The Constitution in Their Hearts
America has never quite satisfied political theorists. On the one hand, it can seem as though the Founders were idealistic revolutionaries, committed to an abstract notion of the “rights of man” that can obliterate tradition and introduce disorder. On the other, it can seem as though they were cold-blooded realists who made cynical compromises with unjust institutions. It is difficult to explain this tension with many of the prevalent methods of political science – and therefore difficult for those in the field to understand it at all. Is it any wonder, then, that the leading ideologues of the Left and Right have both become such great critics of the Founding?
But America is not a political theory. She is a nation. The Founders did not set out to bring about heaven on earth. As Russell Kirk often observed, they were statesmen, not philosophes. Their great achievement was the practical preservation of ordered liberty in real communities against a crisis of tyranny.
This defense of the particular, though, necessitated the Founders to articulate what Abraham Lincoln called “the definitions and axioms of free society.” Something about their struggle had a universal significance, as the Railsplitter put it, “applicable to all men and all times.” In order to properly understand America, we cannot ignore the particular circumstances of the place and time when independence was achieved or the general principles to which the men who sought to achieve goal appealed. America is “not just an idea”, as J.D. Vance put it. But our nationhood does still involve ideas that we cannot and must not diminish.
Restoring our understanding of the American founding is the most important task ahead of conservatives. One mind who can show the path to recovering this heritage is the Founders’ greatest contemporary, Edmund Burke, because he understood this relationship between the particular and the universal better than any political theorist. In the Letters on the Regicide Peace, he acknowledged that all political societies are “artificial combinations; and, in their proximate efficient cause, the arbitrary productions of the human mind” and therefore concluded that “commonwealths are not physical but moral essences.” While rejecting the utopian idealism of Enlightenment thinkers, Burke understood the fundamentally spiritual nature of politics. The particular orders us toward transcendent truths, he held, through the faculty of the moral imagination.
Read more in Fusion.
