Updated: February 12, 2026
Intellectual Foundations of the American Revolution
To fully comprehend the American Revolution, we have to study the developments that frayed relations between Great Britain and its American colonies in the Pre-Revolutionary Era, generally understood as the years between 1763, which marked the end of the French and Indian War, and 1775, when open and violent hostilities broke out starting with the Battles of Lexington and Concord (April 19, 1775). I should note that I personally believe the Pre-Revolutionary Era ended in 1774. This is because, in my opinion, for all intents and purposes, the Revolution began in 1775. That year, therefore, belongs to the Revolutionary Period itself and not to the Pre-Revolutionary Era.
In our program, Analyzing American Revolution, several scholars do just that—analyze the Pre-Revolutionary Era. For example, Dr. Robert Gross details the lead-up to Lexington and Concord, and Dr. Serena Zabin reexamines the Boston Massacre. I will link both interviews here when they publish.
But long before the dramatic events of the Pre-Revolutionary years, starting with the Boston Tea Party and the Stamp Act, revolutionary ideas were being debated and memorialized in transformative treatises in places like England, Scotland, France and the Netherlands. And although none of these ideas by themselves could have ignited a revolution (as my guest in this interview emphasizes), they nevertheless served as the intellectual foundations of revolutionary movements that began with Committees of Correspondence as early as 1772.
So to better understand this background, I explore the intellectual foundation of the American Revolution in an interview with Dr. Sophia Rosenfeld.
Here’s how I’ve structured this post:
- Part I: The Enlightenment and revolutionary thinking — key figures, ideas, and how they influenced society.
- Part II: Common Sense and Thomas Paine — how everyday knowledge became a tool for political thought.
- Part III (this post): Choice, agency, and perspectives of Americans during the Revolution — concluding with our “Just One Point” takeaway: why ideas matter.
Exploring Enlightenment Ideas, Common Sense, and the American Revolution with Dr. Sophia Rosenfeld
Thomas Paine’s Common Sense transfigured the Colonists’ fight for their rights as British subjects to a Revolutionary War for independence. In a two-part interview, my guest, Prof. Harvey Kaye, describes Paine’s personal journey in England—from his youth to his failed careers—to his transformation and rise in America. Those interviews will be linked here when they publish.
In this interview, my guest Dr. Sophia Rosenfeld explores how Enlightenment ideas reshaped the way Western Europeans and, by association, American colonists thought about their world and reprocessed contemporary and past events based on new principles that were not just for the elite and intellectually minded. In many ways, these new thoughts were common sense for and by the common people.
In essence, long before the American Revolution, a more profound revolution had been reshaping the minds of 18th-century Europeans and North Americans. It was a revolution of “thinking about thinking,” a term that I borrow from Dr. Rosenfeld, and which explains in this interview.
About My Guest – Dr. Sophia Rosenfeld
Dr. Sophia Rosenfeld is a professor of history and former chair of the Department of History at the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches European and American intellectual and cultural history with a special emphasis on the Enlightenment, the trans-Atlantic Age of Revolutions, and the legacy of the eighteenth century for modern democracy.
Her writings and works include the following books:
- The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in the Modern World
- Common Sense: A Political History
- A Revolution in Language: The Problem of Signs in Late Eighteenth-Century France
- Democracy and Truth: A Short History
To learn more about Dr. Rosenfeld, you can visit her academic homepage and personal website.
Transcript of My Interview with Dr. Rosenfeld
The notes below are excerpts from the edited transcript of my November 2026 interview with Dr. Rosenfeld. You can watch the full interview in the video immediately below, and for convenience, I’ve also linked specific video clips to their corresponding sections in the transcript.
What Is the “Age of Choice”?
Adel: That’s kind of nuts. I want to switch gears, but I’m not sure if this is actually switching gears, because I bet there’s a lot of commonality and overlap.
And I want to talk about your book, Age of Choice, which came out this year.
So what is the age of choice?
Dr. Rosenfeld: So the age of choice in this case is a term that I essentially made up, because historians don’t use the term age of choice.
