Praise for America’s Revolutionary Mind

“America’s Revolutionary Mind is a tour de force that vastly expands our understanding of the ideas that launched the American Revolution. Thompson goes beyond the groundbreaking intellectual histories by Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood by explaining how Americans came to embrace Enlightenment ideas about human nature, reason, and moral principles in the years preceding 1776. For legal and constitutional scholars, this monograph will become an essential source on the original meaning of fundamental political and legal concepts in the founding era, especially when combined with his forthcoming companion book on the Constitution.”

—Adam Mossoff, Professor of Law, Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University

“Thompson’s stunning new interpretation of the American Revolution restores the Declaration of Independence as the clearest window into Americans’ thoughts regarding their rightful relationship with Great Britain—as well as with each other. Cogent and compelling, his careful analysis of the ideas and events leading to independence amounts to the best intellectual history of the Revolution in years.”

—Robert M. S. McDonald, United States Military Academy, author of Confounding Father: Thomas Jefferson’s Image in His Own Time

“America’s Revolutionary Mind says new things about and takes new approaches to the world of ideas in the era of the American Revolution. Since his John Adams and the Spirit of Liberty, C. Bradley Thompson has continued to enlighten us and to challenge conventional wisdom. By using moral philosophy as his book’s foundation, Thompson changes our angle of vision on the subject: the Revolution looks different when we adopt his perspective. Beautifully written and formidably documented, his book confronts such predecessors as Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood, Henry Steele Commager, and Douglass Adair. Readers who disagree with his argument in whole or in part, particularly with his account of the relationship between the Revolution’s intellectual world and the history of American thought up to our time, must read him nonetheless. This is an essential book.”

—R. B. Bernstein, City College of New York, author of The Education of John Adams and Are We to Be a Nation?: The Making of the Constitution

“Those who believe there is nothing new to say about the American Revolution are in for a great surprise. C. Bradley Thompson shows that an unprecedented change in the method of thinking in the decade preceding Lexington and Concord was the deepest cause of the ‘shot heard round the world.’Before it unfolded on the battlefield, the real Revolution was born first in the minds of America’s leaders and the public. Thompson’s unerring mastery of this period provides us with an education, as important today as it was 250 years ago, into this nation’s fundamental principles.”

—James Ceaser, Professor of Politics, University of Virginia

“With America’s Revolutionary Mind, C. Bradley Thompson launches a ‘new moral history,’ an approach to understanding our past and ourselves that puts front and center the American founders’ claim to have grasped and to have acted on the basis of an objective moral reality. Thompson’s book, at its heart, challenges us to see the American Revolution as rooted in a moral choice for freedom over slavery, a choice that faces each generation, and, indeed, each one of us.”

—Bradford P. Wilson, Executive Director of the James Madison Program and Lecturer in Politics, Princeton University