By and large, the American Revolution was not an innovating
upheaval, but a conservative restoration of colonial prerogatives.
Accustomed from their beginnings to self-government, the
colonials felt that by inheritance they possessed the rights of
Englishmen and by prescription certain rights peculiar to themselves.
When a designing king and a distant parliament presumed
to extend over America powers of taxation and administration
never before exercised, the colonies rose to vindicate
their prescriptive freedom; and after the hour for compromise
had slipped away, it was with reluctance and trepidation they
declared their independence. Thus men essentially conservative
found themselves triumphant rebels, and were compelled to
reconcile their traditional ideas with the necessities of an
independence hardly anticipated.1
Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind
Is the United States a revolutionary nation? Was it founded in
1776 out of whole cloth by men determined to construct a
government and a people committed to radically new ideas of
political equality and individual liberty? Or is American public life
best understood as the outgrowth of a political culture—governmental
structures and an unwritten constitution consisting of
people’s habits, attitudes toward government and general ways of
life—rooted in British and earlier traditions in the west? Were the
founders politically innovating liberals or culturally and historically
grounded conservatives?
Much hinges on the answer to this question because it
indicates the nature and tendency of our founding documents and
our nation’s intended path. If America is at its core a set of
ideological beliefs we all must accept and serve, then we must
constantly reshape ourselves and our way of life to fit these ideas.
But if our nation was founded to preserve a pre-existing way of life
that the founders valued deeply, then it is this concrete way of
life—the institutions, beliefs, and practices central to the local
communities in which we live—that we must work to conserve,
rather than any abstract notion of the best political regime.
Russell Kirk left no doubt on which side of this debate he
stood. At a time when the liberal interpretation of America’s past
and destiny reigned all but unchallenged he forged, from dispirited
and isolated pockets of resistance, a tradition of cultural
valuation and analysis. And this tradition connected “”modern””
America to its cultural roots in Great Britain, medieval Europe
and the classical world. From The Conservative Mind through
The Roots of American Order and America’s British Culture Kirk
insisted that American constitutional government—our system
of ordered liberty—rests on customs, beliefs, and habits developed
during 150 years of relative self-government in the colonies
and by centuries of formation within Western civilization.
Kirk argued that our “”new order of the ages”” was not intended
to be a political utopia founded on abstract theories. Rather, it
was to be an experiment in republican self-government firmly
grounded in traditions of common law, local control, and adherence
to Christian and western standards of virtue. Thus the
American founders drafted a Constitution that balanced and
limited the powers of the central government, thereby protecting
rather than threatening the cultural habits or unwritten constitution
onto which it was grafted. Conservatives at the time—John
Adams chief among them—sought to maintain the historical
continuity of Americans’ traditions and ways of life within their
new nation. Of course, Jefferson and his followers took a different
path; they sought to reform society on the basis of abstract
principles borrowed from the French revolutionary Jacobins.2
And so was born the fundamental tension in America between
defenders of tradition and ideologues committed to the notion of
progress and its corollary values of equality and material wealth.
Today most academics and journalists side with Jefferson.
Even a number of public intellectuals calling themselves conservatives
have sought to portray America as a truly “”new nation””
founded on an ideological commitment to equality, progress and
an abstract freedom divorced from prescriptive institutions,
beliefs and practices.3 These intellectuals further portray Kirk
and the tradition of social and political analysis his Conservative
Mind did so much to reinvigorate as marginal and even “”un-
American”” because of their focus on the roots of America’s
ordered liberty in European and Christian sources.4 Indeed,
some deny the very existence of traditional conservatism outside
a few “”fever swamps”” of extreme isolationism and pseudo-European
pretensions.5
Yet Kirk’s cultural understanding of the nature and proper
ends of politics is hardly eccentric. It belongs to a tradition of
sociological understandings of public life represented by prominent
figures such as Alexis de Tocqueville, Otto von Gierke and
Robert Nisbet.6 As a method of political analysis it is alive and well
and shared by a worthy group of successors. Traditional conservative
scholars continue to expand our knowledge of the social
institutions and customs at the heart of the American way of life.
And it is to our way of life rather than to any set of abstract
political precepts that conservatives would have us look in judging
the worth of political or any other institutions.
Traditional conservative scholars see politics as merely a part
of any good society. And the proper goal of political institutions
is to protect and nurture more fundamental, local associations
such as churches and families. Traditional conservatives reject
the liberal emphasis on political ideology as the shaper of public
life, seeing this view as the source of destructive innovation and
an increasingly centralized, powerful, and intrusive state. For
conservatives, political systems are good or bad according to their
tendency to promote or undermine a decent way of life. In Kirk’s
words, conservatives work for the “”preservation of the ancient
moral traditions of humanity.””7 These traditions embody and pass
on the habits that make it possible for human beings to fulfill their
duties to family, friends and neighbors, as well as strangers and
God. American ordered liberty is the flower of these longstanding
traditions as modified by changing historical circumstances. But
the flower dies unless the roots are nurtured. And it is the chosen
task of traditional conservatives, following Kirk, to extend our
knowledge of the nature and requirements of these roots. Within
the study of politics this means examining the cultural bases and
ultimate purposes of governmental institutions and processes.
Thus, in seeking Kirk’s legacy in this realm, we must look to
scholars concerned to show the limits of politics as the pursuit of
ideological utopias. We must look to scholars integrating the
study of politics with historical understanding and appreciation of
the higher ends of human beings taken both individually and,
more naturally, in their communities.
