Bernard Bailyn's Barbarous Modernity

I his 2019 memoir Illuminating History, Bernard Bailyn shared a story about entering the PhD program at Harvard. Fresh from service in the army, where he and countless others of his generation witnessed the unparalleled attack on the Enlightenment ideals that had ushered a liberal Europe into existence, he decided to study history. As it turned out, the army had assigned him to learn German in anticipation of the post-war reorganization and occupation of Europe. Bailyn’s linguistic training and immersion in German led him, not surprisingly, into European history, especially the history of Germany. But after the war, when he arrived at Harvard, his interests had shifted. He had become fascinated with understanding the relationship between ideas and lived experience and to “exploring the connections between America and Europe, in whatever sphere.” Bailyn had settled on the early modern era where, he wrote, “one could see the connections between a distant past and an emerging modernity.” The question that drove him first into early American history became a lifelong quest. As he put it, during his career he examined individuals and documents that revealed “vital encapsulations of what would become major developments in the emergence of modernity.”1 Fair enough, as Bailyn might have put it. This was the kind of large problem historians should pursue, a point he made early in his career in his provocative essay on the limitations of Fernand Braudel’s study of the Mediterranean in the sixteenth