John Adams: Russell Kirk’s Founding Federalist
As the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence approaches, it seems natural that the American mind turns to Thomas Jefferson. The principal author of the document, his republican ideology represents one of the major sources of our country’s identity. As his sometimes-ally Thomas Paine put it, radicals of this party believed the new nation had a chance to “begin the world over again” along more equal, democratic lines. Americans could tear down the last vestiges of hierarchy, establishment, and empire, these radicals contended, and replace it with new and supposedly more enlightened modes and orders.
But as Luke Sheahan recently noted in The University Bookman, Russell Kirk had a different interpretation of the American Revolution. Unlike other historians, such as Gordon Wood or R.R. Palmer, who emphasized an expanding blaze of radicalism, the conservative writer argued that the birth of the American Republic was a “revolution of memory,” a return to what he sometimes called the “old moral order” that had animated Western civilization for thousands of years. According to Dr. Kirk, the constitution of the American people was fundamentally conservative. The liberties they sought to defend were ancient, not innovative, and for the most part they had no desire to completely remake society according to speculative principles.
As such, he located the mainstream of the American Founding not with the Jeffersonian Republicans, but with their rivals in the Federalist party. Kirk admired them not only as practical statesmen, but also as anti-revolutionary thinkers in their own right. As he put it, the Constitution they supported was both “the most successful conservative device in the history of the world” and a “great monument” to the Federalists. Men like Fisher Ames, Alexander Hamilton, John Marshall, and above all John Adams proved that republics could resist the temptations of revolution just as well as monarchies—wisdom worth recovering at the 250th anniversary of American independence.
Read more at the Russell Kirk Center.
