America is the land of progress, speculative, contingent,
pragmatic, experimental, traditionless. An American conservatism,
accordingly, is oxymoronic, blundering, graceless, and
embarrassing in a society devoted to change and forgetful of the
past. “The storybook truth about American history,” began Louis
Hartz in The Liberal Tradition in America, is that the country
“was settled by men who fled from the feudal and clerical
oppressions of the Old World. If there is anything in this view…then
the outstanding thing about the American community in Western
history ought to be the non-existence of those oppressions, or
since the reaction against them was in the broadest sense liberal,
that the American community is a liberal community.”1 In 1953,
two years before the appearance of The Liberal Tradition in
America, Russell Kirk, then an unknown professor at Michigan
State College (later University), had published The Conservative
Mind. Kirk not only announced the existence of a vibrant Anglo-
American conservative tradition, but, as his publisher Henry
Regnery declared, he gave “coherence and integrity” to the
postwar conservative movement in the United States.2
Seeking to make conservatism relevant to the modern world,
Kirk had set himself a formidable task. At the time he wrote, most
students of American history had made feeble attempts to understand
the nature and significance of conservative thought, if they
bothered to acknowledge conservatism at all save as an aberration
from liberal values and standards. Even when Americans appeared
to embrace a conservative political and social philosophy,
as in the defense of traditional rights during the struggle for
independence, they remained liberals at heart. Louis Hartz’s view
was indicative. Colonial history, he argued, had not been a gradual
process of evolution toward ordered liberty. On the contrary,
“since the first sailing of the Mayflower [Was there more than
one?] it had been the story of new beginnings, daring enterprises,
and explicitly stated principles” more in the spirit of Jeremy
Bentham than in that of Edmund Burke. “The result,” Hartz
continued, “was that the traditionalism of the Americans, like a
pure freak of logic, often bore amazing marks of antihistorical
rationalism,…a symbol of the emancipated mind at work.”3 In
1944, the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal summarized the
case against an American conservatism, writing that “America
is…conservative…. But the principles conserved are liberal and
some, indeed, are radical.”4
Although eloquent and original, Kirk’s act of restoration was
not sui generis. Before the Second World War the New Humanists,
primarily Irving Babbit, Norman Forster, and Paul Elmer
More, and the Southern Agrarians, including Donald Davidson,
Andrew Nelson Lytle, Frank Lawrence Owlsey, John Crowe
Ransom, Allen Tate, and John Donald Wade, had already undertaken
to fashion a conservative critique of American society and
modern life. During the 1950s, M. Stanton Evans, Willmoore
Kendall, Robert Nisbet, Albert J. Nock, Eliseo Vivas, Richard M.
Weaver, and a host of others sustained that effort.5 Yet, Kirk’s
approach was different. He positioned himself, albeit awkwardly
at times, within the cosmopolitan tradition of nineteenth- and
early twentieth-century American historical scholarship. Like
Kirk, Charles H. Haskins, Henry C. Lea, Alfred T. Mahan, John
L. Motley, Francis Parkman, and William Henry Prescott, though
writing about subjects as diverse as medieval politics, religion and
science, the importance of sea power, the history of the Netherlands,
and the European conquest of the Americas, had emphasized
the continuity between the Old World and the New and
evoked a shared legacy of European, especially English, and
American convictions, values, ideas, and ideals. However impressive
the work that it inspired, this sense of continuity, which
suggested that the guiding principles of the American republic
were of distant and antique origin, never came to dominate the
study and writing of history in the United States. For most
historians, Europe resounded with an abiding sense of failure and
tragedy that was remote from the American experience.6 With the
growing desire of Americans for isolation from Europe after the
First World War, the cosmopolitan view receded further into the
shadowy background of historiography.
An important stimulus to the retreat from cosmopolitan
history lay in a widespread acceptance of American exceptionalism.
During the nineteenth century, George Bancroft provided what is
still the most cogent expression of this view.7 The advance of
national unity and the triumph of democratic liberty distinguished
the American past. Endowed with a unique providential
mission, America, Bancroft affirmed, became the instrument
through which God acted in history to ensure the unbroken
progress of humanity. Even when Bancroft confronted slavery,
the one potentially tragic element that threatened to upset
providential designs, he concluded that it was foreign to the true
and natural character of America. Corrupted, degraded, and
brutalized by long contact with Africa and by centuries of warfare
against Islam, the Spanish had fastened slavery upon the New
World. In their cupidity, the Spanish and other Europeans were
responsible for slavery, a vestige of Old World wickedness and
debauchery; the guilt was wholly theirs.8 American slavery thus
represented no dilemma for Bancroft, who never seriously examined
how, in a land devoted to liberty, slavery had taken root and
flourished among a free people. Slavery, he discovered, even
brought unanticipated rewards and consolations. “In the midst of
the horrors of slavery and the slave trade,” Bancroft intoned,
echoing the proslavery ideologues, “the masters had, in part at
least, performed the office of advancing and civilizing the negro.”9
Devoid of avarice, selfishness, injustice, and tragedy, America
continued to perform its work of redemption, saving the rest of
mankind from its follies and its sins.
Long before the European discovery of the New World, the
event with which Bancroft’s grand saga of America begins, a
growing volume of literature already extolled the faraway and
mysterious land across the sea and beyond the horizon as a world
free from the materialism, luxury, greed, corruption, and sinfulness
of Europe. In the European imagination, America was a
“virgin land,” a place of renewal and regeneration where men
could solve all lingering problems and satisfy all human desires.
