Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism

by Staughton Lynd

The New Left—comprising what Bayard Rustin calls the "disaffected sons & daughters of the middle class"—has found a curiously appropriate leader in Staughton Lynd. He's the Brooks Brothers man as revolutionary. Harvard graduate, former assistant professor at Yale, he's the son of Robert S. & Helen M. Lynd, authors of Middletown & Middletown in Transition, both classic sociological studies of a small city in the '20s & '30s. Staughton, now 38, is best known as editor of the book Nonviolence in America & as a confirmed peace marcher & self-appointed citizen-envoy to N VietNam. He seems to be acting out his own role in a contemporary sequel to his parents' books that might be called Middletown in Revolt.
Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism is a kind of historical guide & handbook for the gentleman rebel—Emerson-cum-Marx rather than Rap Brown-cum-Mao. "I am less interested in 18th century radicalism than in 20th century radicalism," Lynd admits, & at times he makes American history read like one long protest march in which Jefferson, Thoreau & Lynd are fraternity brothers linked arm in arm. Lynd writes as a scholar as well as a proselyter & his slim volume valuably documents the American tradition of dissent. But it must be read with the proper skepticism due any partisan credo.
Like a film running in reverse, Lynd's version of American history reels backward from the New Left to the Declaration of Independence—"the single most concentrated expression of the revolutionary intellectual tradition." Yet even in the beginning, Lynd observes critically, there was a snake in Eden. "Property, property! That is the difficulty!" cried John Adams upon rereading Rousseau's The Social Contract in the White House. "It was indeed," Lynd echoes. Even the radicals of 1776, he laments, believed that the best way to support individual freedom was by guaranteeing the rights of "property rather than conscience."
For Lynd, the history of American radicalism has been a series of accelerating "guerrilla attacks upon the right of property." A Quaker as well as a Marxist, he's at his most original in suggesting that members of Nonconformist English sects—many from the Society of Friends, as were Wm Penn & Th Paine—were the 1st of the guerrillas. In the latter part of the 18th century, these Dissenters argued that the only "absolute & inalienable" rights were human rights, not property rights. Bringing theology & politics into coincidence, they established conscience—the "inner light"—as the divine right of the common man. In the 19th century, Lynd says, the doctrine was assimilated into the American "Property was no longer the ark of the covenant. It was recognized to be not a natural right but a social convention."
In Lynd's quick march, the next main engagement that had to be fought by the American radical was to establish "a freedom to act as well as think & speak." History, he believes, provided the appropriate issue in abolitionism, which expanded the private privilege of conscience into the public privilege of civil disobedience. The radicals of 1776 stipulated that "only majorities could renew the social contract," explains Lynd. "Abolitionism was obliged to discard that restriction so as to justify individual disobedience to laws which sanctioned slavery."
Lynd ends his slim outline at the Civil War & brings American radicals surprisingly close to what he regards as the final spiral in their evolution, "a frontal assault on the authority of the state." Enter the radicals of the 1960s right on cue, taking literally the nearly 200-year-old advice of the influential English political philosopher Wm Godwin, who declared that established authority has no more right to regulate an individual's actions than to regulate his thoughts.
Lynd concedes that the ultimate risk of this position invites "generalized disrespect for law," but he slides away from consequences. When in doubt, he radiates an unqualified trust in the natural goodness & perfectibility of man that makes such an early wishful-thinker as Rousseau look like a cynic.
First & last, Lynd is a moralizer. For all his meticulous scholarship, his instinct is to reduce American history to a series of black & white questions. Ought we to tolerate slavery? Should we fight unjust wars? Are we revering property more than people? To these questions, the reader seems to hear echoing between the lines Lynd's own Civil rights. Pacifism. Socialism. Seeing less the tangled events than the abstracted issues, Lynd has composed not so much a position paper as a posture paper for the New Left. This is the politics of righteousness or moral style. "I feel drawn," he's admitted, to people who feel & act in "the mystical-romantic-adventurous-sectarian" manner.
Despite his evangelical fervor, Lynd leaves a final impression of ambiguity, partly justifying the Yiddish proverb that Irving Howe recently directed at "He wants to dance at all t...

