| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders. By Bernard Bailyn. (New York: Knopf, 2003. x, 185 pp. $26.00, ISBN 0-375-41377-4.)

This new work has all the hallmarks of a Bernard Bailyn classic. It is beautifully written, concise, and full of illuminating insights and intriguing ideas. In a few brief essays, Bailyn explores the tensions between pragmatism and idealism in early American political life in his own contribution to the recent "Founders chic." Drawing first on the insights of the art critic Kenneth Clark, Bailyn probes for the sources of creative imagination and compares the Founding Fathers with outstanding provincial artists. The most skillful and creative artists at once reintroduce simplicity and common sense into their style and invigorate their work with a visionary intensity. True creativity thus flourishes on the margins. Bailyn explores this theme through a series of political sketches: Thomas Jefferson's tortuous struggle with the complexities and ambiguities of the Revolution's ideals as he sought, often unsuccessfully, to reconcile theory with practice; Benjamin Franklin's unique blend of realism and idealism in developing—and embodying—an American foreign policy (Bailyn provides a wonderful foray into the iconography of Franklin abroad); the frenetic efforts of the writers of the Federalist Papers to explore and explain a new and innovative balance between power and liberty; and, finally, the resonance of the results of those creative struggles throughout the Atlantic world.

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