Weary of the “useless historical burdens” of Europe, the German
poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote in 1827:
America, you’re better off than we are
Than our aged land, the Continent….
(Amerika du hast es besser
Als unser Kintinent, das alte….)
There were no “ruined castles” (“keine verfallene Schlösser”) in
America to preserve memories of the senseless conflicts of a
failed past. For the German philosopher G. F. W. Hegel, America
was “the Land of Desire for all those who are weary of the
historical Armory of old Europe.” (“Amerika, Land der Sehnsucht
fur alle die welche die historiche Rustkammer des alten Europa
langweilt.”)10
This extensive literary tradition, based on a combination of
classical and Christian sources extending at least from Homer and
Hesiod to Thomas More and Tommaso Campanella, enabled the
American to conceive of himself as the “New Adam.” Unencumbered
by the fear, superstition, and rapacity of a moldering
civilization, the quintessential American was a wise innocent
dwelling in an earthly paradise. A happy farmer, content to enjoy
the blessings of a simple rural life and the bounty of his own labor,
the American was at the same time a hardy, self-reliant, and
adventurous pioneer, supremely confident of his ability to reform
an oppressive and evil world.11 “What then is the American, this
new man?” asked J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur in Letters from
an American Farmer (1782). “He is neither an European nor the
descendent of an European…. He is an American, who, leaving
behind him all his antient [sic] prejudices and manners, receives
new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new
government he obeys, and the new rank he holds…. The American
is a new man, who acts upon new principles; he must therefore
entertain new ideas, and form new opinions.”12
According to this interpretation, the American War of Independence
constituted a rejection of, and an escape from, the old
order and the creation of a “Novus Ordo Seclorum,” a new order
for the ages. The Revolution was not, as Kirk would have it,
motivated by a conservative impulse to restore the fundamental
rights of Englishmen that were under siege. Gordon Wood
revitalized the exceptionalist thesis in The Radicalism of the
American Revolution. Proposing to reveal how the United States
achieved its unique status and identity, Wood clarified his intentions
in the subtitle: “How a Revolution Transformed a Monarchical
Society into a Democratic One unlike Any That Had Ever
Existed.” The Revolution “did more than legally create the United
States; it transformed American society…. Almost over night,”
Wood proclaimed, Americans became “the most liberal, the most
democratic, the most commercially minded, and the most modern
people in the world.”13 In an exchange with critics published
in the William and Mary Quarterly, Wood defended his conclusions
about American exceptionalism:
That all white men were equal in 1776 was something revolutionary
and new under the sun. In my book, I wanted to get that
point clear; for once the claim of equality by all white males was
established in the eighteenth century (no mean feat since it took
a few thousand years of Western history to accomplish), then the
other claims to equality could follow and, relative to the total span
of Western history, although not to our brief American past,
follow rather rapidly.14
Wood tells the story of liberal progress in America and the West
in which the American Revolution, the American Founding, and
the rise of American democracy constitute the turning points. His
is not a “history” focused on the past. Rather, for Wood, the
significance of events that happened to take place in the eighteenth
century is the extent to which they anticipated and made
possible a liberal, progressive future.
Kirk, by contrast, was engaged in tracing and nurturing “the
roots of American order,” which he located outside of America
itself in Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, and London.15 For Kirk,
America was neither unique nor separate from the rest of the
world, as many American historians deemed it to be. The sense of
novelty, abundance, and equality that suffused American life
during the first half of the nineteenth century, however, enhanced
this sense of distance from the Old World. “We have listened too
long to the courtly muses of Europe,” lamented Ralph Waldo
Emerson in 1837 at the end of his famous address on “The
American Scholar.” “The Spirit of American freedom is already
suspected to be timid, imitative, tame.” Detached from all restraints
and antecedents (history, family, community, and faith),
the American had to become a self-made man, the autonomous
and exclusive source of virtue, morality, conscience, identity, and
meaning. “We will walk on our own feet,” Emerson intoned, “we
will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds.”16 This
image of America and the American as self-made became so
pervasive that even such a cosmopolitan historian as Henry
Adams could not evade its influence. “As an independent people,
with half a continent to civilize,” Adams wrote in his magisterial
History of the United States during the Administrations of
Jefferson and Madison (1889-1891), the Americans “could not
afford to waste time in following European examples, but must
devise new processes of their own…. Stripped for the hardest
work, every muscle firm and elastic, every ounce of brain ready
for use, and not a trace of superfluous flesh on his nervous and
supple body, the American stood in the world a new order of
man…. Compared with this lithe young figure Europe was actually
in decrepitude.”17
Frederick Jackson Turner severed “the roots of American
order,” arguing that the distinctive character of the United States
arose not out of the European past but from unconquered nature,
the boundless wilderness, and the expansive frontier. “The frontier
is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization,”
Turner maintained in “The Significance of the Frontier,” the
memorable address that he delivered before the American Historical
Society on July 12, 1893.18 From the frontier, Turner
believed, the United States had derived the attributes that characterized
the first century of its existence, independence, freedom,
democracy, unity, and individualism, as well as those that
defined the American character, strength, practicality, exuberance,
confidence, and determination. The West, he wrote, embodied:
that coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and
inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to
find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking
in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless,
nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good
and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which
comes from freedom, these are traits of the frontier, or traits called
out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier.19
The settlement of the West was the central drama of American
history. At the confluence of savagery and civilization, the frontier
generated a constant renewal, a perpetual rebirth that reinvigorated
the United States. Indebted to the West for their sense
of national identity, the American people could reassure themselves
that the nation of which they were so proud was uniquely
their own and not the bartered legacy of the Old World. “Since the
days when the fleet of Columbus sailed into the waters of the New
World,” Turner concluded, “America has been another name for
opportunity, and the people of the United States have taken their
tone from the incessant expansion which has not only been open
but has even been forced upon them.” The frontier provided “a
new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the
past; and freshness, and confidence, and scorn of older society,
impatience of its restraints and its ideas, and indifference to its
lessons, have accompanied the frontier.”20 As long as the frontier
exited, America would never succumb to the lassitude, decadence,
and corruption that had engulfed Europe.
