On America

As Americans mark the semiquincentennial of their republic’s birth, they are deeply divided over the nature and meaning of the American Founding. Does the United States rest on an intrinsically racist basis, as is now so often claimed? Did the Declaration of Independence commit the United States to a perpetual revolution aimed at liberating the American people—and others—from all inherited constraints? If America’s framers were neither vile racists nor wild-eyed radicals, were they at least good liberals? They were in fact none of these things. So argued Russell Kirk, one of the most important and brilliant political thinkers of the twentieth century. In On America: How to Understand the Legacy of 1776, Kirk warns that America is not an “experiment,” but rather a particular expression of the entire Western heritage. The Founding of the United States should be understood as an essentially conservative act, Kirk believed, and was therefore an achievement in which sober-minded Americans ought to take pride. Besides fresh, accessible essays on the Declaration of Independence and the Founding period, On America includes Kirk’s insightful reflections on wise American statesmen from John Adams to Abraham Lincoln to (surprisingly) Eugene McCarthy, as well as his interpretations of great American writers from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Robert Frost to Flannery O’Connor. The result is a timely volume that illuminates what America means—and what it means to be an American.