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction, Philosophy, United States, American History, American

184 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 1968

About the author

The son of renowned sociologists Robert Staughton Lynd and Helen Lynd, Staughton Lynd grew up in New York City. He earned a BA from Harvard, an MA and PhD in history from Columbia. He taught at Spelman College in Georgia (where he was acquainted with Howard Zinn) and Yale University. In 1964, Lynd served as director of Freedom Schools in the Mississippi Summer Project. An opponent of the Vietnam War, Lynd chaired the first march against the war in Washington DC in 1965 and, along with Tom Hayden and Herbert Aptheker, went on a controversial trip to Hanoi in December 1965 that cost him his position at Yale.

In the late 1960s Lynd moved to Chicago, where he was involved in community organizing. An oral history project of the working class undertaken with his wife inspired Lynd to earn a JD from the University of Chicago in 1976. After graduating the Lynds moved to Ohio, where Staughton worked as an attorney and activist.

Reviews

[Erik Graff · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the major intellectual influences in my life was an older friend in high school, Walt Wallace. From a workingclass background himself, he had already become a committed American historian by the age of seventeen, if not earlier. Not having much money, he worked himself through the downtown campus of Chicago's Roosevelt University for a BA in the field and then went on to graduate study at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, then at Union Theological Seminary in New York. Although separated during the years between his high school graduation and his entering UTS where I was already in attendance, I followed his academic career closely.

The following of Walter's academic career consisted of many visits to Roosevelt University and NIU on my part as well as trips to colloquia or to the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where Walt did much of his research which eventually led to his "Oh, Liberty! Oh, My Country!", an account of views and opinions of common American soldiers during our revolution. While still in high school, these trips to higher educational institutions were profoundly inspiring to me.

Roosevelt University's history department at the time was publicly seen as left wing. Staughton Lynd was there as were others such as Jesse Lemesh, whose classes I attended as an auditor. Lynd was headline news for a while. A junior faculty member, his appointment was not renewed and the students protested, leading to headlines and photos in the Chicago press. My visits and Walter's accounts of agitation at Roosevelt and within the august American Historical Association kept me abreast and interested in these events even after I'd gone off to college in Iowa myself.

Thus it was with great pleasure that I obtained a copy of Lynd's Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism years later, perhaps as a gift from Walter. In any case, I read it in the fall up at grandmother's cottage in Michigan, thinking appreciatively of Walter and of the sixties while huddled on the wicker couch near the fireplace.

[Jason Ross · Rating 3 out of 5]

Staughton Lynd was a product of America's New Left in the late 1960s. He received his first academic job at Spelman College through the assistance of Howard Zinn. This work was part of his extensive effort to re-vision American history as containing within it the seeds of Marxist utopia. Like a Marxist, he divides his book into two sections, "Theory" and "Praxis"; and he concludes, "Like Marx, American revolutionaries sought a society in which the state would wither away." (162)

For Lynd, the radicalism of the American Revolution came in the premise that "the proper foundation for government is a universal law of right and wring self-evident to the intuitive common sense of every man...." Pressing against a liberal story of America as grounded in the Lockean notion of property rights, Lynd argues that American radicalism drew instead from proto-Marxian ideas of the Levellers and Rousseau, filtered through English free-thinkers, and translated into the American context through the Quaker-influenced Abolitionist movement that emphasized the primacy of conscience. His goal, as framed in his introductory chapter, was to present the preamble to the Declaration as a means of encouraging "frequent recurrence to fundamental principles" - that is, revolutionary principles. It was also, in a sense, to set Marx right vis-a-vis his distrust of the working class. "...Marx felt considerable distrust for workingmen who sought to change society on the basis of their own experience and perceptions. In this he somewhat resembled those American Founding Fathers who considered moral outrage against slavery premature and utopian, and placed their hope for its eventual abolition in long-run economic trends.//Abolitionist activism therefore has something to say to Marx's dialectical materialism just as it spoke tellingly to the materialism of the Founding Fathers. What it has to say is this: One cannot entrust men with a collective right to revolution unless one is prepared for them to revolutionize their lives from day to day; one should not invoke the ultimate act of revolution without willingness to see new institutions perpetually improvised from below; the withering away of the state must begin in the process of changing the state; freedom must mean freedom now." (12-3).

