The Roots of American Order
America's rich and vibrant history, and her legacy of liberty, exists in continuity with her European past. Historian Clarence Carson made this astute observation,
Americans did not cast themselves off from their past experience, from ideas and practices of long standing, or from older traditions and institutions. In their building they relied extensively upon ancient and modern history and that which had come to them through the ages. What separates this as an epic from abortive revolutions is that these men brought to a fertile junction their heritage—which contained several great streams, namely, the Classical, the Christian, and the English—their experience, and contemporary ideas. The Founders stood on the shoulders of giants, thought it sometimes requires giants also to attain such heights. 1
Therefore, America's remarkable success as a nation, and an experiment in ordered liberty owes to the fertile ground and soil her roots were planted in. In the establishment of the nation, and securing her independence from Great Britain, America did not make a clean break with the past—but stood in continuity with the Anglo-American common law tradition and a broader cultural inheritance from Europe.
In his perennial classic, the Roots of American Order, Russell Kirk elucidated on the roots of order in the United States:
Although the tree of American order has grown in height and breadth during the past two hundred years, it could not have flourished so if those roots had been unhealthy. Those roots go deep, but they require watering from time to time. Whatever the failings of America [presently], the American order has been conspicious success in the perspective of human history. Under God, a large measure of justice has been achieved; the state is strong and energetic; and a sense of community endures... [T]he history of most societies is a record of painful striving, brief success (if success at all), and then decay and ruin. No man can know the future, but most Americans believe that their order will continue to 'bring out in this life the dialectic union of authority and liberty.' That will be true so long as the roots of order have proliferating life in the them. 2
Historically, Americans have not countenanced collectivism to the degree that their modern European counterparts have. Moreover, it may be said that the American mind is fundamentally antithetical to collectivism of all stripes — in spite of the New Deal and Great Society legacies. Historian Mark Puls notes,
The theme of individual liberty became central to the American psyche, manifested in Jefferson's notion of the self-reliant farmer, and carried westward in the rugged individualism of the frontiersman and pioneers. It became the underlying theme of the country's seminal literature, reflected in the works of Washington Irving, Herman Melville, James Fennimore Cooper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, William James, and countless other writers. 3
- 1. The Rebirth of Liberty: The Founding of the American Republic 1760-1800, (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1973), p. 21.
- 2. Kirk, Russell, The Roots of American Order, (Bryn Mawr, PA: ISI Books, 1974)
- 3. Puls, Mark, Samuel Adams: Father of the American Revolution, (New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan), p. 236