McClay on the Necessity and Virtue of Cultural Institutions
The key distinction between traditional, “”Kirkean”” conservatives
and their ideological adversaries concerns the importance of
culture to political life. Those who see America as primarily a
political construct denigrate local, cultural institutions as at best
private concerns and at worst the source of divisive prejudices
which fragment political loyalties and produce inequality and
injustice.8 Kirk, on the other hand, argued that “”for the conservative,
custom, convention, constitution, and prescription are the
sources of a tolerable civil social order.”” Thus any “”abstract
rigorous set of political dogmata”” could lead only to the destruction
of inherited standards of conduct by “”promising the Terrestrial
Paradise to the faithful”” and thus ignoring the persistent need
for individuals to conform their day to day behavior to prescriptive
norms. Conservatism, Kirk observed, rejects the attempt to
reshape social life through the brutal means of political action.
Rather, conservatives, sharing “”an inclination to cherish the
permanent things in human existence,”” choose to “”join in resistance
to the destruction of old patterns of life, damage to the
footings of the civil social order, and reduction of human striving
to material production and consumption.””9
Conservatives’ valuation of cultural life over political innovation
can be defended even on political grounds. Wilfred McClay
has made the important point that the individual freedom liberals
value so highly depends on communitarian cultural institutions
for its existence and efficacy. Cultural institutions including
family, church, and local association play a crucial role in instilling
the virtues and sense of duty essential for sustaining political
liberty. It is wrong to claim that America is (or over time could
survive as) a creation of classical liberal politics, devoted to
principles of abstract freedom, equality and progress; any movement
devoted solely to such ends would undermine itself. The
claim for a liberal America ignores both the necessity and the
virtue of Americans’ lived experience and moral traditions.
In part misinterpretations of America’s founding stem from
misunderstandings of liberty itself. The identification of liberty
with the mere absence of constraints on individual action is both
anachronistic and inaccurate. McClay points out that a historically-
informed use of the term “”liberty””—one rooted in early
American usage—refers to
a form of political freedom, whose existence is predicated upon
an entire system of structures and constraints, without whose
presence “”liberty”” is said to devolve into “”license.”” The “”freedom””
of modern liberalism and libertarianism, which presumes the
moral autonomy of the self-validating individual, could not have
been further from the Founders’ thinking. When Patrick Henry
declared, “”Give me liberty or give me death,”” he was not holding
out for the expressive liberties of Robert Mapplethorpe.10
“”Liberty,”” in McClay’s understanding, “”enables the individual
to act freely within a larger context of moral accountability.”” The
more radical notion of “”freedom”” refers to the simple absence of
constraints on the individual will. Moreover, liberty assumes
“”that we can identify a moral order that is not merely subjective
and arbitrary.””11 It requires common adherence to a law higher
than our own will. Without such common adherence, liberty will
devolve into license. And the founders knew that license inevitably
would lead to anarchy and a resort to violence and oppression
to re-establish some semblance of order.
Political liberty, and even an ordered, sustainable individual
freedom, must be constrained by cultural institutions and by
individual virtues rooted in recognition of one’s duties to others.
In an essay on Ralph Waldo Emerson and the nature of Transcendentalist
individualism, McClay points out that even the radical
selfhood explored by Emerson “”silently presupposed—indeed, it
took utterly for granted—a profound degree of social order and
a wide range of social, institutional, cultural, and moral supports
provided by the family and community life into which he was
born.””12 Liberty requires order, and the cultural supports that
instill habits of regularity, responsibility and (to the extent it is an
attainable goal) self-sufficiency.
#page#
Social traditions of thought and action are necessary to
maintain the constrained individualism that is the only form of
individualism human beings can attain; indeed, the American
system of ordered liberty was founded on them. As McClay
observes, the essentially liberal view of America’s politicized,
reformist founding
ignores the distinct and powerful elements of civic humanist or
“”republican”” thinking in colonial and revolutionary America,
elements that stressed the individual’s necessary involvement in,
and dedication to, the polity. It downplays the wide influence of
Scottish moral philosophy, with its emphasis on the inherent
sociality of human nature, and of faculty psychology, which
stressed the need to subject the human passions to rational and
social control. It gives short shrift to the elements of English
institutional and legal tradition that profoundly shaped North
American colonial life. But most of all, it downplays the immense
and pervasive influence of reformed Protestant Christianity,
especially as embodied in Calvinistic covenant theology and
congregational church polity.13
Traditions, social institutions, and above all religion have
shaped Americans’ character and way of life since before their
nation’s beginning. As Kirk often remarked, culture comes from
the cult. A people’s social institutions grow from its common
beliefs and practices, responding to new circumstances as they
seek to maintain continuity with their past. Without this basis in
common, historically rooted beliefs and practices, Americans
would never have become a free people. If this common basis is
lost, American liberty will be lost as well.
Unfortunately, the liberal belief in absolute, unconstrained
freedom undermines any authoritative, shared belief. Why? Because
such beliefs require habitual acceptance from the people.
The people must accept them as true, whether or not they chose
them in some presumed moment of unencumbered, rational
reflection.
McClay notes in his book The Masterless that Americans for
decades have sought to avoid authority. Following an ideology of
individualism (and responding to a number of cultural shocks
such as the mass killings of the Second World War) Americans
increasingly have sought to free themselves from any common
authority—including God and the various local institutions of
communal life. At the same time, Americans have allowed an
increasing political centralization to sap the powers of these local
institutions. Thus, even as their nation consolidated into increasingly
large, centralized organizations, Americans have sought to
preserve a vision of themselves as fully autonomous individuals,
answerable to no one. But, as McClay points out, “”every way of
life, even a seemingly neutral and eclectic pluralism that tolerantly
affirms a wide-open bazaar of ideas and values, has its builtin
imperatives, its virtues, its vices, its codes, its taboos, its
benefits, and its costs.”” The cost for contemporary Americans is
directly related to the supposed benefits of the system they have
allowed to be formed. Dispensing with the ultimate authority of
God, Americans have cast themselves as atomistic individuals,
determined to maintain their independence while “”yearning for
unrealizable forms of community.””14 Responding to the
Jeffersonian tradition in their culture, Americans grew tired of
the demands for virtue made by local communities. As a result,
they gave up their liberty as well, and left themselves seeking an
increasingly meaningless freedom and an increasingly unrealizable,
and indefinable, community.