That said, choice is another one of those kinds of concepts that’s central to our existence, and that we don’t usually think about in historical terms very often, much like common sense.
And what interests me about choice, and why I think we can call the era we’re living in the age of choice, is that it’s in many ways, the meeting point of our economic lives, and our lives as citizens in a democracy.
From human rights declarations to advertising campaigns, choice is often thought to be the equivalent of freedom. And what I think is important here is that freedom hasn’t always been imagined in all times and places, and still isn’t in parts of the globe today, as involving making choices for oneself.
There are lots of different ways one could conceptualize freedom. A very particular one for our moment is, and this economic and political idea, it’s even our personal idea, is that we’re free when we get to decide for ourselves within a menu of options, which one matches our preferences.
So I see the roots of this story going all the way back to the age of enlightenment, back to the 18th, even the 17th century. But it doesn’t really consolidate as an idea, I don’t think, until the 20th century.
Was the American Revolution About Making Choices?
Adel: Were the founding fathers making a choice by imagining a government, a new form of government for themselves? Is that within the rubric of what you’re talking about?
Dr. Rosenfeld: So yes and no.
Yes, definitely, in the sense that even the Federalist Paper starts with this wonderful line about whether we are now, it’s going to be up to Americans to determine whether government can be created by choice, or whether government should always be a matter of power and strength.
In other words, the people’s decision, something more democratic, would have been called Republican then, or a matter of power politics and dynasty.
So choice is a concept in the 18th century. But what Hamilton has in mind in that famous passage, for instance, is really the collective decision of the people in a sort of abstract way.
It’s not the way we vote today.
It’s not this idea that each of us likes something different. And when we vote, we’re just we’re doing something a lot like going shopping. We’re picking what we, what corresponds best to our own predilections and preferences and values.
Adel: When you say collective decision of the people, that doesn’t sound like choice if it’s a collective decision.
Dr. Rosenfeld: Right.
And a lot of voting in the 18th century is collective. It’s not always a matter of tabulating. Some places use secret ballots, but many places did not.
Many places voting was kind of by general acclaim or everybody just saying, being in accord. Most people didn’t have the vote initially to begin with.
It’s this very particular notion of picking off menus of options on a personal, individualized basis, which is what we now generally think of as making a choice, is a more modern notion.
You can see roots of it in the 18th century. You can see roots of it in commercial practices like shopping. You can see roots of it in notions about religious liberty and choice in ideas.
But it doesn’t really become a political reality till much later.
Are Americans Today Different from Americans of the Revolution?
Adel: Professor Rosenfeld, when I speak with scholars such as yourself, some of them tell me the past is a foreign country.
So, what you were just sharing with me made me think of this question about people making personalized choices. Are we Americans now different than the Americans of the time of the American Revolution in this particular aspect: Did they sort of accept certain things that this is my lot in life, this is how things are, that there’s the House of Burgess in Virginia, or there are the, I don’t know, the Loyalists that are connected to London. Was their notion different than ours?
I think you kind of answered that, but I want to make sure that I hone in on the American Revolution period and better understand that.
Dr. Rosenfeld: I would say that, and this is again a supposition of sorts, yeah, in every era people find the world they live in to be normal.
This is what the world is like because we inhabit it.
Adel: Some may beg to differ with our time right now, Dr. Rosenfeld.
Dr. Rosenfeld: Maybe they will, yes.
In general, other places or other times are strange.
So the past is a foreign country is a sense that if you went back in time, sitting where you are, or you traveled around the globe to somewhere else, you’d find things that you found strange because you’re used to your own reality.
So it’s certainly colonists, for instance, if that’s what we’re talking about in the 18th century, didn’t sit around thinking, it’s so strange that we’re an outpost of Britain.
This is the reality for most people.
What’s harder to imagine is how do people start seeing their own world as strange, which would be a sort of first step towards thinking we need to change this.
You have to see something as wrong because it doesn’t accord with what should be, before anybody’s going to turn into a revolutionary of any kind.
Revolutions are rare.
Most of the time people might grumble about things, but they take the world to be largely as things are.
