There’s no such thing as a bad time to read Russell Kirk, but America’s 250th year is an especially good one. Kirk—the founder of this journal—helped place American conservative thought in a broader intellectual tradition and provided intellectual ballast to the movement that would shape American politics and culture for generations. For On America: How to Understand the Legacy of 1776, Michael Lucchese has gathered 17 essays in which Kirk discusses not only the Founding, but also the nation that the Revolution created, the distinctive nature of the people who imagined and developed it, and the traditions they inherited and adapted.
Lucchese, an associate editor of Law & Liberty and contributing editor to Providence, has organized his selections into three sections and a postscript. “American Roots” comprises six essays about the Founding and its origins. It is followed by “American Statesmanship,” in which we encounter Kirk’s meditations on significant Americans both great and obscure, and finally “American Letters,” which showcases Kirk’s abiding belief in the importance of a nation’s literary culture.
As distinct as the sections are, several common themes and ideas recur. The first is that America has been, from its founding, an essentially conservative nation. Kirk’s interpretation of the Revolutionary War, offered most thoroughly in “A Revolution Not Made but Prevented,” is that the Founders did not seek a revolution in the way we understand the word today; their aim was not to innovate, but “to preserve an old constitutional structure for the most part.” This perspective, displaced by scholarship that emphasizes the revolution’s radical consequences (most famously by the recently departed Gordon S. Wood), is bracing to encounter again.
This vision of the Founding is in keeping with Kirk’s broader understanding of America’s conservative nature. “Americans have known no political revolution, either violent or accomplished with bloodshed, for two centuries,” he boasts, “nor have we consciously swept away old ways of living in community so that we might conform to some brave new ideological design.” Indeed, as Kirk notes in the postscript, the most aggressive push toward innovation and novelty has been “large scale constitutional alteration by a judicial aristocracy” in the form of a wayward Supreme Court.
Read more from Christopher J. Scalia at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal.