II. The Dawn of the Gods
The so-called Progressive historians, of which Turner was an early
exemplar, assumed rather than proved the detachment and isolation
of the United States from Europe and the human condition.
Enthralled by incidents of conflict and change, they tended to
ignore or depreciate the continuities that had also shaped the
American past. If conservative historians analyzed the sustained
emergence and development of important ideas and critical
institutions, the Progressives surveyed the diverse contests for
power that took place between entrepreneurs, workers, farmers,
women, immigrants, and the like, all of which, they insisted, were
indispensable to social progress.
In Charles and Mary Beard’s Rise of American Civilization,
this progress grew from the secular forces of history rather than
from the divine hand of God. The focus on history as the agent of
change, however, prompted the Beards to highlight not American
accomplishments but American struggles. They did not think that
Americans had realized the full potential or established the ideal
character of the United States at some moment in the past, but
that they must aspire to do so in the future. Although the outcome
of this endeavor remained uncertain, the Beards were optimistic
that America would in time fulfill its mythic destiny. If, as the
Beards surmised, the progress of the United States toward social
democracy implied the progress of civilization itself, then, they
reasoned, “it is the dawn, not the dusk, of the gods.”21
The generation of historians who came of age after the Second
World War and at the inception of the Cold War, the contemporaries
of Russell Kirk, regarded the United States as a pillar of
strength and morality in an otherwise perilous and depraved
world. The ascendancy of the United States, though, was far from
complete. International developments soon exposed the limits of
American supremacy. To prepare Americans for the long battle
against communism, consensus historians determined to unify
national sentiments. They rejected the Progressive interpretations
of Turner, the Beards, Carl Becker, and Vernon L. Parrington,
who had viewed economic and political conflict among antagonistic
social groups (“the people” versus “the interests”) as the
defining attribute of the American past. Convinced that Progressive
historiography had distorted and simplified reality by imagining
dissension and confrontation where none existed, consensus
historians adduced that such disputes as did occur had taken place
within a structure of general agreement. Observing the absence of
decisive ideological conflict in the American past and indicating
the emergence of an accepted set of fundamental ideals, beliefs
and principles in the present, Richard Hofstader anticipated the
appearance of consensus history. The historians of the consensus
school suggested that pragmatism, compromise, and accord were
the hallmarks of the American political tradition.22
Yet, Hofstader had no wish to reassert American chauvinism,
indulge in the wearisome veneration of the American past, or
create a “literature of hero-worship and national self-congratulation.”
23 He aspired, rather, to investigate and understand the
commonalities that had existed between the Federalists and the
Jeffersonians, the Jacksonians and the Whigs, northerners and
southerners, Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives.
In the introduction to The American Political Tradition and
the Men Who Made It, Hofstader wrote that he had accentuated
consensus rather than conflict because he hoped to eliminate the
favoritism that the Progressives had displayed, a partisanship that
caused them continually to rehearse the debates of the past
without either resolving or elucidating them. “It is the nature of
politics that conflict stands in the foreground,” Hofstader began,
“and historians usually abet the politicians in keeping it there.” By
nature, human beings were partisan creatures. “Finding certain
broad resemblances between their own problems and those of an
earlier age,” Hofstader noted, they “take sides with the campaigners
of former years; historians, who can hardly be quite free of
partisanship, reconstruct the original conflict from the surviving
ideas that seem most intelligible in the light of current experience
and current convention.” They recapitulate old quarrels, making
no advance over the initial dispute and, in all likelihood, misrepresenting
the conditions under which it had taken place. “The
issues of the twentieth century are still debated in the language of
Jefferson’s time,” Hofsadter complained, “and while the conflicts
of Jefferson’s day are constantly reactivated and thus constantly
brought to mind, the commonly shared convictions are neglected.”
24
The opponents of Progressive history shared with Kirk the
condemnation of “utopian politics” and the acceptance of “principles
arrived at by convention and compromise…and tested by
long experience.”25 Although numerous scholars have remarked
on the conservatism of the consensus historians, their differences
with a conservative of Kirk’s variety far exceeded the similarities.
The adherents of the consensus school, after all, vindicated the
liberal values that they saw governing American life: self-reliance,
free enterprise, economic individualism, beneficent acquisitiveness,
and popular democracy. In the middle of the twentieth
century, at precisely the moment when the “main political realities
in American history” were no longer “essentially different
from those of Europe,” the consensus historians compared
America to Europe in order to reassert the singularity of the
United States.26 American uniqueness thus became for them an
explicit, distinct, and manifest category of analysis. In the influential
Liberal Tradition in America, Louis Hartz explained that
“any attempt to uncover the nature of an American society
without feudalism can only be accomplished by studying it in
conjunction with a European society where the feudal structure
and the feudal ethos did in fact survive. This is not to deny our
national uniqueness…but actually to affirm it. How can we know
the uniqueness of anything except by contrasting it with what is
not unique?”27 The consensus historians thereby subtly eroded
the conservative tradition, advancing a new paradigm of American
exceptionalism in which they replaced conflict and progress
with unity and continuity.
