Revolutionary!

Four scholars of the Constitution and 18th century American history said the American Revolution was more important politically than intellectually.

At the symposium entitled "The American Revolution Defining Liberty and Its Social Foundations," University Professors Bernard Bailyn and Oscar Handlin presented papers to an audience of about 300.

Both said modern scholars' access to data has destroyed the previous generation's interpretation of the American Revolution as a revolt of the oppressed against a Tory elite.

Handlin discussed the Revolution's impact on American ideas about politics and government, concluding that it was "an incident in the way of life of a people," but not a clear turning point in American intellectual history--only in its political structure.

Bailyn criticized the common assumption that the framers of the Constitution were more conservative than their predecessors, the signers of the more radical Declaration of Independence.

The men who formed the Constitution held similar views to those of their predecessors. However, what changed was not the ideas but the obligations: the first generation's objective was to remove colonial rule. The second, faced the task of constructing a new government that would not lead to autocracy, he said.

The victors in the Federalist-Anti-Federalist dispute, he said, were not conservatives, but rather came to the decision that the risk of granting too much power to the central authority was worth the accomplishment of creating a new state that could stand by itself as a coordinated whole.

He observed that "the anti-Federalists were right," summarizing their views as "liberty and size are inverse."