Carey on the Limits of Politics
Ironically, Americans’ flight from authority ended by empowering
the central government, rendering the people increasingly
subject to the will of distant political elites. As liberty
depends on cultural structures, its loss stems from cultural
sources as well. The decline of local liberties in the United
States has been at least as much a matter of cultural change as
of institutional innovation. Political developments have affected
American culture, to be sure. But political developments
are outgrowths of cultural developments, not independent
causes of societal change.
The complex relationship between politics and culture is
easily lost amid the drama and the mere mechanics of political
action. One traditional conservative who has sought to show the
need to integrate political and cultural understanding is George
Carey. Carey is best known as a student of works relating to the
Constitution and of The Federalist in particular.15 His work
explains the mechanics of the Constitution and important founders’
expectations as to how it should work, and also the founders’ key
cultural assumptions, including their intention that the Constitution
be read and applied with an historical understanding of the
tradition of ordered liberty in which it stood. But such concerns
do not, for Carey, exhaust the subjects proper for political
analysis. He also explains the political and cultural limits of the
Constitution and of constitutionalism more generally. Indeed,
some of Carey’s most important insights concern precisely these
limits and their implications for political and social life.
Conservatives recognize that constitutions play a limited role in
fostering and nourishing communities. This role, moreover, is
largely passive. Genuine communities evolve naturally; they are
complexes of voluntary associations bound together by ties of
loyalty, affection, and purpose. Consequently, constitutions, no
matter how well crafted, play little, if any, role in their origins and
growth.16
No matter how conservative in nature, no matter how well
crafted to fit the people’s character and culture, a constitution is
by nature an abstract document. It sets down general rules
intended to shape the behavior of those in positions of power in
the government. And those rules are the products of rational
considerations, of a reasoning process that at its best integrates
the results of rational study with the bare facts of human experience.
Because a constitution is a set of rules rather than an
embodied model of behavior, it can provide only a partial vision
and guide for conduct; it is not a substitute for vital, characterforming
communities. Carey notes that “”communities can be
created, but to be vital and functional, and to operate in conformance
with their goals, they must have their origins in some shared
and genuine human interest or need, not the dreams or aspirations
of social planners.””17 Politics is too divorced from daily life,
too abstract a concept and too blunt an instrument, to form live,
functioning communities. The obverse is not true, however, as
good politics—in a phrase, ordered liberty—require a proper
grounding in a healthy, vibrant, and ordered culture.
Carey points out the fallacy of any reading of The Federalist,
or of the founding generation more generally, that emphasizes the
role of mere political mechanisms over good character in maintaining
peace, order, and freedom. For example,
Crucial positions and arguments in The Federalist are based on
the presumption of a people sufficiently virtuous for selfgovernment.
At one point Madison even acknowledges that
“”Republican government”” depends to a greater degree “”than any
other form”” on those “”qualities in human nature”” that “”justify a
certain portion of esteem and confidence.”” He also recognizes
that those backing the Constitution are assuming a “”sufficient
virtue among men for self-government.””18
Regardless of how cleverly its constitution is constructed,
over the long haul only a virtuous people can be free. But whence
will come the people’s virtue? The American Constitution cannot,
any more than any other constitution, provide the people with
virtue; and the founders knew this. They were convinced that
character formation, the shaping of individuals into virtuous
citizens and members of society, is by nature the task of local
associations. Evincing an instinctive understanding of the moral
principle of subsidiarity,19 the founders acted on the belief that as
much responsibility as possible must be left at the most local and
most private (or, more precisely, most social) level possible. Only
in this way would local associations be able to form and to do their
job of shaping individuals’ moral character.
But what, then, can and must a constitution do? Allow those
in power to carry out their tasks without allowing them to usurp
powers properly belonging to others, and to local associations in
particular. In an antagonist world of potential internal and
international conflict there always will be a role, a “”job,”” for the
central government. But, as Carey points out, “”communities fare
best and enjoy free and spontaneous development under political
constitutions that allow ‘space’ or ‘room’ for their functioning and
development, as well as for their adjustments to the social,
economic, and technological factors that affect them.””20
By providing “”space”” for local associations and communities
to form and develop, the Constitution does all it can to promote
freedom, its own survival and, the source of both, a decent,
virtuous character in the people. This means that limited, decentralized
government is best for community and therefore most
likely to perpetuate the people’s virtue and freedom. “”The reasons
for this seem clear enough: the more confined the scope of the
central government, the greater the need and opportunity for the
spontaneous growth of communities and associations at the local
level—the only place, after all, where they can grow.””21
Like McClay, however, Carey does not end with the observation
that local, cultural institutions are necessary for the perpetuation
of liberty. He observes that it is in these institutions, in these
communities, that any decent life is formed and lived. Centralization,
in the end, is not merely unwise; it does more, even, than
make human beings unfree; it dehumanizes them.
Centralization in violation of the subsidiary principle not only
leads to the degeneration of society but also eventually weakens
(if not destroys) the individual’s inherent and distinctive capacities
as a human being. Specifically, unnecessary centralization
deprives the individual of meaningful participation at those
levels most important for developing a sense of initiative, obligation,
and responsibility. The feelings of achievement, the sense
of reward or accomplishment, would not be his, nor would he
develop friendships through cooperative enterprises. His growth
as a human being with creative potential, free choice, and dignity
would be stunted. This situation, in sum, would not be unlike
that of children whose parents have continually protected and
coddled them at every turn throughout their lives, making all
decisions for them, providing for their every want, thereby
depriving them of the opportunity to develop and assume the
responsibility of adults.22
Today, unfortunately, centralization has become a fact of
political and cultural life in America. The Supreme Court in
particular has imposed its ideological vision of a national community
on states and localities, stripping them of their proper
functions, undermining their ways of life and forging a centralized,
tutelary state.23 This is doubly problematic because, while a
good constitution cannot form the good communities on which it
relies, a faulty political system can undermine even a fundamentally
sound culture. The result is a loss of both freedom and virtue.