III. A Heap of Broken Images
Consensus history carried within it the germs of its antithesis and
the seeds of its dissolution. The democratic, egalitarian social
order of the United States ironically produced false hopes and
unrealistic expectations, and, for all that, a conformist mentality.
As Wilfred McClay has admirably demonstrated, an assortment
of liberal thinkers during the 1950s feared that such irrational
longings and affinities drew American society perilously close to
totalitarianism. These thinkers identified a “soft” totalitarianism
in the atomized mass society of alienated individuals, which they
thought prevailed in the United States, corresponding to the
“hard” totalitarianism that they associated with Nazi Germany
and Soviet Russia.
By the 1950s, confusion had already begun to disorient
American historiography. Epistemological skepticism and uncertainty
prompted historians to adopt the theories, concepts, and
methods of the social sciences in order to escape the taint of
subjectivity and to make the study of history more scientific.28
Only the scientific method, it seemed, could furnish accurate and
credible generalizations. The accomplishments of the Annales
school in France and the History Workshop in England inspired
the new social and cultural history in the United States, the
practitioners of which also sought to write “history from the
bottom up.” Concentrating on the “inarticulate,” workers, immigrants,
minorities, and women, the new social and cultural
historians criticized the elitist assumptions of their intellectual
forebears. The consensus of the postwar years began to unravel.
“By the end of the 1960s,” wrote John Higham, “the study of
national character and the respect for national myths was collapsing,
not only in history but also in the other social sciences. The
principal writers of consensus history were falling silent…. An
intellectual revolution, the kind of upheaval that postwar historians
had tried to disprove, overturned their work.”29
According to the new social and cultural historians the vision
of a liberal American past, which the consensus school had
promoted, was contrived and coercive. Their own egalitarian and
democratic agenda focused the critical attention of the new social
and cultural historians on the monolithic, authoritarian tendencies
of American society and roused them to seek instances of
genuine liberty, community, diversity, and resistance to oppressive
authority. “This is what so much of recent historiography is
primarily about,” declared Lawrence Levine, “not the plight of
the victims but the culture, the thought, the lives of people we
have previously neglected—people who exerted cultural power,
the importance of which we are just now beginning to appreciate.”
30
The contributions of the new social and cultural historians
have vastly enriched American historical literature, enhancing
the understanding of neglected, marginal, and often vulnerable
groups. Abandoning the bourgeois and patrician view that history
chronicles only the lives and deeds of influential minorities and
elites, the new social and cultural historians recognized a variety
of persons as historical agents: workers and immigrants, women
and blacks, prostitutes and slaves, the crowd and the masses, the
downtrodden and the poor. Writing in the 1830s, Alexis de
Tocqueville already perceived the need to penetrate beneath the
surface of events to the opinions, beliefs, attitudes, and sentiments
of ordinary men and women. In an age of democracy,
Tocqueville noted, causes of “a secondary and accidental nature
are infinitely more various, better hidden, more complex, less
powerful, and hence less easy to sort out and trace, whereas the
historian of an aristocratic age has simply to analyze the particular
action of one man or of a few men amid the general mass of
events.”31 The debate over the new historiography, Levine avowed,
centers on the extent to which historians “should widen our
historical net to include the powerless as well as the powerful, the
followers as well as the leaders, the margins as well as the center,
popular culture as well as high culture.”32 The customs, mentalities,
and cultures of separate groups, argue the new social and
cultural historians, deserve a separate history. Yet, they have
displayed little inclination to reconnect those histories into a
unified interpretation for, as Laurence Veysey wrote, “the parts
are seen as the realities, the whole as an artificial construction
sustained by politicians and financiers.”33 In this revision of the
past, those who wielded power contrived artificial systems designed
to sustain their status and privileges; those who were
subjugated fashioned genuine cultures that offered a refuge
against total domination.
The celebration of diversity and the insistence on pluralism
have thus given rise to fragmentation and disarray. Historians can
no longer agree even about what constitutes the proper subject of
history. Some welcome as liberating the breakdown of older
narratives and paradigms. Spurning demands for a new synthesis
and rejecting the ideal of unity, Allan Megill, for instance, finds
himself “profoundly suspicious of attempts to overcome the
fragmentation, of attempts to restore (at some higher or more
sophisticated level) the synthesis…. Let us be warned: all calls for
synthesis are attempts to impose an interpretation.”34 Postmodern
theory has lent an élan to the growing uncertainty about the
nature of historical knowledge. For postmodernists, any interpretative
synthesis is, by definition, partial and exclusionary. A mere
construct, it cannot be normative, and efforts to establish it as
such are distorted, constraining, unstable, and false.35 Historians
cannot coerce the past to fit a single “paradigm.”
As a consequence, averred the folklorist Henry Glassie,
“every narrative, blatant in its incompleteness, must come upon
the mind as an artifice, a willed confection, always questionable….
