Extremism, The American Founding, and Russell Kirk's The Roots of American Order.

• Author: Bradizza, Luigi
• Position: Russell Kirk: A Centennial Symposium - Critical essay

Russell Kirk has three interlocking intentions in writing The Roots of American Order. (1) First, he would draw our attention to the appearance of modern tyranny, particularly as established by the French and Russian revolutions, and have us see this form of tyranny as a new and especially dangerous type of political evil. Second, he aims to keep America from succumbing to a similar modern tyranny by arguing that America is largely the result of premodern strains of thought and historical and cultural experiences that have combined to give us an ordered liberty that, if properly understood and attended to, insulates us from modern tyranny. (2) Third, in recovering an understanding of our ordered liberty, Kirk would also have us renew our loyalty to it on its own terms (apart from the protection it offers us from modern tyranny) and retain it as the substantial political goal toward which Americans can and should aim. In recovering an appreciation of the premodern roots of American order, Kirk sets himself against the position that America can be understood as a fundamentally early-modern liberal nation. Though recent scholarly work on the place of natural rights in the American Founding has raised questions about Kirk's analysis of the Founding, it is my argument that Kirk's analysis is largely sound because America's political culture does indeed have deep roots in premodernity. Furthermore, Kirk's analysis of modern tyranny is also sound. Despite the fact that debate over the character of the Founding is very much alive, and regardless of how it turns out, loyalty to Kirk's understanding of ordered liberty is vital because the American ordered liberty that he describes is a precondition of human flourishing.

Comparing Two Revolutions

Kirk illuminates some of the key salutary elements of the American Founding by comparing it to a quite defective modern revolution--the French Revolution. He correctly argues that the French Revolution provided intellectual and emotional impetus to such modern tyrannies as the Soviet Union and Maoist China. It did so by popularizing certain key modern premises that give tyrants unprecedented political ambition and political power that lead in turn to unprecedented brutality and misery. In comparing the American and French revolutions, Kirk points to three fundamental differences. These concern the question of whether or not man is naturally good; the power of individual human reason; and the status of religion in human life. (3) With respect to the first difference, the French revolutionaries assimilated their belief in the natural goodness of man from Rousseau. By contrast, the American revolutionaries maintained the traditional view, inherited from Christianity, that man is fallen: "A principal difference between the American Revolution and the French Revolution was this: the American revolutionaries in general held a biblical view of man and his bent toward sin, while the French revolutionaries in general attempted to substitute for the biblical understanding an optimistic doctrine of human goodness advanced by the philosophies of the rationalistic Enlightenment." (4) Despite this theoretical claim regarding human goodness, the French revolutionaries could of course see that many actual men around them were in fact not good. They attributed their obvious human sinfulness or immorality to social and political causes. The revolutionaries sought the modification of society and politics so as to ameliorate human sinfulness and immorality in order to bring about the fullest expression of man's innate, natural goodness. A project of social and political amelioration in pursuit of such a transformative goal required greatly empowering government, the instrument of that amelioration. And it required strong measures in the face of human recalcitrance. The belief in the natural goodness of man therefore led, by this chain of political reasoning, to a lack of political restraint fueled by the frantic desire to fulfill "their visions of a future earthly paradise." (5) The result was "the Terror and... a new autocracy," fewer "checks upon will and appetite," and "a far more arbitrary domination." (6) In short, a project that aimed at an unprecedented improvement in the human condition resulted in an unprecedented tyranny, in the very heart of modern, civilized Europe.

By contrast with these French political excesses, America's Founders and people exhibited less willfulness and arbitrariness, and more justice and moderation. American moderation had its roots in the belief that man is by nature sinful. If human sin is ineradicable, one must not expect too much from men and one is therefore led to temper one's political demands. Rather than demands for an "earthly paradise" leading to tyranny, the Founders instead sought to promote ordered liberty and an imperfect but tolerable and perhaps even happy existence.

The second great error of the French revolutionaries concerns their belief in the power of human reason: "At the heart of the 'Enlightenment' mentality was an enormous confidence in the reason of the individual human being. Man's private intellectual faculties, if awakened, could suffice to dissolve all mysteries and all problems." (7) This supreme confidence in individual human reason stood in stark contrast to what the revolutionaries saw as the irrationalities and superstitions of the past. This led them to reject their past as outdated, and with it "their patrimony of order." (8) They would instead invent the world anew: "[T]he philosophes of the Enlightenment expected the swift transformation of civilization on purely rational principles." (9) Favorably describing David Hume's view of eighteenth-century France, Kirk tells us that "[t]he obsessions of philosophes with abstract reason, a priori systems, and unprofitable teachings tend toward injury to society." (10) Indeed, if not moderated, "[p]hilosophy... can produce fanatics" and in fact actually did produce fanatics in France. (11) One can see how this second error fed into the first. A mere belief in the theoretical possibility of human improvement or even perfectibility and a strong desire for it are not enough to produce tyranny. One must in addition discern a path to the sought-for "earthly paradise." That path is the product of a newly unbounded human reason.

By contrast with these rationalistic excesses, the American revolutionaries maintained key elements of their past and key non-rationalistic supplements to reason. Because they understood that man is by nature imperfect and sinful, they were wary of claims concerning the power of unbounded human reason, which itself could only be imperfect. In addition to reason, they relied on experience, and so clung to common law, with its methodological humility and empirical grounding. They retained recognizably traditional institutional forms of government that they had inherited from their experience as somewhat self-governing English colonies by establishing representative assemblies modeled on the House of Commons, a Senate that borrowed from the House of Lords, and a chief executive who could fairly be described as an elected republican "monarch." They modeled the U.S. Constitution's Bill of Rights on the English Bill of Rights of 1689, while also drawing from common law. In the background of both England and the new United States of America lay the English tradition of liberty from Magna Carta onward. Unlike the French revolutionaries, the Americans valued their history and traditions. The fruit of their political efforts, the American regime, aimed not at an "earthly paradise," but rather at ordered liberty with modest, private domestic and economic goals, and exalted but uncoerced religious goals.

The third great error of the French revolutionaries concerns their attacks on the Church. They held the view that "[r]eligion must be discarded as mere superstition." (12) Religion, they believed, leads to rule by the Church over a mass of people held in deliberate ignorance and irrationality. Further, it leads us to think that men are by nature sinful. It deforms and distracts our reason, our one great and efficacious tool for understanding and improving the human condition. This third error feeds into the first two errors. In the absence of religion, they thought, man's reason would be unbounded and undistorted, freely available for his use. And freed from the story or myth of the Fall, we would be free to imagine a better world than that offered by the Church. Kirk sees in this irreligion a number of serious problems. In the first place, and quite apart from politics, the believer within Kirk must wonder at the French revolutionaries' prospects for salvation. In more earthly terms, the French revolutionaries must risk disorder in their own souls. The great cultural inheritance of Judeo-Christianity is the well-ordered soul of those Jews and Christians who place themselves in humble submission to God. Having rejected the Church, the revolutionaries reject with it this key source of internal order. The resulting internal disorder cannot but have pernicious political consequences, for as Kirk makes clear throughout The Roots of American Order, a well-ordered society can be neither achieved nor maintained unless it is composed of individuals who have well-ordered souls. And so it is not surprising to see French revolutionaries plunging France into political chaos. Having disordered their own souls by rejecting the Church and then having seized political power, they are, so to...