The burden of his first chapter is to demonstrate the radicalism of the Declaration of Independence's "self-evident truths". By contrast, "The 'best minds' of the Enlightenment came to believe that the state of nature, the social contract, and the rights of man - in short, the apparatus of John Locke's political philosophy - were human inventions." (17) Lynd rejects the premise that the Declaration should be interpreted as a Lockean document, instead tracing the means by which Dissenting Protestants interpreted this document as emphasizing not the Lockean foundation of private property itself based on doctrine of materialism, but of private conscience exercised by men possessed of free will. The former doctrine shades toward self-preservation, the latter toward revolution. The latter doctrine, transmitted to the colonies through English Dissenters, took Lockean natural rights language and animated it with the democratic spirit of the Levellers and Rousseau, holding that natural rights were accessible to all men, high or low, and universally. "Thus was the way opened for reinterpreting John Locke in the spirit of Tom Paine."

His second chapter focused on the content of the Declaration's "Certain Inalienable Rights". The thrust of his argument is to claim that, while Locke spoke of natural rights, some of which were given up or alienated to form civil society, the Declaration refers to rights that are inalienable. Lynd claims that the Declaration was in conflict with the Lockean model of social compact because "[t]he drafters of 1776 did not yet feel the need to protect themselves against unpropertied majorities." Drawing a parallel to the authors of the French Declaration of Rights, Lynd quotes the Marxist Lefebvre as noting, "The bourgeoisie had no doubts of itself, nor did it doubt that the new order it had conceived, in accord with the laws of nature and the divine will, was destined forever to assure the welfare and progress of the human race.... it did not foresee that its own political ascendency would ever be questioned...." (44) Further, undermining the Lockean notion of rights as a kind of property, Lynd protests that the Lockean scheme allows for rights - most notably of individual conscience - to be alienated.

At this point, he moves directly to "the ills of an affluent society" connecting the points on the thin thread of the need for a society grounded on conscience to inculcate certain "non-materialist" values. His model Dissenters approached the ills of affluence along lines that were "authoritarian and Calvinist," and "nastily puritanical". (47, 48) Tautologically, the basis of those non-materialist values is conscience. Priestley's Essay on the First Principles of Government held out a rather broad version of conscience, but the American founders "tended to reserve absolute inalienability for the life of the mind (or even more narrowly, for religious conscience), and to leave actions of every kind subject to state regulation." (54) Here Lynd suggests, but does not detail, the extent of his own notion of conscience. In reviewing state bills of rights, he finds that the states held as inalienable the rights of conscience and of revolution. But these were limited: the former to beliefs that did not disrupt public peace; the latter to majorities. "Both definitions of inalienability severely limited the individual's scope of action. For some Dissenting radicals, however, individual self-determination had become the very definition of freedom." (55) This notion of individual self-determination was central, per Lynd, to the moral and political doctrines of the Abolitionists.

Here Lynd turns to a brace of chapters on "Praxis," beginning with the Jeffersonian - and radical - premise "The Earth Belongs to the Living." Jefferson's phrase becomes, in Lynd's hands, a way of clarifying the ambiguity of the Revolution and Declaration, both of which had a tangle of motives including the conservative defense of property rights and the radical movement toward social democracy. Lynd involves Madison here as well, quoting a 1788 letter stating, "the two classes of rights were so little discriminated, that a provision for the rights of persons was supposed to include of itself those of property; and it was natural to infer, from the tendency of republican laws, that these different interests would be more and more identified. [But] in all populous countries the smaller part only can be interested in preserving the rights of property." (68) Thus Madison insisted on a bicameral legislature, all the better to defend property rights of the minority; the state, Lynd concludes, exists to protect this minority.