Not only is every tale partial and artful, but there is no obvious
order in the past, no single construct that can satisfactorily
encompass the change and sameness that any account requires
for accuracy.”36 Questioning the foundations of Western rationalism,
Glassie devised a historical world that is amorphous and
indeterminate, possessing neither shape nor form, neither order
nor cohesion. History, “too complex to be contained in one
structure” is “transitory.” It is, Glassie imagined, as “described by
the Buddha, so complicated in its fluid intermixtures of cause, so
multiplex in its over-lappings of temporal rhythms, that origins
dissolve into oblivion, connections ramify toward infinity, and
only the predicament of the moment as understood by a flawed
mortal can determine which pieces of the past are pertinent.”37
If Glassie’s poetic evocation depicts the postmodern consciousness
of history, then what can human beings know of the
past or themselves? Are men doomed to the condition of perpetual
infancy or utter barbarism, as George Santayana discerned,
with instinct uninstructed by experience and untamed by
reflection? Postmodern theorists, of course, do not think so.
Their reason for studying the past is to liberate the present from
it, to verify that all custom, tradition, and inheritance, all institutions,
values, and beliefs are imperious social and intellectual
constructs in the service of power. As such, those constructs lack
validity; they not only can but also must be subverted and
abolished. “There are histories patently designed to charter
society,” Glassie commented, “to explain and reinforce the status
quo through master narratives of places and peoples…. But from
any single account, most is missing. Women are missing, and poor
men, dark people, common labor, painful routines, little joys….
Disorderly, fragmentary, malleable, history leaves room for
diverse participation.”38 The study of the past, and, indeed, life
itself are then little more than a text that never quite means what
it seems to mean. Because “readers” may, nay must, formulate
their own meanings by combining fragments of the text and
varying their context, language becomes absurd, truth a linguistic
convention, and reality at best a mental construct, at worst an
incoherent mirage. Everything, ultimately, is unknowable. Such a
vision offers no solace, inspiration, or hope to a people experiencing
a vague, but acute, psychic uneasiness, the symptoms of which
include the fragmentation of knowledge, the anarchy of the
private, the regimentation of the public, and feverish activity
without cease or purpose.
Among many postmodern thinkers the purpose of studying
history is overtly political and ideological: to erase the sad
chronicle of past exploitation and tyranny. History unbinds men
from the past and promises limitless freedom and endless opportunity.
All that human hands and minds have made other hands
and minds can dismantle and disperse. Instead of drawing men
out of themselves and the welter of their times, instead of inviting
them to escape the present and to judge themselves and their
world according to “the lamp of experience,” the postmodern
conception of history fastens almost exclusively on the needs,
commitments, enthusiasms, and passions of the moment. In
sensibly repudiating the illusion that historians can produce a
definitive transcript of the past, postmodernists have gone too
far, assuming a skeptical, ironic, and relativist point of view that
renders all truth subjective and unknowable. Every opinion
becomes equal and is entitled to respect as long as no one insists
that it is “true.” “So long as [historians] have…no coerced orthodoxy,”
contends Peter Novick, “I see no reason why we cannot
peacefully coexist…. Those who think as I do are content, in our
historical work, to be suggestive, and we don’t worry about being
definitive…. Others are, in a sense that seems to me deluded, but
not pernicious, concerned with ‘moving toward the truth’ or
‘getting it right.'”39
This perspective has not only bred anarchy in the study of
history, it has also provoked nihilism. The problem that historians
confront at the beginning of the twenty-first century is not so
much the reconstruction of a historical synthesis but the restoration
of historical coherence and meaning—even allowing that
coherence and meaning are necessarily contingent, partial, and
incomplete. Frank Ankersmit’s haunting comparison of recent
historiography to dying leaves scattered by the autumn wind
illustrates the predicament.40 Reflecting on the fragmentation of
Western civilization, and the attendant mayhem and impermanence
that accompanied it, T. S. Eliot anticipated the contemporary
disintegration of history as the source of culture and identity
in the modern world—a disintegration that postmodernists have
nearly carried to fulfillment:
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images….41
IV. Order and History
Has the postmodern impasse, “like a tedious argument of insidious
intent,” led historians down “cunning passages” and “contrived
corridors” toward the abyss?42 Did the “discipline of
history cease to exist” during the 1980s, as Peter Novick alleged
in his study of the guild?43 Such questions ignore, or perhaps
betray an indifference to, Russell Kirk’s distinction between
ethical and ideological history, which transcends the concerns
and activities of professional historians. Ideological history, like
ideological politics, was anathema to Kirk. “Terrible simplifiers,”
ideologues were fanatics who clung to their dogmas in contempt
of evidence and experience. Historians at least ought to be more
prudent, thoughtful, and circumspect. It was their office to
invigorate and nurture the moral imagination. If such a renewal
occurred, Kirk speculated that the study of history might turn the
world from the abyss; that eventuality, though, was far from
certain. For ideological historians had renounced their office
when they abandoned the quest for truth. They may still have
regarded history as a source of knowledge, but for them knowledge
meant the power to advance a militant creed, by violence if
necessary, and to bend the world to their will. They ceased to rely
on history as a font of wisdom capable of ordering society and the
soul.
In Kirk’s analysis, the ideological historians of the twentieth
century were the intellectual and spiritual heirs of the doctrinaire
philosophers of the eighteenth who had fancied that they could
deliver mankind from ignorance and superstition. Rejecting belief
in original sin, they taught that men, through their own efforts,
could fashion a heaven on earth. The philosophes convinced
themselves that, if inspired:
man’s private intellectual faculties…could suffice to dissolve all
mysteries and solve all problems…. Religion must be discarded
as mere superstition, old political forms must be swept away as
irrational and oppressive, the natural goodness of man must be
enabled to prevail—through an appeal to Reason. If properly
cultivated, every man’s private rationality could emancipate him
from the delusion of sin, from ways of violence and fraud, from
confusion and fear.44
This optimistic, progressive, a-, and even anti-, historical vision
was, Kirk showed, alien to the original meaning and purpose of
America.