This is not to say that political events alone are to blame for
the corruption of American society and the evisceration of local
communities. Carey notes that communities must respond to
“”social, economic, and technological”” as well as political factors.24
Thus “”the reasons for our problems today are numerous and go
well beyond politics as normally defined.””25 And even the political
factors themselves are part of a wider-ranging degradation of
American culture. The Supreme Court’s hostility toward local
communities has been devastating. It has taken issues of morality,
religion and even daily self-rule from the associations in which
people traditionally have joined to address them, depositing them
with the federal government, and generally with the Court itself.
And Court decisions in recent decades have been rooted in hyperindividualist
ideology. From the beginning, the principles guiding
the Court’s decisions were ideological; they were not
developed over the years through the trials and tribulations of
communities, local governments, or private associations in dealing
with concerns closest to them. On the contrary, the creed to
which the Court subscribes in dictating to communities and local
governments…bears a close affinity to the standards and morality
that attach to the progressive vision of a national “”community””
marked by “”enlightened”” norms and principles whose inherent
worth should be evident to all.26
Community development is by nature organic. The Supreme
Court has rejected this form of growth and continuity, along with
the diversity of local customs it spawns, as insufficiently rational
and too likely to allow forms of behavior it dislikes. Thus it has put
a stop to the independent life of communities, subjecting them to
abstract, universal standards of legalistic form and egalitarian
substance deemed fair by progressive ideology.
As a consequence, one of the major difficulties in our present
constitutional order can be put as follows: Whereas in the past the
breeding ground for virtue and morality was the family, the
church, voluntary associations, and the community, the source is
now to be found at the national level, principally in the
institution, the Supreme Court, that is most removed from an
understanding of local concerns and problems.27
The new constitutional disposition is anti-organic. It devalues
communities and the customary ways that allow them to
function. Carey criticizes the Court’s ideology for its abstraction
from any organic tradition. But the Court’s actions are, in fact,
part of a tradition of sorts—truncated and culturally barren
though it may be. That tradition is the source of the political
tension in America to which Kirk pointed in contrasting Adams
with Jefferson and conservatives with followers of the Enlightenment
thought at the root of the French Revolution. Carey sees the
same conflict at the root of debates over the nature and proper
role of culture in American public life:
the present conflict over the character and the destiny of our
nation is principally an extension of the basic divisions that
separated Burke from the philosophes of the French Revolution.
Whereas Burke could see the vital and indispensable roles of
traditions for the society to become an organic “”partnership in
every virtue, and all perfection,”” the philosophes were antagonistic
towards traditions, convinced that society could be torn
apart to be built anew by the use of “”reason.””28
Over the course of over 200 years even the hyper-rationalism
of Enlightenment ideology has hardened into habits of thought
and action that properly are termed a tradition. Carey explains
that the philosophes’ positions have been
differentiated and refined, their major elements now constituting
well-established traditions in their own right. Modern
American progressivism, with its quest for equality, its view that
more and bigger government is the cure for whatever ails us, its
propensity for blaming society for the wrongs or shortcomings of
individuals, and, inter alia, its anti-traditionalist stance in the
name of freedom, progress, and tolerance, is unmistakably the
outgrowth of the Enlightenment.29
The Enlightenment-based tradition of progressivism is inherently
opposed to the tradition that informed the American
founding. Thus it is not surprising that attempts to further the
progressive tradition have included revisionist attacks on our
understanding of the founding era. Overt attempts to deligitimize
the American founding as inherently unjust and best discarded,
have met with little success. But anti-traditionalists have made
great strides on a different front no less adverse to traditional
institutions and their influence. They have been extremely successful
in convincing people to reinterpret the American founding
as a radical event establishing liberal, progressive values of
equality, toleration, and freedom unconstrained by the dictates of
virtue.30 They have read the American tradition of active participation
in close, local communities out of American history,
rendering it all but irrelevant as a norm and model of behavior. A
major, perhaps the key, conservative task, then, is that of reminding
Americans of the nature and importance of their own tradition.
Kirk well knew that the assault on Americans’ understanding
of their origins is key to the progressive/liberal project. To the
extent that Americans forget the cultural underpinnings of their
system of ordered liberty they cease defending the customs and
institutions central to their way of life, leaving them at the mercy
of progressive ideologues intent on re-forming society along
rationalist lines.31 Thus it is important next to look at a number of
scholars recovering the truth concerning America’s cultural
heritage—not, that is, merely the roots of various folkways, but
the sources within western civilization of the unwritten constitution
on which the American political and social order rest.
McDonald On History as the Key to Normalcy
Nostalgia is a sin of which conservatives often are accused. Yet it
is no sin to remind a people that they once held greater virtue and
led better lives than they do at present. Scholars who seek
rhetorical tools in the past to help further their own political
program betray their society, and their own high calling within
that society. Yet, as Kirk noted, the study of history has a purpose:
to show us what is normal—what is required of us by standards of
conduct written into the nature of man and the universe.32
#page#
History is the source of norms; it shows how human beings
manage to live together in relative peace and decency, as well as
how communities break down or succumb to various destructive
forces. This makes the study of history important for the student
of politics. As the founders studied ancient Greece and Rome to
find examples of virtue and vice, and to glean lasting principles of
politics, so Americans today can look to the founding era to learn
from the founders how to maintain a tolerable civil social order.
