Experiments in Living

[Geee]

American Conservative:

Yuval Levin has argued in his recent, very fine book, The Great Debate, that Edmund Burke is the pre-eminent figure at the origin of today’s contemporary conservatism (as Thomas Paine is the figure who inspires much of modern liberalism). But when one searches the American tradition for evidence of Burke’s influence, one is hard-pressed to find a robust Burkean intellectual tradition. In many ways, it had to be invented from scratch by Russell Kirk, but not until 1953 with the publication of The Conservative Mind.

 

America seems to be a most Burke-unfriendly place, infertile soil for the transplantation of such a strange flower. Tocqueville suggested that Americans are intuitive Cartesians, not apt to accept authority from any source outside themselves. Many of the signs suggest that the likes of Louis Hartz and Lionel Trilling were right—America has always been, and always will be, a liberal nation, a place intuitively hostile to tradition as Burke understood it.

 

It seems correct to me to conclude that Burke has not been a major figure in the American intellectual tradition—but the reason for this, I would argue, is not that America is preternaturally hostile to Burkean philosophy per se, but because there has been little need for Burke since most Americans were conservative not as a matter of philosophy, but as a way of life. While the American intellectual tradition has been dominantly liberal (the quirky exceptions such as Henry Adams and late Orestes Brownson, modestly popularized by Russell Kirk, tend to prove the rule), most Americans, generally uninterested in the world of ideas, have lived fairly conservative, tradition-bound lives.