When true to their origins and their history, Americans had
more in common with Edmund Burke’s vision of human nature,
which complemented the historical understanding by challenging
both objectivity and relativism and also by placing mankind again
at the center of the historical and Christian drama. Men may not
live by history alone, but for Burke it was plain that they could not
live as men without a knowledge and understanding of the past.
The accumulated experience and inexhaustible wisdom drawn
from the past afforded what order there was to life on earth.
“Ignore the enormous bulk of racial knowledge, or tinker imprudently
with it,” Kirk warned, “and man is left awfully afloat in a sea
of emotions and ambitions, with only the scanty stock of formal
learning and puny resources of individual reason to sustain
him.”45 Kirk explained that Burke had linked historical and
religious consciousness by adjoining the temporal to the divine
order. In Burke’s view, God operated in and through history, that
is, in and through human affliction and failure, to reveal, however
fractionally and episodically, His providential design. Rejuvenating
historical consciousness, therefore, required access to discretion,
prudence, and judgment, to the qualities that Burke called
“intuition,” “habit,” and “prejudice.” Unlike the philosophes and
other progressives since their time, Burke contemplated the dark,
complex, and mysterious recesses of the soul, an exploration that
often had more in common with classical mythology and Christian
theology than with modern historical writing.
Rooted in the rationalist and scientific optimism of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, American historiography
has long rested on the assumption that men would automatically
progress toward a better future, if only the oppression and
injustice of the past could be remedied. There is a deeper, more
adamant, and at times more desperate, insistence within the
American soul that Americans were the people chosen to have a
future—chosen, that is, not to fulfill history but to transcend it.
This conviction derives in part from the Puritans, for whom
history was teleological, moving inexorably toward the end of the
world and the Day of Judgment. Once shorn of its religious
content, however, this ideology of secular progress served only to
erode traditional sources of virtue and identity, such as work,
religion, family, community, and self, by assuming the boundless
capacity of technology to gratify an expanding array of desires.
But the longer events deferred this American utopia, the more
dissatisfied Americans became with life as it is, and the harder
they tried to distance themselves from the corruption of the Old
World and to establish a city upon a hill in the New. The
unqualified acceptance of millenarianism, Kirk admonished, was
treacherous, more likely to bring “a devouring conflagration…than
a torch of progress.”46
Kirk agreed with Reinhold Niebuhr’s diagnosis of “the irony
of American history,” for he knew too well the calamity that
messianic passions had visited upon men in their determination to
achieve universal happiness.47 Incontrovertibly historical, human
life was not given to fulfillment and perfection. According to
Christian eschatology, history does not and cannot solve the basic
problems of human existence. “This truth,” Kirk wrote, “may be
more readily understood in the troubled twentieth century that
[sic] it was in the nineteenth. Under tribulation,” he continued,
“men come to realize that they are feeble and imperfect, if they try
to stand by themselves. They recognize their failings—what the
Hebrews called their sinfulness.”48 In Christian thought the
future does not promise greater security, happiness, and virtue.
Evil never disappears, and, in fact, may grow as individuals and
societies move from innocence to experience, from simplicity to
sophistication, from weakness to strength. The illusion of progress
may obscure decadence, corruption, and immorality as human
power, arrogance, and self-absorption evolve and mature. Most
ancient and modern philosophies denied or masked the Christian
interpretation of history. The ancients deprived history of meaning,
substituting in its stead the eternal cycle of recurrence by
which human beings escaped flux and instability. Modern thinkers
often ignored or diminished the evil inherent in history and
conceived of history itself as the source of redemption. History
thereby became the means not only of understanding but also of
completing human destiny, and of maintaining it under human
control.
In opposition to the utopian dogma of progress, Kirk emphasized
the continuity that linked past and present. Spurning both a
facile optimism and a facile pessimism, he nonetheless saw ample
reason for hope. Equipped with familiar and durable customs,
habits, traditions, institutions, and morals, Americans could look
forward to the future with expectancy, and might still impede, and
perhaps reverse, the “progress” toward a brave new world that
was at once “rich and dehumanized.”49 If, on occasion, Kirk was
too sanguine about American prospects, it was because he refused
to adopt a wholly ironic interpretation of American history or to
yield utterly to despair at present circumstances. His heightened
sense of tragedy notwithstanding, Kirk was no cynic, malcontent,
or fatalist. On the contrary, he believed that the creation of a
healthy social order was not the act of radical skepticism but of
“imaginative affirmation.”50 A country still in the making, America
had flourished. “Whatever the failings of America,” Kirk noted,
“the American order has been a conspicuous success in the
perspective of human history.”51 The United States had bestowed
a greater measure of freedom and justice on a larger number of
its citizens than most societies, past or present, have effected, and
had done so without suffering revolutionary upheaval and violence.
Dangers arose if Americans, forgetful of their origins, neglected
or severed the roots of order from which their way of life
had grown. Although Kirk hoped for, and may even have permitted
himself to expect, the best, he took nothing for granted.