In the opening essay of Requiem: Variations on Eighteenth-
Century Themes, a book he co-wrote with his wife, Ellen, Forrest
McDonald paints a picture of the culture that produced the
American Constitution; a culture Americans have lost, but which
they must seek to understand if they are to recognize their own
limitations, the quality and character of the political system
bequeathed to them by the Constitution’s framers, and their
duty to revive their constitutional tradition. McDonald begins
the essay (“”The Intellectual World of the Founding Fathers””) by
noting the overweening hubris of intellectuals calling for a new
Constitution, rewritten by a convention or the Supreme Court,
“”to reflect the realities of the twentieth century.”” The assumption
underlying this drive is simple: 200 years of experience has
made us wiser, more informed and more sophisticated than
those who drafted our original Constitution. This assumption,
writes McDonald, “”is as presumptuous as it is uninformed.”” Not
only have 200 years failed to make us wiser—to change our
flawed, limited nature—but our conduct during those intervening
years has left us with such desiccated standards of learning
and character that “”it would be impossible in America today to
assemble a group of people with anything near the combined
experience, learning, and wisdom that the fifty-five authors of
the Constitution took with them to Philadelphia in the summer
of 1787.””33
We live in corrupt times, whereas “”the formation of the
republic was a product of America’s Golden Age, the likes of
which we shall not see again.””34 In detailing the nature of this
Golden Age, McDonald spells out the fundamental requirements
for free government within the American tradition, showing us
the institutions, beliefs and practices we should seek to reinvigorate
even as we recognize our inability to recreate them. Key to
McDonald’s argument is the close connection between American
culture during the founding era and the founders’ political genius.
If we are to recognize that America was founded by men deserving
of respect—neither “”regular Joes”” whose wisdom we have surpassed
nor self-created demigods, whose pronouncements should
be read de novo, as having created a new nation out of whole
cloth—then we must come to understand the culture that produced
them.
McDonald first points out how well educated the founders
were; almost all of them could read Latin and ancient Greek as
well as, often, one or more modern languages. Moreover, their
education was steeped in understandings of human nature and the
need for virtue. Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and
Romans was the most generally read classic.35 Thus the founders
were trained from an early age to care about virtue. And they
cared about a specific kind of virtue, one embedded in the western
tradition. The founders’ education made them, not philosophers,
but bearers of the western tradition. The learning of the ancients,
of the old Whig writers on liberty, and of the Scottish common
sense school did not produce a thoroughly consistent ideology.
But they produced a background understanding of human limitations,
capacities, and duties that “”permeated the very air Americans
breathed”” from the newspapers to George Washington’s
beloved theater, to public oratory; they were part of the culture.36
Strongly British in character, American culture embodied traditions
and institutions key to American liberty.
Among the English institutions and attitudes that were firmly
planted in America were the traditional idea that government
must be lawful; the common law, which was adopted selectively,
colony by colony; the practice of settling disputes through juries,
reliance upon militias of armed citizens for defense and for the
preservation of order; and the belief that the ownership of land,
or the possession of enough other property to ensure an independent
livelihood, was a prerequisite to the full rights and
duties of citizenship. These, together with the development of
such indigenous creations as the town meeting and such virtually
indigenous practices as the responsibility of church ministers to
their congregations, as well as the ready availability of land, bred
a citizenry that was at once self-reliant and interdependent. What
is more, the scheme of things required widespread participation
in public affairs through face-to-face mechanisms, largely outside
the framework of formal government. The daily business of
life thus schooled Americans for responsible citizenship and for
statesmanship.37
Americans were trained from an early age in the habits of selfrule.
They grew up in communities formed by institutions and
customs—some inherited, others developed in response to local
circumstances—that emphasized local rights and duties. And the
founders worked to preserve these aspects of American culture
because they loved and understood the western tradition of
ordered liberty.
The founders’ educational culture strengthened their commitment
to the traditions shaping their public culture. The vast
majority of them did not read the French philosophes, with their
radical ideologies, because “”Americans were immune to the
antireligious virus that had infected the French.””38 Indeed, the
founders’ most cited source of social and political as well as
religious wisdom was the Bible. But even the biblical word of God
was part of a tradition, approached through habits of interpretation
and application deeply embedded in the people’s way of life.
Recovering Our Tradition
McDonald draws a compelling picture of the unwritten constitution
and cultural assumptions of the founding era. Barry Alan
Shain’s The Myth of American Individualism makes clear that this
culture itself was rooted, proximately, in traditions of communalism
and reformed Protestantism. Recent decades have seen a
resurgence of interest in communalist beliefs and practices
during the founding era.39 But this literature is a-historical in its
insistent secularism. Shain demonstrates that American communalist
culture was deeply religious. Americans of the colonial and
Revolutionary eras had “”little interest in forming dialogic communities
where life’s meaning was gained through political activity.
Most were interested in possessing everlasting life through Christ’s
freely given grace by serving their religious and geographical
communities and their families, and by attending to agricultural
matters.””40 America was neither individualist nor secular. Its
people lived within close-knit communities joined by a shared
cult, a shared, reformed Protestant vision of the meaning of life
and requirements for salvation. America already had the full
flower of religious pluralism in its many varieties of Protestant
sects (and, to a lesser extent, Catholic community); but the result
was not a uniform, liberal “”tolerance”” that downplayed the
importance of religion. It was, rather, a collection of homogenous
local communities joined by an almost instinctive understanding
of the utility and requirements of subsidiarity.
Long before the formation of the American federal system,
Americans insisted on local autonomy as necessary for a good life.
The leaders of local towns and plantations were convinced that
[o]nly within the compass of a small community could the visible
saints be known—those principally responsible for subjecting
“”the damned to the divine supervision of the Church”” in a
manner “”consistent with the glory of God.”” From the reformed
Protestant perspective, any loss of corporate autonomy to extralocal
religious, social, or governmental power would have made their
divinely ordained duties and functions more difficult to fulfill.41
To understand Americans’ religiously driven political ethic
and the reasoning behind its localism one must understand the
vision of the good life on which it was based. It was, in Shain’s view,
conservative before that term had come into usage.
