IT'S WHY GEORGE COULD HAVE SO EASILY AVOIDED WAR:

Russell Kirk's The Roots of American Order traced the influence of four cities--Athens, Rome, Jerusalem, and London--on the formation of the American republic. He demonstrated that America's order did not arise de novo but emerged from a patrimony of thought and the lessons of experience. Political ideas, he argued, are carriers of historical experience and judgments, the residue of hard-won truths gained in the crucible of trial and error. Kirk believed that the unique historical experiences of these four cities created paradigmatic understandings of order that Americans wove together into their constitutional fabric.

His book was written in 1974 in anticipation of the bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence and amid serious political scandal. It's not a stretch to see the book as motivated by the problem of corruption: not only personal corruption but the corruption of a regime--that is, its systemic decay. How America could avoid the fate of the republics of the past was the central question to which thinkers put their minds during the framing of the Constitution, and Kirk raised that question anew in the shadow of Watergate and Vietnam.

Note the title: The Roots of American Order. Kirk does not evoke some variation of "the American founding," which, in contrast to the organic metaphor implied in the word Roots, would make America seem more an artifice than an historical development. Kirk wanted to emphasize continuity rather than discontinuity in American history.

His book includes as an appendix a chronology that begins in 2850 BC and ends in 1866 with the publication of The American Republic by Orestes Brownson. One is tempted to see the twelve-page chronology as idiosyncratic--and it is--but its unifying theme is that history is full of contingencies that require sensitive thinkers and "great men" somehow to turn the apparent randomness of circumstance into meaningful action. Kirk draws attention to efforts to snatch back immortality from time's all-thieving hands. Overseeing all such human efforts, driven as they are by pride and marked by tragedy and irony, stands the watchful eye of Providence, a God who "intervenes" in human affairs and who in the process generates both resentment at his interference with our freedom and rage at not having such interferences result in perfection.

Kirk's chronology is not intended to be Whiggish, a simple timeline of progress that somehow culminates in American greatness. It is fitful and haphazard, telling a story of achievement and failure, of greatness and meanness, of rise and fall, of things divine tasted partially and things Satanic swallowed wholly, of a Providence whose mysterious workings the finite human mind can grasp only by faith. As Kirk liked to say, paraphrasing T. S. Eliot: there are no lost causes because there are no gained ones.

And that is why the chronology ends with Brownson, a defender of "the permanent things" who understood that no regime or governing authority can sustain itself without some sort of religious sanction. Every living nation, Brownson argued, "has an idea given it by Providence to realize," which is that nation's "special work, mission, or destiny." "The American republic," he observed, "has been instituted by Providence to realize the freedom of each with advantage to the other."

Brownson explicitly defended the idea of the nation as "an organism, not a mere organization--to combine men in one living body, and to strengthen all with the strength of each, and each with the strength of all--to develop, strengthen, and sustain individual liberty, and to utilize and direct it to the promotion of the common weal." In doing so, "the social providence" imitates divine Providence, a continuing act of creation by which all that is human returns to its origin and end.

In this sense, America's roots grow not into a founding but into a constituting. The term founding carries within it not only the idea of establishing but of manufacturing something, in the sense of casting metal: that is, something bound to endure, a metal that doesn't rust. The great "founders" of political society "founded" in both senses: they laid social life on new and solid foundations, and they also mixed the unformed elements available to them to recast political life into something new and enduring. It was Machiavelli who saw the Prince as operating on the raw materials of political life and forming them, through an act of creative will, into something new.

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