The year 2024 marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Roots of American Order, one of the many outstanding works by 20th century man of letters Dr. Russell Kirk.
The Roots of American Order is a book for everyone. It’s for high-school American history pupils. It’s for college students. It’s for graduate and professional students, including law students. And it’s for the common reader.
All would benefit from immersing themselves in this masterful treatise that is easy to read, which is part of its genius.
It traces the history of Western civilization from Ancient Israel to Ancient Greece to Ancient Rome to central Europe to Britannia and to the New World.
To read this book is to explore the history of Western civilization–with all of its triumphs and all of its flaws–over four millennia.
Yes, four millennia.
Which is a blip in the history of the planet yet a time of exponential advance in the history of humanity.
A few pages from the end, Kirk writes, “That patrimony, as traced in this book, is not a dead thing. The roots of order twist back to the Hebrew perceptions of a purposeful moral existence under God. They extend to the philosophical and political self-awareness of the old Greeks. They are nurtured by the Roman experience of law and social organization. They are entwined with the Christian understanding of human duties and human hopes, of man redeemed. They are quickened by medieval custom, learning, and valor. They grip the religious ferment of the sixteenth century. They come from the ground of English liberty under law, so painfully achieved. They are secured by a century and a half of community in colonial America. They benefit from the debates of the eighteenth century. They approach the surface through Declaration and Constitution. They emerge full of life from the ordeal of the Civil War. … Those who would assist in America’s providential mission … need to understand where these thick roots of moral and social order may be found. …
“To protest against the existence of order is to protest against well-being, justice, freedom, and prosperity. Happiness is found in imaginative affirmation, not in sullen negation. Gratitude is one form of happiness; and anyone who appreciates the legacy of moral and social order which he has inherited in America will feel gratitude. The pursuit of happiness is not altogether vain. One finds happiness is restoring and improving the order of the soul and the order of the republic–not in acts of devastation that make a desert of spirit and of society.
“America’s order rose out of acts of affirmation … . Upon the classical and the theological virtues, upon the social experience of the Old World and the New, there was built by self-sacrifice and high imagination the intricate structure of personal and public order. Although no single human mind planned this order of ours, the wisdom and the toil of countless men and women have gone into its making.”
Although that’s a little more than a page from The Roots of American Order, it encapsulates a theme from a book that brings history to life.
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While reading this book in Kirk’s library one evening while he was at his desk typing away, this columnist asked the author a question about the fifth-century history of a region we now call Turkey.
This was many years after he wrote the book, yet his knowledge was so vast that he effortlessly, extensively answered the question.
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You, faithful reader of this column, would do well to secure a copy of this book originally published a half-century ago. You’ll be glad you did.
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Dr. Randy Elf is among the many people who had the privilege of serving as an assistant, through the generosity of the Marguerite Eyer Wilbur Foundation, to Dr. Russell Kirk and his wife, Annette Kirk, at their home–Piety Hill–in Mecosta, Michigan.
COPYRIGHT (c) 2024 BY RANDY ELF