Conservatives defend a theory of the good, communalism, which
holds that individual human flourishing is best pursued through
familial and communal shaping of individual character…through
the active inculcation of corporately agreed-upon virtues. This
sanctioned formation of individual character by intermediate
social and political institutions is guided by an underlying moral,
invariably religious, conception of a well-lived human life. This
necessitates a common morality that rests on universal and
absolute truth claims and by contemporary liberal sensibilities
must be judged intrusive. In effect, the quest after personal
virtue is not a fully private or even wholly familial project but
rather a corporate and public one that involves political, social,
and usually theological elements.42
A conservative vision guided individual and communal conduct
in America from the first New World landing and before, and
had deeper roots in a reformed Protestantism that shaped the
behavior of a significant and emigration-prone minority in England.
This vision still predominated in America, though in
greater tension with later, Enlightenment influences, through the
founding era. It is a key element of Americans’ cultural and
constitutional heritage.
Political scientists and historians have overlooked Americans’
lived philosophy of communalism because it is not ideological, it
is not found in the theories of the Enlightenment, but rather in
daily behavior.43 Thus the work of social historians, examining the
customs and local institutions of typical people rather than elites’
philosophical musings, are needed to gain an accurate picture of
this way of life. This is not to say, however, that political
philosophy is unimportant. Indeed, some of the most important
work being done in the Kirkian tradition involves reminding
Americans of the connections between their own political system
and the broader culture of Western civilization.
In introducing an essay on Greek and Roman influences on
the American founding, Bruce S. Thornton observes that “”the
advent of multiculturalism with its version of history as a therapeutic
melodrama designed to boost the self-esteem of selected
‘victims,’ has called into question a historical fact once the
common knowledge of every schoolboy.”” Today textbooks perpetuate
the falsehood that Americans copied their constitution
from Iroquois council sachems, downplaying the clear and obvious
role played by Greek and Roman political philosophy and
historical example.44 It is important to recover the political
thought and institutional examples used by the framers as guides
and cautions in framing American constitutional government. As
important, however, is a more cultural vision, one Thornton
describes as “”The Greek Georgic tradition”” of agriculture and
land-based loyalties and concerns, that motivated and shaped the
goals and methods almost instinctively chosen by the American
founders.
Both the Greek city-state and the Roman republic had at their
core the small, independent farmer. The “”regimen of hard work,
self-sufficiency, and distrust of merchant and aristocrat alike””
that characterized these farmers produced a character and set of
habits central to free government.45 Their exemplar, Cincinnatus,
left his farm long enough to save Rome from the Gauls, then
returned to his accustomed life of material poverty and hard
work, that is to the mode of living he deemed best for man. And
the founders consistently cited examples from this tradition—
Cincinnatus in particular, with whom they identified George
Washington—as providing proper models for human conduct, as
well as a way of life their new nation must be careful to provide.46
E. Christian Kopff also points to the classical origins of the
founding. Noting Kirk’s insistence that “”America’s political institutions
owe next to nothing to the ancient world,”” he goes on to
illustrate Kirk’s further point, that “”American modes of thinking
about politics indeed were influenced, two centuries ago, by
Greek and Roman philosophers long dead.””47 In addition to the
ever-haunting image of Cincinnatus, calling every man to hard
work and a high standard of self-sacrificing virtue, classical
thought provided a vocabulary of politics that formed the very
minds of Americans of the founding era.48
Kopff takes issue with Kirk on points of detail in making his
case for classical influence on the founders’ thinking in regard to
specific political institutions and theories—particularly the separation
of powers and the nature and implications of political
tyranny.49 Yet Kopff’s disagreements with Kirk are matters of
emphasis merely. While Kopff argues that Kirk overemphasized
America’s specifically British heritage, he also notes that “”the
ideas which lay behind the American Founding were understood
as a continuous and coherent tradition which had developed from
ancient Greek thought through its Roman successors and culminated
in seventeenth century English Whig thinking.””50 Thus
Kopff, like Kirk, is arguing for an understanding of the American
founding as one preserving and institutionalizing, under changing
circumstances, the western tradition.
Historical Understanding
Some readers may have noticed that this essay has discussed the
work of historians, students of classics and even English professors
as well as students of political science. This is intentional.
Traditional conservatism is not a pseudo science of politics,
applying methodologies appropriate to rocks and animals as if
they applied to human behavior.51 Rather, conservatives are
concerned with discovering what is necessary for human beings to
achieve relative peace, freedom, and stability, fulfilling their
duties to one another and to God. And this inquiry is rooted, not
in the so-called social sciences, but in human history. It emphasizes
our need for customs and prescribed, inherited ground rules
to help us deal peacefully and virtuously with one another. It sees
liberty, not as an abstract idea to be imposed on individuals by a
liberating state, but rather as a way of life rooted in traditional
practices. It sees reasoning itself as rooted in history—in inherited
beliefs and in analogical thought by nature grounded in
experience. Finally, it sees our way of life as good because we are
fortunate enough to be inheritors of the Western, Judeo-Christian
civilization, with all the ancient moral traditions bequeathed
to us by that civilization.
Conservatism is historically minded. It recognizes the debt of
current institutions and ways of acting to customs and even
institutions of the past. But this does not mean that conservatives
merely value the old for its own sake. They are not “”stand-patters,””
to use Clinton Rossiter’s phrase. They value permanent, abiding
goods and prudent action aimed at achieving those goods in light
of various, changing circumstances.
