The categories within which the colonists thought about the social foundations of politics were inheritances from classical antiquity, reshaped by se… - Bernard Bailyn

Never had Parliament or the crown, or both together, operated in actuality as theory indicated sovereign powers should.

The ideas that the colonists put forward, rather than creating a new condition of fact, expressed one that has long existed; they articulated and in so doing generalized, systematized, gave moral sanction to what had emerged haphazardly, incompletely and insensibly, from the chaotic factionalism of colonial politics.

Up and down the the still sparsely settled coast of British North America, groups of men-intellectuals and farmers, scholars and merchants, the learned and the ignorant-gathered for the purpose of constructing enlightened governments.