America’s Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It, by C. Bradley Thompson (Encounter Books, 584 pp., $32.99)

America’s Founding Fathers often said that a “frequent recurrence to fundamental principles” is essential for the survival of freedom. They meant that in bustling commercial republics, such as they expected the United States to become, people can be distracted from the basic premises on which freedom depends, or duped by demagogues who, in the words of The Federalist, “possess [the people’s] confidence more than they deserve it.” In America’s Revolutionary Mind — the first half of a planned two-volume study — C. Bradley Thompson lays out those fundamental principles in a comprehensively researched and patiently organized way. The result is a work that will likely become a standard reference for teaching the ideas of the American Revolution.

Although labeled “history” — specifically, what Thompson calls “the new moral history,” which “studies the what, why, and how of moral reasoning” — America’s Revolutionary Mind is not organized in chronological order but in a philosophical order that explains the “self-evident truths” of the Declaration of Independence point by point and demonstrates just how thorough was the colonists’ consensus on those principles. Rather than stopping with familiar quotations from celebrated revolutionaries, Thompson, a political-science professor at Clemson University, musters evidence from scores of writings by lesser-known figures, many never published before, and deftly assembles it all into a logical sequence that begins with fundamentals (one section is entitled “The Meaning of Truth”) and works its way up to such concepts as entrepreneurialism and “the ideal of the self-made man.”