#page#
Kirk insisted that we can lead good lives only by recognizing
certain “”permanent things”” or goods written into the nature of
being. But how do we reconcile the obvious variations (and
depredations) of human history with the call to a timeless,
universal standard of goodness? Claes Ryn has written that, for
Burke, there is “”a standard of good that is not a mere creature of
time and place but universal. Yet, for him, that standard becomes
embodied in and known to man in historical particulars.””52 Burke
was instinctively aware that “”The transcendent reveals itself in
history by becoming selectively immanent in it.””53 But we have
forgotten this truth and have lost even our understanding of what
it means. Indeed, “”That life might have an enduring purpose, but
one that manifests itself differently as individuals and circumstances
are different, seems a contradiction in terms.””54 Elsewhere
I have argued that this seeming contradiction is put to rest
by the realization that the conservative goal is not any particular
political regime or program, but a virtuous way of life. That way
of life, in which individuals join with their fellows in local
associations devoted to the common good, and to promoting good
character and conduct in accordance with the dictates of religion,
can exist under any number of political regimes. But it necessitates
understanding that the purpose of any political regime is to
protect and nurture the fundamental, cultural institutions in
which human beings associate and lead their day to day lives.55
Some political systems are better than others at promoting
virtue in a given set of circumstances. But politics is not, as Ryn
points out
an autonomous, self-generating, self-subsisting force that shapes
all other aspects of society. It is essential to understand that
political beliefs and institutions are expressions of an underlying
attitude toward human existence, that they are in a sense
secondary phenomena, having antecedents and roots in the life
of the mind and the imagination.56
Because politics is not the center of human life, it is unproductive
to focus on rulers and their ideologies as the key to political—
let alone more generally public or social—behavior.
Political elites do not simply impose their will on a people. Their
being in power is in an important sense symptomatic of the
moral-cultural-intellectual life of society, which is shaped in the
long run by thinkers and artists as much as by politicians. Political
elites sometimes affect the future decisively, but they can and
cannot do various things depending on the moral-culturalintellectual
climate of their societies.57
Society’s “”moral-cultural-intellectual climate”” plays a dominant
role in shaping its politics. Moreover, this climate embodies
the spiritual health of a people. Thus, the decline of political life
into mere competition for material goods is symptomatic of a
deeper sickness; one caused by the people’s rejection of the goals
and customs of a common religious viewpoint—of their rejection,
as a people, of the duty to live by permanent norms.58 The move
toward subjectivism is taken as liberation, but ends by enslaving
people to their appetites, and leaving them defenseless in the face
of the political elites they have empowered. Rejecting the permanent
things, people reject any call to virtue and, in the end, the
duties whose fulfillment renders common life tolerable.
The people’s desire for an easier, less virtuous life, surely was
rewarded through the growth of a centralized administrative and
welfare state. It was rewarded more handsomely by the elimination
of religious values from public life. The rewards: ease and a
decline in moral responsibility. “”In a world without a lasting
higher purpose and without a commonality of meaning there is no
need to struggle with conscience, the latter having been shown to
be merely an arbitrary, historically bound imposition.””59 Of
course, the cost has been a loss of traditional liberties, the
breakdown of custom, tradition and the fundamental institutions
of local life, most prominently the family. But key to a conservative
understanding of the current political situation is recognition
that the rewards and the costs have gone together from the outset.
As the founders knew, republican government requires a virtuous
people, and that virtue rests on religious practice, embedded
within customs with their roots deep in a people’s history. Thus we
cannot hope for a return to a healthier, freer society through mere
political action. Such a return would require nothing less than, in
Ryn’s phrase, “”a transformation of civilization.””60 Indeed, “”Politics
would of course form part of any renewal of civilization, but
it is the direction of the moral and cultural life of society that will
be the very heart of the matter, even for politics itself.””61
Integrating the Transcendent with the Concrete
Ideas have important consequences. But they are not alone in
influencing political actors. Moreover, politics is a naturally
embedded part of a larger, more comprehensive culture and
society. Critical ideas combine political with moral content and
must address concrete customs and practices if they are to affect
a civilization. The modern era can be defined as one dominated by
ideologies. An important reason for this is the prominence of
specifically political concerns in Enlightenment thought. Not
virtue or salvation but specifically political concepts of liberty and
equality have dominated. Yet even the political emphases of
modernity have their roots in deeper understandings, or misunderstandings,
of the nature of the human person and the proper
goals of life. For the moderns, that nature is radically atomistic,
and those purposes are purely subjective. In short, modernity
rejects culture and the transcendent in the name of individualism.
Peter Augustine Lawler has argued that modernity is distinguished
by the view
that a human being is an individual, and the modern individual
is an abstraction, an invention of the human mind. That individual
is made more free from social and political constraints, and
less directed toward duty and goodness by God and nature, than
a real human being ever could be…. The modern individual is
liberated from the philosopher’s duty to know the truth about
nature, from the citizen’s selfless devotion to his country, from
the creator’s love and fear of God, and even from the loving
responsibilities that are inseparable from family life. Conservatives
today oppose liberal individualism both because its understanding
of the human being is untrue and because that definition
erodes all that is good about distinctively human existence.62
Modern ideologues’ insistence that the individual be treated
solely as a monad, an unconnected product of its own radically
free choice, has produced the myth of an autonomous political
sphere. Moderns, both despots and democrats, have come to
believe that human nature can be changed through political
means, if only that individual is stripped of non-political attachments.
As a result modern politics has been characterized by overt
hostility toward the institutions in which people actually live, and
toward the customs that allow these institutions to function.
Thus the state has gone from protecting the family as the
foundation of society to undermining it by refusing even to
enforce its contractual nature—allowing one party to dissolve the
union without cause and over the objection of the other party.
Thus municipalities have been stripped of all independent legal
powers and left as mere creatures of the states, exercising only
that authority which the states choose to give them. Thus church
figures and even independent citizens have been denied the right
to show communal support for religious values and institutions.
Thus the law has worked to liberate individuals from all groups
that might influence their decisions on important life matters.
