A Russell Kirk Center Special Series
Throughout the semiquincentennial year celebrating America’s independence, The University Bookman will invite a range of writers and speakers to contribute to a series drawing upon Russell Kirk’s work on the American Revolution and the constitutional order it secured. The series seeks to advance understanding of the significance of the American founding to our times through fresh, concise presentations. The following piece by Bookman editor Dr. Luke Sheahan sets the stage.
“[A] revolution not made, but prevented.” Russell Kirk fondly and frequently quoted E. J. Payne’s pithy summary of Burke’s view of the Glorious Revolution as a précis of the outcome of the American Revolution. What Americans stood for was the right to go on governing themselves as they had governed themselves before—in order, justice, and freedom.
When the English threw off King James II, it was not for his conservatism but for his innovations—not for upholding order but for undermining customary rights that were themselves the bedrock of English political order. Kirk writes,
When eighteenth-century Whigs praised the Revolution of 1688, which established their party’s domination, they did not mean that William and Mary, the Act of Settlement, and the Bill of Rights had produced a radically new English political and social order. On the contrary, they argued that the English Revolution had restored tried and true constitutional practices, preservative of immemorial ways.
Despite some radical political sophists glossing American opposition to Britain in millennial terms, Americans largely defended their cause through conservative appeals to English constitutional principles and their own practices of self-government. Representation in colonial assemblies, adherence to charters and compacts—written out much as the Magna Carta had been centuries earlier—and the enjoyment of rights under law formed the substance of colonial constitutional government.
The modern meaning of the word revolution can therefore be misleading when applied to the American struggle—unless one recalls its older meaning of a “turning back,” a return to established ways. As Kirk writes, “What most moved the Americans of that time was their own colonial experience: they were defending their right to go on living in the future much as they had lived in the past.”
The moral and political principles Americans defended in 1776 were already generations, even centuries, old. The moral principle of the dignity of man carried forward the convictions of the ancient Hebrews through the religious impulse of the Puritan settlers. From those convictions arose protections for natural rights, tempered by the needs of circumstance.
Yet the same religious inheritance that affirmed the glory of man also recognized the stain of original sin. Human dignity existed alongside human imperfection. Seen in this light, the supposed “split personality” of Publius in The Federalist disappears. The tension between a sober view of human nature requiring institutional restraint and a confidence in the possibility of public virtue simply reflects the Framers’ religious understanding of the human heart. Humane order accounts for both tendencies: the glory of the Imago Dei rising toward the heavens and the weight of original sin pulling toward the abyss.
The political principle of ordered liberty likewise emerged through historical development, growing out of the constitutional experience of medieval and early modern England. Through English constitutional institutions—often more fully developed in the American colonies—order, justice, and freedom were sustained.
Kirk writes in The Roots of American Order, “Order is the path we follow, or the pattern by which we live with purpose and meaning.” Justice cannot be upheld and freedom cannot be maintained without order. As Simone Weil wrote—and Kirk agreed—“Order is the first need of all.”
American order, this pattern of purpose and meaning, arose from the long historical and spiritual experience of Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, London, and Philadelphia. It includes the principle of harmony—obedience to just authority and no other. Such harmony must arise both in the soul and in society. This kind of order is not like a building designed by an architect but like an ancient oak: grown tall and strong only through nourishment drawn from roots far older than itself.
Justice, in turn, secures what properly belongs to each person. Kirk writes in The American Cause, “‘Justice’ is the principle and the process by which each man is accorded the things that are his own—the things that belong to his nature…It is the principle and the process that protects a man’s life, his property, his proven rights, his station in life, his dignity.”
The common law, with its practical protections for property and procedure, made freedom concrete while restraining the predations of political power. Representative government ensured that sovereign authority remained attentive to the whole of the realm, tethering the taxing power to those taxed. Where justice sometimes failed, it was typically because of imperfect enforcement, not because the constitutional principles themselves were defective.
Freedom, finally, is the principle that each person is the “master of his own life.” Yet such freedom does not release one from the obligations of justice or the demands of right order. Rather, it secures the space in which each person may pursue justice in the soul and order in society according to his talents and opportunities.
As Kirk writes in The American Cause:
In the just state, the energetic man is protected in his right to the fruits of his endeavors; the contemplative man, in his right to study and leisure; the propertied man, in his rights of inheritance and bequest; the poor man, in his rights of decent treatment and peaceful existence; the religious man, in his right to worship; the craftsman, in his right to work.
Where each receives his own—where energy is expended, contemplation pursued, property protected, peace maintained, and worship and work permitted—there exists liberty under law: freedom sustained within a framework of just order.
This understanding of the Revolution—conservative in its defense of inherited order rather than radical in its ambitions—was central to Russell Kirk’s interpretation of the American founding.
We invite you to join us throughout America’s 250th anniversary year in considering the legacy of the American Revolution and its enduring task: the preservation of order, justice, and freedom.
Luke C. Sheahan is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Duquesne University, Nonresident Senior Affiliate at the Program for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society at the University of Pennsylvania, and Editor of The University Bookman. He is author of Why Associations Matter: The Case for First Amendment Pluralism (2020) and editor of International Comparative Approaches to Free Speech and Open Inquiry (2022).
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