We accept all kinds of things in daily life that someday somebody’s going to say about us, how could they have lived that way?
Our grandchildren will say, how could you maybe, and that’s not even that far off and not that distant, will say, how could you have lived in a world in which X was possible?
Adel: My daughter asked me that, how could you live in a world there was no cell phones? How did you get to places?
Title page of the first collection of The Federalist, 1788.
(Public Domain)
Why Would Anyone Risk Everything to Start a Revolution?
Dr. Rosenfeld: There you go.
Or there were homeless people all over the streets and people just walked around them. How is that not a great injustice?
Or things like, you ate this, but not that.
There are all kinds of different ways in which time changes.
It’s an interesting question emerges for thinking about the age of revolutions. What would have pushed enough people to risk their lives, their property, their stability to take on a cause that seems to have basically upset what they already knew and expected to be the case?
I would say that about the American Revolution and I would say that about the French Revolution too.
It was rather extraordinary to risk upsetting the apple cart to such a profound degree.
That’s why historians are still fascinated by the question of causation.
What could have produced this in a world in which I’m sure people were just as settled into their routines as we are into ours?
Adel: By risk, I think this is a really interesting word that you use, risk, because whether it’s the French Revolution or the American Revolution, this is no longer, let me fix this, let me reform this institution or this way of doing things.
This is just essentially just turning everything upside down. That’s a particularly scary, frightening type of risk.
Just One Point
Adel: If you want our audience to remember just one point about the age of Enlightenment and the American Revolution after everything we’ve talked about, what would that one point be, Dr. Rosenfeld?
Dr. Rosenfeld: I think it’s an interesting question.
I would say ideas matter.
And, what I mean by that, again, is not that ideas cause events to fall directly out of them. Nobody says this is what equality is and people go out and actualize that fact. That just isn’t how the world works.
And yet, without ideas, without the willingness to think in new ways about old questions or even to ask new questions, we are in a way destined to kind of keep repeating the same behaviors in the same forms.
And sometimes ideas have a quick effect. Sometimes ideas have centuries-long sort of lifespans before anything happens in their wake.
The Enlightenment: “Thinking About Thinking”
Dr. Rosenfeld: But I think I would come back to the idea that the Enlightenment helps one see how thinking about thinking, thinking about why people think what they do, when they do, how they do in different eras, is vital to any kind of, not just revolution, but even any kind of reform movement.
Adel: Is it fair to say that I, when you say ideas matter, it’s not like they become a spark and a revolution starts. I get that.
But is it fair to say that ideas sometimes make you start thinking about, hey, this thing that made sense to me no longer makes sense. It’s no longer common sense.
Dr. Rosenfeld: Exactly, exactly.
If we don’t sort of ask deep questions about why are things the way they are, which I think is what Enlightenment thinkers really started to do to ask questions, then we can’t ever really imagine alternatives to the way we’re already doing things.
And so ideas are kind of spark our imaginations.
And I think studying the history of ideas is important because it helps us see how many different ways people have thought in the past and in different parts of the world, but also stimulates our own thinking about what the future could be like.
Adel: Yeah, that’s fascinating.
Dr. Rosenfeld, thank you so much for educating me and our audience about the American Revolution and about the Enlightenment. And to our audience, if you know of any history that could provide more perspective about the American Revolution, please share it with us and tell us what’s your perspective.
Discover more about Enlightenment Ideas, Common Sense, and the American Revolution in Parts I and II:
The Enlightenment and revolutionary thinking — key figures, ideas, and how they influenced society.
Common Sense and Thomas Paine — how everyday knowledge became a tool for political thought.
About the Featured Image
The featured image brings together images of Dr. Sophia Rosenfeld and Adel Aali from the interview, alongside a collage of Enlightenment-era philosophers—Adam Smith, Denis Diderot, Immanuel Kant, the Marquis de Condorcet, René Descartes, and John Locke.
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Analyzing American Revolution (AAR) is a special series podcast production of the History Behind News program. In this series, 33 professors (and counting) analyze the American Revolution from 33 different angles through in-depth interviews with host Adel Aali.
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Think You Know the American Revolution?