Having attacked the notion of bicameralism, Lynd progresses to an attack on representation. "A minority, even a minority of one, had the duty of living on the basis of God's law in defiance of all man-made authorities." (100) Here Lynd traces the role of Quakerism in fostering in Abolitionism a new doctrine of civil disobedience, effectively a personal right to revolution. Finally, he undermines the notion of territorial borders, documenting the universalist slogan, "Our country is the world." Per Lynd, "Seeking to be faithful to the principles of the American Revolution, abolitionists were driven outside of the framework of national allegiance and began to understand themselves as citizens of the world." (132)

Yet the promise of Abolitionism was, for Lynd, unfulfilled. Abolitionists lost their pacifism when it seemed as though the executive war power was capable of freeing the slaves; "Thus at its very moment of success the American revolutionary tradition threatened to become its opposite: a means of oppression and a hindrance to further growth." (153) Further, "abolitionism too had its silences, particularly concerning the kind of economic system which the North intended to transplant southward and the economic motives behind the war by means of which the transplantation was effected. These tensions within the ideology of the second, abolitionist coalition [i.e. the second American revolution in 1861] could be exposed only by the spokesmen of a third revolutionary movement prepared to be critical, not just of property in man, but in private property in all of its forms." (161)

Concluding, Lynd writes "Like Marx, American revolutionaries sought a society in which the state would wither away." (162) And he goes through a range of examples, American and non-American, by which democratic and voluntary bodies could create "bicameralism from below". He is - to his credit, and despite his time with Saul Alinsky - no fan of the community organizer model of many on today's Progressive Left. Yet his mixture of academics and activism has made him the subject of criticism from historians - even Marxist fellow travelers like Eugene Genovese - for failing to fulfill his duties as an historian. This is an argument that had more force a generation ago, as Lynd's career, and his interpretation of the American Founding, are both coming back into vogue.

[Reid Luzzader · Rating 4 out of 5]

Written by a New Left academic, the main thesis of this book is that the same radical ideas that influenced the American Revolution were used by later radical movements, such as the abolitionists – and what is still considered radical in America – by socialists.

When it comes to the idea of common property, it is true that there were ideas of land as common property in 17th and 18th century thought. However, this was mostly theoretical. John Locke believed that property was held in common in the state of nature until someone cultivated the land, at which time it became theirs - which seems to leave out hunter-gatherers. It is probably correct that Jefferson believed that everyone should own land, and that the western frontier could be used for this. This idea of common land comes out most clearly in Tom Paine’s “Agrarian Justice”, in which he sets out a plan for a rudimentary welfare state that was unique among the Founding Fathers and which shows a real concern for the poor that was unusual for the time. However, he argued that it wasn't charity. He argued that the poor were owed it because the never got the economic benefit from the time when land was held in common.

Lynd passes by pretty quickly a very strong economic movement in the 18th-century America that we would think of as radical today. This is the agrarian vision as exemplified by Jefferson, and as opposed to the promotion of manufacturing exemplified by Alexander Hamilton. (See “The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America” by Drew McCoy.) One of the main reasons that supporters of a purely agrarian economy wanted it was that it would result in self-sufficient farmers that were not dependent on others. They viewed working under an employer – say, at a factory – as inherently degrading. Clearly, the Hamiltonian vision won out.

[Samuel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm a pretty big Staughton Lynd fan, practically fanboy status because the dude is legendary, but this was lightweight painful to slog through especially if you aren't super familiar with the revolutionary time period, or with the philosophy of enlightenment thinkers in general, especially Locke, and the Dissenters who were like the British predecessors in thought, to the framers of our own constitution which we allegedly hold so near and dear to our hearts.

Had these thought patterns been allowed to arrive at their natural conclusion undeterred, would have resulted in the abolition of slavery much sooner than we were able to accomplish it, potentially even during the debates for the ratification of the constitution itself. Also, I learned that while Locke receives the lions share of credit for influencing the thought of Jefferson and other prominent figures involved in crafting our declaration of independence, constitution and bill of rights, when in fact they were much more likely heavily influenced by the Dissenters in their understanding and overall implementation of Locke's theories. in their implementation of Locke's theories to the Dissenters much as their name would imply dissented from the rule of England such as it was at the time in relation to their religious freedoms, and freedom to act in accordance with one' such as it iss conscience a line of thinking which would heavily influence Henry David Thoreau when settling on the path of civil disobedience as an effective tool not just to voice displeasure but to achieve results as well, creating a revolution of one as he so famously called it.

