About this item
Americas Revolutionary Mind is the first major reinterpretation of the American Revolution since the publication of Bernard Bailyns The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution and Gordon S. Woods 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 "Americas 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."
About the Author
C. Bradley Thompson is the BB&T Research Professor in the Department of Political Science at Clemson University and the Executive Director of the Clemson Institute for the Study Capitalism. He received his Ph.D from Brown University, and he has also been a visiting scholar at Princeton and Harvard universities and at the University of London. Professor Thompson is the author of the award-winning book John Adams and the Spirit of Liberty. He is also the author (with Yaron Brook) of Neoconservatism: An Obituary for an Idea. Thompson has edited two books: The Revolutionary Writings of John Adams (Liberty Press) and Antislavery Political Writings, 1833-1860: A Reader (M.E. Sharp) . He was also a co-editor of the four-volume Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment (Oxford University Press) .Dr. Thompson is currently completing two books: one on "The Ideological Origins of American Constitutionalism" and another tentatively entitled "Manifesto for a Free Society."Dr. Thompson is also an occasional writer for The Times Literary Supplement of London, The Objective Standard and various other national publications. He has lectured around the country on education reform and on the moral foundations of capitalism, and his op-ed essays have appeared in scores of newspapers in the U.S. and abroad. His lectures on the political thought of John Adams have twice appeared on C-SPAN, and he has been a guest on the John Stossel show.
