| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Bernard Bailyn. To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 2003. Pp. x, 185. $26.00.
Bernard Bailyn's extraordinary power of expression invests particular words with totemic power, and these words are always in motion. "Transforming" is the most famous, as in The Transforming Radicalism of the American Revolution, the original title of Bailyn's best-known book. In the book under review, itself in many ways an apercu of themes Bailyn has developed in the past half-century, the catch-word is "ambiguity": the ambiguity of American provincials, caught between the cautious admonitions of the old world and the unlimited possibilities of the new; the "ambiguities of freedom" that bedeviled Thomas Jefferson, at once an exploiter of slaves and the prophet of equality; the ambiguities of "reason and idealism in American diplomacy," that is, Benjamin Franklin and John Adams in Paris; the ambiguities of the Federalist papers, polemical political essays turned prescriptive judicial texts; and the ambiguity of the American Revolution in the Atlantic world, where, for example, North American federalism became the vehicle of South American nationalism.	1
Bailyn deftly connects the first and last of these ambiguities, the founders' provincialism and their federal constitution. It was Americans' simultaneous experience of an imperial parliament and provincial assemblies that educated them to the possibility of dual sovereignty. It was the provincials' experience of the expansion of political representation to match the physical growth of the colonies that led them to unite classical republicanism with expansive nationalism, to "expand the sphere," in James Madison's famous formulation.	. . .

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