America did not have to prosper or survive; the continued
blessings of good fortune depended on Americans’ engagement
with, and devotion to, their birthright. “In America, order and
justice and freedom have developed together,” Kirk pointed out,
“and they can decay in parallel fashion” unless scrupulously
cultivated, protected, and improved.52 If, however, Americans
should cease to revere their traditions and to value their inheritance,
or if they should become hostile to them, they would “form
a ‘lonely crowd,’ alienated from the world in which they wander.”53
Kirk avoided the extremes. He resisted the misguided zealots who
sought to impose order by decree and to preserve it by force. They
denied the prospect of achieving ordered liberty and supposed
that men, in their wickedness, obeyed no authority save intimidation
and terror. This caricature of order was nearly as intolerable
as anarchy, and it would not endure. Kirk similarly denounced the
intemperate radicals who, by whatever means and at whatever
cost, demanded the immediate accomplishment of earthly perfection.
Such a revolutionary aim necessitated the creation not only
of a new government and a new society but also of new men.
Alluring but false, the myth of revolution promised more than
freedom from tyranny and injustice; it heralded the triumph over
the human condition itself.
Kirk never mistook the City of Man for the City of God.
“There is no man but historic man,” he proclaimed, and history
afforded little consolation to men in their search for meaning and
purpose. A bewildering array of tensions, conflicts, and disparities
marked the history of American society and Western Civilization.
It is the human condition to live amid such tumult, Kirk
believed, for he dismissed as folly or worse all efforts to gain
redemption from history within history itself. Contrary to modern
assumptions, the future did not ensure relief from the
ambiguities of historical existence. New tyrannies proved more
brutal than the old ones they had replaced. At the same time, the
rapid spread of human freedom engendered unforeseen perils, as
isolated men, estranged from the discipline and succor of community,
fell prey to fear, anxiety, resentment, and hatred, becoming
ready instruments in the hands of charlatans and demagogues.
This sinful worship of human power had, in God’s own good time,
brought “retributive providential judgments,” leaving in doubt
the survival of civilization if not the fate of mankind. Without a
contrite awareness and a pious acceptance of human limits—an
awareness that came only with the evolution of religious consciousness—”
there can exist,” Kirk wrote, “no order in the soul
and no order in the state—indeed, no history that can be recorded
without a shudder.”54
A nation originally conceived as an alternative to, and an
escape from, the Old World, the United States has been particularly
susceptible to destructive millennialist ambitions. Unique
among the nations of the earth, America was the New Zion, poised
to redeem the world. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, many American historians, to say nothing of American
statesmen and diplomats, continued to espouse these progressive
ideals and exceptionalist delusions. Even now these convictions
survive intact, although the religious beliefs to which they owe
their existence have almost completely disappeared. Kirk demurred.
Human beings, he made clear, had every reason to fear
the consequences of undertaking providential missions. In place
of such messianic pretensions, Kirk substituted the tragic vision
of Christianity, which located ultimate meaning beyond time,
which required a humble submission to God, and which comprehended
the predicament of man, especially of modern man, from
the vantage point of a faith that alone can triumph over despair.
Kirk entertained no illusions that men could extricate themselves
from history or resolve the dilemmas of life within history.
He thus dissuaded them from accepting the distortions and lies of
false messiahs who preached that certainty, power, virtue, and
happiness were the exclusive domain of one or another ideological
commitment. Invoking the eternal ground of existence, Kirk
aspired to temper pride without destroying hope, to make human
toil and suffering meaningful, and thereby to prompt men to
accept their historical responsibilities. To achieve those ends, he
urged upon the American people the necessity of preserving the
civilization they had inherited. In The Conservative Mind, Kirk
intended to aid that process by conserving “the spiritual and
intellectual and political tradition” of America and the West—a
tradition meaningful even though incomplete, provisional, contingent,
and imperfect.55 The times may be catching up with Kirk.
More Americans seem at last to see themselves as the stewards
and conservators of what remains of civilization in the West, and
to sense that theirs is, and has always been, a historical, not a
utopian, project.
Mark G. Malvasi
Randolph-Macon College
NOTES
- Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation
of American Political Thought Since the Revolution (New
York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1955) 3. - Henry Regnery, “The Making of The Conservative Mind, in
The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot, 7th ed. (Washington,
D.C.: Regnery, 1995) i. - Hartz, The Liberal Tradition, 48–49.
- Gunnar Myrdal, The American Dilemma: The Negro Problem
and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper & Brothers,
1944) 7. - See Clinton Rossiter, Conservatism in America: The Thankless
Persuasion, 2nd ed., rev. (New York: Vintage Books, 1962)
225–26. - To cite but one example, Parkman’s Huguenots in Florida,
the first volume of his series on French exploration of the New
World, begins: “The story of New France opens with a tragedy.”
France and England in North America, Vol. I (New York: Library
of America, 1983) 21. See also David Levin, History as Romantic
Art: Bancroft, Prescott, Motley, Parkman (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1959) and Richard C. Vitzthum, The American
Compromise: Theme and Method in the Histories of Bancroft,
Parkman, and Adams (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma
Press, 1974). - George Bancroft, History of the United States from the
Discovery of the American Continent, 10 vols. (Boston: Little,
Brown, 1837–1875). See also Levin, History as Romantic Art;
Vitzthum, The American Compromise, 12–41; Russell B. Nye,
George Bancroft: Brahmin Rebel (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1944) 157–59; Dorothy Ross, “Historical Consciousness in Nineteenth-
Century America,” American Historical Review 89 (October
1984), 909–28. - Bancroft, History of the United States, Vol. I., 159–64.
