It was 20 years ago that Thomas G. West, nowadays the Potter
professor of politics at Hillsdale College, published Vindicating the Founders: Race, Sex, Class, and Justice
in the Origins of America. The book was a tour
de force against the
left’s relentless attacks on and distortions of the American founding, and it
is an indispensable reference book for every one of the left’s clichés about
the supposed defects, if not downright evil and oppression, of America. The
book is a model of engaged scholarship, showing how it is possible to be both
partisan in favor the decency of America while remaining objective about facts
and unbiased interpretation.
West
returns this week with a new blockbuster book on the founding that, in a
rightly ordered world, would be universally regarded as one of the most
significant works ever produced on the subject: The Political Theory of the American Founding: Natural
Rights, Public Policy, and the Moral Conditions of Freedom (Cambridge University Press). This
book is not casual reading. It is 410 pages of detailed argument and analysis,
though it should be quickly added that West’s prose is clear and direct, and
never lapses into typical academic jargon or obscurity.
It
is impossible to offer a summary overview of this book in a short space (and
I’ve only just started reading it), but two central points stand out. First,
West’s account is not just at another rich synthesis of the various
intellectual traditions and currents that most historians attribute to American
political thought, but instead makes a powerful case for the centrality of the
idea of natural law and natural right above other ideas: “If I am correct, the
founders embraced ‘other traditions’—common law. Protestantism, etc.—only to
the extent they helped to ‘secure these [natural] rights.’”
Second, West directly and
powerfully rejects the smug historicism typical of most accounts of the
American founding today even by some authors who regard themselves as
sympathetic to the founding. Historicism assumes our current opinions, even
consciousness itself depending on how far out you travel on the historicist
spectrum, are limited by our own historical horizons. For people trapped in the
prison of historicism, the “truth” of the founders may have been true for
their time, but our times and ideas are—and must be—different.
(This is the root of that laziest of liberal tropes about “the side of
history.”) West believes (and I agree) that the achievement of the American
founding was crystalizing the accumulated and hard-won political wisdom of two
millennia of western civilization into a truly novus
ordo seclorum—a new order for the ages, meaning an advance of human
social order based on permanent principles of right. As George Washington wrote
in 1783: “The foundation of our empire was not laid in the gloomy ages of
ignorance and superstition; but at an epoch when the rights of mankind were
better understood and more clearly defined, than at any other period.”
“Ignorance
and superstition” is the very ground of contemporary liberalism, which is why
Tom West’s book is necessary antidote to decades of defective history and
scholarship about the founding.