I learned a lot, and he makes many solid and/or interesting points overall, first of which is some of the more interesting and less well-broadcasted thoughts and ideas from some of our founding fathers, such as Jefferson, or Franklin, which you don't typically get from the mainstream narrative. Also, much of the language used in our famous historical documents was heavily influenced by the thought of the English Dissenters overall. If, like myself, all of this sounds like a fair amount of gobbledeygook, strap on your seatbelt because it could get a little bumpy along the way.

Despite the interesting points which he is making, he often references historical documents in such a way that it would require that you also have read that same document prior to his referencing it in order to be able to follow along easily. This means that the author is assuming a certain degree of familiarity with the material historically speaking, and does not do a good job bridging the gaps for those who aren't (imho).

This gets deep in the weeds real early on, so this definitely isn't recommended as a casual read by any stretch of the imagination, especially without any prior knowledge or familiarity with time period and/or subject in general. There were some areas I had to go back and read several times in order to make sense of it, but once I got my bearings it was a little better, still, not what I had been expecting given his other works that I have read and loved, though in hindsight many of those have been either an interview, or he has served as an editor of rather than the author.

[Steve Llano · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an excellent survey of deep dives into primary documents to reveal the relationship that the founding fathers and other significant American thinkers and revolutionaries had with documents that were produced by "dissenters." This is a slippery term, and one that I'm working through right now in my own scholarship. Lynd seems to think, by way of the method of this book, that dissenters are usually reaching back to a set of texts just before the current ones in order to grab hold of an idea and reframe it against itself, in its own terms, in order to push the status quo toward something better, more fair, better for the people. He does this masterfully, especially on the subject of the legal defense of private property and Jefferson's writings. He proves very skillfully though a range of documents how private property was considered to be a threat to good republican government and would lead to an oligarchy where property concerns drove decision making. This is, of course, a very persuasive rendering of where we are in the US today.

This is a quick read and really great history based on some older documents that take issue with the traditional tale - that everyone was influenced by John Locke. There were a number of interlocutors with Locke that had great influence on many American thinkers, and shaped their response to the question of what American law should be and what good government looks like. It's incredibly interesting and very well written.

[Mark Valentine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lynd's short study I found an apt exploration of the roots of radical thought in American History. Lynds traces two stands but spends more energy on the Rousseau to Paine to Garrison to Thoreau to DuBois to Debs involving the American Revolution, Abolition and ultimately solidarity for workers. The second strand begins with Hobbes to Burke to Clay...and it involves the strength that an autocratic leader wielding political power like a club can bring to unruly, unprincipled citizens.

The central chapters, the bulk of the volume, concerns the origins and rise of Abolitionism and I thought it remarkable reading because--think about it--when they were writing and speaking, they didn't know if the 14th Amendment would ever come to pass.

I also found it inspirational reading for application today; I mean, we may not be in a revolution now as what happened in 1776 or 1861 but we are certainly in an upheaval, getting tested for our bedrock political values (will the Constitution remain or will it be disregarded?) and who can tell what the Impeachment proceedings will bring?

[Peter Strauss · Rating 5 out of 5]

For America, until lately, radicalism has meant communism. This is a look at home-grown political radicalism from our colonial era. At the very least, brief book is a necessary counterweight to one of the principle dogmas of the 20th Century.

[Aidan]

Read for my class America and the Radical Tradition

[B · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have to say, this is one of the better history-esque books I've read in a long time.

The book is structured as such: starting before the American Revolution and ending in the mid-late 1800's, Lynd's book takes different ideologies from the times and smooshes them all together. It sounds complicated but it reads like a dialogue between a bunch of intelligent men, pondering what a good society should be based around.

I find that books such as this are usually bland and you want to burn them afterward but Lynd has achieved an easy reading style to a book chock full of interesting people, telling us what their Utopia is.

If you want to know how we have the government we have and what other options were, pick this up.

[Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very dense material, but quite fascinating. It was interesting to learn how many of our Founding Fathers were divided on the subject of private property and how its rights do not trump natural law. (Ya hear that, Ron Paul?)