[ l66 ] BOOK REVIEWS even the most elementary questions. The two volumes of symposia papers under consideration here constitute a clarion call for additional research into the causes, course, and consequences of the Revolution. Essays on the American Revolution is the outgrowth of a symposium held March 8-12, 1971, at Williamsburg, Virginia, where, under the auspices of the Institute of Early American History and Culture, some thirty-five selected scholars met to discuss two public lectures and six commissioned papers that had been distributed to the participants in advance. Honed by five days of sharp formal and informal criticism, the essays, some of which have been substantially revised for publication, not only contribute significantly to the literature of the Revolution but also set an unusually high standard of quality for works of this genre. Regrettably, the editors failed to provide an effective introduction to integrate the disparate pieces. Brilliant expositions by Bernard Bailyn and Edmund S. Morgan, originally presented as public addresses, respectively open and close the collection. Through what Bailyn terms an "anthropological" approach to the formation of the political ideology that first occasioned and then shaped the course of the Revolution, he endeavors to relate abstract concepts to actual political behavior. Where Bailyn further refines—and in a sense completes— the line of thought advanced in his Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967), Morgan boldly, even audaciously, offers a sweeping analysis of how Americans, mainly through the Revolutionary doctrine of equality, fashioned a fundamental national consensus out of endemic socioeconomic, racial, and sectional conflict. The implications of this seminal essay are profound; Morgan's thesis will stand as a landmark in American historiography. Between these two minor classics appear six essays uniformly distinguished by imaginative and authoritative scholarship. Reminding us that popular violence is one of the negative legacies of the Revolution, Richard Maxwell Brown breaks new ground in exploring the roots of colonial insurgency, the catalytic effect of the Revolution on public disorder, and the manner in which the Revolution has subsequently been used by such groups as vigilantes to legitimize extra-legal activities. While Brown's classification of provincial upheavals is most instructive and his delineation of the infrastructure and modus operandi of the Boston radical organization is superb, the exact relationship between provincial and Revolutionary turmoil remains vague. Departing from the traditional drum-and-bugle military history that has long dominated the writings on the War of Independence, John Shy calls for an investigation of the war as an agent of revolutionary change in terms of both the structure of the conflict and its impact on society. Such inquiry, he correctly suggests, could radically revise current notions about the Revolution and restore the war to the central role it occupied in the minds of the Revolutionary generation. •