hundred years of experience with an ever-growing federal power.

Mr. Bradford is a professor of history at the University of Dallas.