De-integration of politics from culture has brought about the
disintegration of society and an age of atomistic individualism,
peppered by outbursts of unmediated mass movements. Stripped
of their natural relationships as families, churches, and local
associations have fallen apart under political pressures, people
have been forced to seek out association and empowerment in
overtly political associations. And the people have found themselves
endowed with great power to destroy, though little power
to reconstruct what has been destroyed. The modern “”intention
to transform human nature has failed. Its project of transforming
the human person into the autonomous individual was and
remains unrealistic; we can now see the limits of being an
individual because we remain more than individuals.”” But the
attempt has had deep effects on our culture. “”The world created
by modern individuals to make themselves fully at home turns out
to have made human beings less at home than ever.””63
Of particular importance has been the attack on religion.
Culture not only comes from the cult or religion of a people, it also
points them back to the reality of transcendent, religious truth.
Cultural life is intimately tied to religion, and so the modern
attempt to strip culture from humanity has entailed the rejection
of God and religious belief. Lawler asserts that “”the individual
really did try to replace the God of the bible in the modern
world—with the individual himself.””64 Of course, “”the individual””
cannot act because it is a mere abstraction. But political
elites, acting in a society atomized by individualism, in which
people are stripped of their natural attachments, amass for
themselves great power. And this power leads them to believe that
they can change human nature, even as it produces in the people
a moral and intellectual degeneration that allows them to forget
that they are created beings, dependent on God and religion to
make sense of their lives.
The Christian heaven, Lawler argues, has been replaced by
moderns, even supposedly “”different”” moderns like Marx, by “”a
world-to-come where we can do whatever we want, whenever we
want, without any constraint by or guidance from nature, other
human beings, or God.””65 Government and society itself must
whither away, on this view, so that each individual can act truly
“”autonomously””—that is, with radical free choice, unconstrained
by human attachments or any higher purpose.
Pursuit of this earthly heaven of autonomous individualism
has produced a hellish existence of loneliness and enslavement to
one’s passions, drives and political rulers. And so those empowered
by the state to look after our well-being—the psychologists,
psychiatrists, social workers, and other “”facilitators”” who have
replaced our priestly class and our parents—have sought to ease
our minds. Their goal has been to eliminate the pains of modern
life by destroying our last human attachments, our desire for love
and fear of death. Mindless fornication and euthanasia will
eliminate the final constraints on radical autonomy, leaving us
without any goals to unsettle our post-human minds.66
Lawler’s answer to the meaningless existence of modern
individualism is the reintegration of human beings into their
communities. A world that has put the pathologies of modernity
behind it will begin with “”the replacement of the individual by the
whole human being, and the using of our natural capabilities for
thought and action to make the world worthy of him.”” As usual,
for a conservative, Lawler eschews any specific ideological program.
He points out that conservatism is quite compatible with
constitutional liberty, and that no “”particular changes to our form
of government”” should be seen as central to a plan of reformation.
67 The point, to use Ryn’s phrasing, is to change the “”moralcultural-
intellectual climate”” that shapes our daily lives and our
politics.
And that climate is, after all, the focus of traditional conservative
political analysis. Kirk made critical contributions to a
mode of analysis intent on reintegrating our knowledge of politics
with our knowledge of the basic structures and customs of society.
He did much to re-legitimize an understanding of politics that
eschews the unbridled pursuit of ideological conceptions of the
best regime, defined narrowly as the institutional structures best
embodying modern notions of individual autonomy. Thanks in
significant measure to Kirk’s work, a number of scholars are
working to reintegrate politics into society, the individual into the
community, and the transcendent into the concrete. Such reintegration
eschews even the mechanistic application of Kirk’s own
canons of conservatism—meant, after all, only to provide an
outline of a decent civil social order. And it focuses in particular
on the need for transcendent standards because these have been
most abused in recent years—either rejected altogether or degraded
into mere ideological formulae justifying utopian political
action.
As Burke observed, man is by nature a religious animal. If he
is denied real religion he will find a substitute in superstition,
including, today, superstitions regarding the powers of individuals
and political mechanisms. Because our way of life grows from
common institutions and beliefs rooted in religious practice, we
must foster genuine faith if we are to have decent, generally
accepted moral standards and any common life. Such standards
provide meaningful goals (community in this life and salvation in
the next). And such goals shape our institutions and our conduct
as individuals and as members of communal groups.
#page#
Ideologues may attempt to paint traditional conservatism as
un-American, in the political sense. And the argument will sound
plausible because conservatives refuse to see any political regime
as providing the true and only heaven. But, as Tocqueville argued
that democracy is best served by its friendly critics, so one can
argue that America’s system of ordered liberty is best served, not
by those who claim it is a perfect, uncreated whole embodying all
this is good, but rather by those who are willing to judge that
system according to higher standards, rooted in history and
emanating from God’s will as revealed in the natural law. The
traditional conservative task is too critical, too likely to result in
negative comments on current behavior, to sustain mass popularity.
But, being guided by concern for the truth, it offers rewards
higher than mere popularity.
Bruce P. Frohnen
Ave Maria School of Law
NOTES
- Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot
7th ed. (Washington, DC: Regnery, 1985) 72. - Ibid.
- Examples abound but include Michael Novak, God’s Country:
Taking the Declaration Seriously (Washington: AEI Press,
2000), Charles Kesler, ed., Saving the Revolution: The Federalist
Papers and the American Founding (New York: Free Press, 1987)
and Thomas Pangle, The Spirit of Modern Republicanism: The
Moral Vision of the American Founders and the Philosophy of
Locke (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). The paradigm
for such ideological readings of the United States was set by
Seymour Martin Lipset, The First New Nation: The United States
in Historical and Comparative Perspective (Garden City, NY:
Anchor Books, 1963). - See for example Charles R. Kesler, “”All American?,””
National Review, (December 7, 1998). - In a Christmas Eve, 2002 Wall Street Journal article,
Francis Fukuyama asserts that “”traditional (as opposed to American)
conservatism”” is a purely European phenomenon, unwelcome
and almost unheard of on American soil. In America,
Fukuyama claims, almost no one wants “”to defend a status quo
based on hierarchy, tradition and a pessimistic view of human
nature.””
