Of course, the extent of America’s liberation from the past has been exaggerated. The country surely does not lack some pietas, as any consideration of the temples built in Washington to honor the cult of the founders makes plain. Yet beyond the civil-religious piety for these particular ancestors, America perhaps inherits more of an older tradition than the patriotic narrative of the American founding, recounted above, reveals. And our forgetfulness of such an inheritance many constitute not only impiety but injustice. Not least, we might notice that the style in which our new capital and its temples were constructed is not a “new” style at all but a conscious imitation of classical Roman exemplars. What this and many other facets of our “way of life” indicate about the meaning of America was one of the most important questions explored by Russell Kirk.
Ever the conservative, Kirk attempted to demonstrate the unoriginality of the American Revolution. To him, ours was “a revolution not made but prevented,”2 a conservative revolt against the novelty of George III’s centralizing rule and Parliament’s departure from past practice into direct taxation of the colonies. At a political level, Kirk was more impressed by the continuity between the arguments of 1688 (the “Glorious Revolution”) and those of 1776 than by their differences, while he was more impressed by the discontinuity between 1776 and 1789 (the French Revolution) than by their similarities. Following Burke’s implicit view and the arguments of such later conservative thinkers as Friedrich von Gentz,3 Kirk distinguished the American experience from that of other nations during the so-called “Age of Democratic Revolution.” What was truly novel about America’s experience for Kirk was that it had undergone a political “revolution” precisely while escaping the ideological novelty of the age.
Furthermore, Kirk’s view of the American constitutional founding in 1787 was captured in his refusal even to speak of a “founding”—a word which conjures images of some Great Man, a Solon, Lycurgus, or Aeneas. A founding implies the quasi-divine legislation of an entirely new way of life, the creation of a people. Kirk, however, read the Constitution of 1787 as a reworking of traditional English and colonial American practice rather than anything new or particularly speculative. Certainly it is fanciful to imagine immediately deducing bicameralism, for example, from any postulate of natural right. For Kirk, just as the constitutions of the states were prudent revisions of colonial charters, so the 1787 U.S. Constitution was a slight adjustment of the Articles of Confederation. Kirk was surely correct that whatever the “intention” of the drafters of the Constitution, this was the “understanding” of the ratifying conventions of the states, whose consent established our political regime.4