24 quotes
Defiance to constituted authority leaped like a spark from one flammable area to another, growing in heat as it went.
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967)
Whatever deficiencies the leaders of the American Revolution may have had, reticence, fortunately, was not one of them.
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967)
On the evening of October 14, 1774, the Massachusetts delegates were invited to Carpenters' Hall by a group of Philadelphians to do "a little business."
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967)
What gave transcendent importance to the aggressiveness of power was the fact that its natural prey, its necessary victim, was liberty, or law, or right.
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967)
At first the relevance of chattel slavery to libertarian ideals was noted only in individual passages of isolated pamphlets.
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967)
The fact that the ministerial conspiracy against liberty had risen from corruption was of the utmost importance to the colonists.
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967)
The classics of the ancient world are everywhere in the literature of the Revolution, but they are everywhere illustrative, not determinative, of thought
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967)
In England the practice of "virtual" representation provided reasonably well for the actual representation of the major interests of the society, and it raised no widespread objection.
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967)
The wielders of power did not speak for it, nor did they naturally serve it. Their interest was to use and develop power, no less natural and necessary than liberty but more dangerous.
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967)
The categories within which the colonists thought about the social foundations of politics were inheritances from classical antiquity, reshaped by seventeenth century English thought.
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967)
Never had Parliament or the crown, or both together, operated in actuality as theory indicated sovereign powers should.
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967)
Up and down the the still sparsely settled coast of British North America, groups of men-intellectuals and farmers, scholars and merchants, the learned and the ignorant-gathered for the purpose of constructing enlightened governments.
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967)
The turning point was the Tea Act and the resulting Tea Party in Boston in December 1773.
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967)
The primary function of a constitution was to mark out the boundaries of governmental powers-hence in England, where there was no constitution , there were no limits (save for the effect of trail by jury) to what the legislature might do.
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967)
That by 1774 the final crisis of the constitution, brought on by political and social corruption, had been reached was, to most informed colonists, evident; ...
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967)
The full bibliography of pamphlets relating to the Anglo-American struggle published in the colonies through the year 1776 contains not a dozen or so items but over four hundred; ...
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967)
Everyone knew that democracy-direct rule by all the people-required such spartan, self-denying virtue on the part of all the people that it was likely to survive only where poverty made upright behavior necessary for the perpetuation of the race.
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967)
The theory of politics that emerges from the political literature of the pre-Revolutionary years rests on the belief that what lay behind every political scene, the ultimate explanation of every political controversy, was the disposition of power.
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967)
It was an elevating, transforming vision: a new, fresh, vigorous, and above all morally regenerate people rising from the obscurity to defend the battlements of liberty and then in triumph standing forth, heartening and sustaining the cause of freedom everywhere.
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967)
The idea of sovereignty current in the English speaking world of the 1760s was scarcely more than a century old. It had first emerged during the English Civil War, in the early 1640s, and had been established as a canon of Whig political thought in the Revolution of 1688.
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967)