- Bancroft, Ibid., Vol. III, 408. For a discussion of Bancroft’s
views on slavery, see David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery
in Western Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966)
21–24. - Quoted in John Lukacs, Historical Consciousness: The
Remembered Past (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction
Publishers, 1994) 363. - For discussions of the images and meanings attached to
America, see Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West
as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1950); R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy,
and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1955); Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden:
Technology and the Pastoral Ideal (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1964); David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in
Western Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966);
Hugh Honour, The New Golden Land: European Images of America
from the Discoveries to the Present Time (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1975); James Oliver Robertson, American Myth, American
Reality (New York: Hill & Wang, 1980); Ray Allen Billington,
Land of Savagery, Land of Promise: The European Image of the
American Frontier (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1981). - J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American
Farmer (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) 43–44. - Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992) 6–7. - “Forum: How Revolutionary Was the Revolution?” William
and Mary Quarterly 11, no. 4 (October, 1994), 707. - See Russell Kirk, The Roots of American Order, Third
Edition (Washington, D. C.: Regnery Gateway, 1991). - Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” in
Robert E. Spiller, ed., Five Essays on Man and Nature (Northbrook,
IL: AHM Publishing Corporation, 1954) 58–59. - Henry Adams, History of the United States during the
Administration of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Library of America,
1986) 53, 109. On the idea of the American self and the self-made
man, see John G. Cawelti, Apostles of the Self-Made Man: Changing
Concepts of Success in America (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1965); Wilfred M. McClay, The Masterless: Self and
Society in Modern America (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1994); Barry Alan Shain, The Myth of American
Individualism: The Protestant Origins of American Political Thought
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Charles Taylor,
Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). - Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier
in American History,” reprinted in Daniel J. Boorstin, ed., An
American Primer (New York: Meridian Classics, 1985) 542–570.
The quoted passage appears on page 545. See also Richard
Hofstader, “Turner and the Frontier Myth,” American Scholar 18
(1949), 433–43 and The Progressive Historians (New York: Vintage
Books, 1970) 47–164; Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy
of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York:
W. W. Norton & Company, 1987) and “Turnerians All: The
Dream of a Helpful History in an Intelligible World,” American
Historical Review 100, no. 3 (June, 1995), 697–716. - Turner, “Significance of the Frontier,” 566.
- Ibid., 566–67.
- Charles A. and Mary R. Beard, The Rise of American
Civilization, 2 vols. (New York: The Macmillan Company 1927)
Vol II, 800. - Richard Hofstader, The American Political Tradition and
the Men Who Made It (New York: Vintage Books, 1973; originally
published in 1948). - Ibid., xl.
- Ibid., xxxviii–xxxix.
- Kirk, The Conservative Mind, xvi.
- John Lukacs, “American History: The Terminological
Problem,” The American Scholar (Winter 1992), 18–19. - Hartz, The Liberal Tradition, 4.
- See, for example, Richard Hofstader, “History and the
Social Sciences,” in The Varieties of History, Fritz Stern, ed. (New
York: Vintage Books, 1973; originally published in 1956), 359–
370 and Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity
Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988), pt. 2. - John Higham, “The Future of American History,” The
Journal of American History 80 (March 1994), 1298. - Lawrence W. Levine, “Clio, Canons, and Culture,” The
Journal of American History 80 (December 1993), 864. See also
Levine’s essay “The Unpredictable Past: Reflections on Recent
American Historiography,” in Lawrence W. Levine, The Unpredictable
Past: Explorations in American Cultural History (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 3–13. - Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America J. P. Mayer,
ed, George Lawrence, trans. (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books,
1969), Vol. II, 494. - Levine, “The Unpredictable Past,” 8.
- Laurence Veysey, “The ‘New’ Social History in the Context
of American Historical Writing,” Reviews in American History
7 (March 1979), 5. - Allan Megill, “Fragmentation and the Future of Historiography,”
American Historical Review 96 (June 1991), 693–94. - See Eric H. Monkonnen, “The Dangers of Synthesis,”
American Historical Review 91 (December 1986), 1146–57; Nell
Irvin Painter, “Bias and Synthesis in History,” Journal of American
History 74 (June 1987), 109–112; Frank Ankersmit, “Historiography
and Postmodernism,” History and Theory 28 (1989), 137–
53; Dorothy Ross, “Grand Narrative in American Historical
Writing: From Romance to Uncertainty,” American Historical
Review 100 (June 1995), 651–77, especially, 673–77. - Henry Glassie, “The Practice and Purpose of History,”
Journal of American History 81 (December 1994), 966. - Ibid., 964.
- Ibid., 965, 964, 966.
- Peter Novick, “My Correct Views on Everything,” American
Historical Review 96 (June 1991), 702. - Ankersmit, “Historiography and Postmodernism,” 149–
50. - T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land” (1922), in The Waste Land
and Other Poems (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers,
1962), 29–30. - The lines are from T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock” and “Gerontion” in Ibid., 3, 20. - Novick, That Noble Dream, 628. See also David A.
Hollinger, “Postmodernist Theory and Wissenschaftliche Practice,”
American Historical Review 96 (June 1991), 688–692. - Kirk, The Roots of American Order, 349.
- Kirk, The Conservative Mind, 38.
- Ibid., 9.
- Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (New
York: Scribner’s, 1952), 16. See McClay, The Masterless, chapters
6 and 7 and “The Continuing Irony of American History,” First
Things 120 (February 2002), 20–25. - Kirk, The Roots of American Order, 15.
- Ibid., 9.
- Ibid., 475.
- Ibid., 470.
- Ibid., 7.
- Ibid., 473.
- All quotations from Russell Kirk, “History and the Moral
Imagination,” The University Bookman 44/2 (Winter 2006), 59. - Quoted in Regnery, “The Making of The Conservative
Mind,” iii.