Russell Kirk - Americas British Culture
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It is an incontestable fact of history that the United States, although a multiethnic nation, derives its language, mores, political purposes, and institutions from Great Britain. The two nations share a common history, religious heritage, pattern of law and politics, and a body of great literature. Yet, America cannot be wholly confident that this heritage will endure forever. Declining standards in education and the strident claims of multiculturalists threaten to sever the vital Anglo-American link that ensures cultural order and continuity. In Americas British Culture, now in paperback, Russell Kirk offers a brilliant summary account and spirited defense of the culture that the people of the United States have inherited from Great Britain.Kirk discerns four essential areas of influence. The language and literature of England carried with it a tradition of liberty and order as well as certain assumptions about the human condition and ethical conduct. American common and positive law, being derived from English law, gives fuller protection to the individual than does the legal system of any other country. The American form of representative government is patterned on the English parliamentary system. Finally, there is the body of mores--moral habits, be-liefs, conventions, customs--that compose an ethical heritage. Elegantly written and deeply learned, Americas British Culture is an insightful inquiry into history and a plea for cultural renewal and continuity.Adam De Vore in The Michigan Review said of the book: A compact but stimulating tracta contribution to an overdue cultural renewal and reinvigoration. Kirk evinces an increasingly uncommon reverence for historical accuracy, academic integrity and the understanding of ones cultural heritage, and Merrie Cave in The Salisbury Review said of the author: Russell Kirk has been one of the most important influences in the revival of American conservatism since the fifties. [Kirk] belongs to an almost extinct species on both sides of the Atlantic--an independent man of letters.
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AMERICAS BRITISH CULTURE
Library of Conservative Thought
Americas British Culture, Kirk
Authority and the Liberal Tradition, Heineman
A Better Guide Than Reason, Bradford
Burke Street, Scott-Moncrieff
The Case for Conservatism, Wilson
Cline, Hindus
Character and Culture, Babbitt
Collected Letters of John Randolph to John Brockenbrough, Shorey
Congress and the American Tradition, Burnham
Conservatism: Dream and Reality, Nisbet
A Critical Examination of Socialism, Mallock
Edmund Burke: Appraisals & Applications, Ritchie
Edmund Burke: The Enlightenment & Revolution, Stanlis
Edmund Burke and the Natural Law, Stanlis
The Essential Calhoun, Wilson
The Foundations of Political Science, Burgess
Ghosts on the Roof, Chambers
The God of the Machine, Paterson
A Historian and His World, Scott
Historical Consciousness, Lukacs
I Chose Freedom, Kravchenko
I Chose Justice, Kravchenko
Irving Babbitt, Literature, and the Democratic Culture, Hindus
The Jewish East Side 1881-1924, Hindus
Law Without Force, Niemeyer
Lord George Bentinck, Disraeli
The Moral Foundations of Civil Society, Roepke
Moral Phenomena, Hartmann
Moral Values, Hartmann
Natural Law, dEntrves
On Divorce, de Bonald
Orestes Brownson, Kirk
The Phantom Public, Lippmann
Political Philosophy and Cultural Renewal, Wilson
Politics of the Center, Starzinger
Regionalism and Nationalism in the United States, Davidson
Rousseau and Romanticism, Babbitt
The Social Crisis of Our Time, Roepke
Tensions of Order and Freedom, Menczer
The Vision of Richard Weaver, Scotchie
The Voegelinian Revolution, Sandoz
We the People, McDonald
AMERICAS BRITISH CULTURE
Russell Kirk
First published 1993 by Transaction Publishers
Published 2017 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
Copyright 1993 by Taylor & Francis.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Catalog Number: 92-13217
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kirk, Russell.
Americas British culture / Russell Kirk.
p. cm. (The Library of conservative thought)
Includes index.
ISBN: 978-1-4128-0457-8
1. United StatesCivilizationBritish influences. I. Title. II. Series.
E169.1.K549 1992
306'.0973dc20
92-13217
CIP
ISBN-13: 978-1-4128-0457-8 (pbk)
To Henry Salvatori, friend and benefactor for three decades
Contents
The author thanks Pepperdine University for sponsoring the writing of this book, and Mr. Henry Salvatori for conceiving of such a study and making it possible. In his library at the Michigan village of Mecosta, the author had the help of several Fellows of the Marguerite Eyer Wilbur Foundation: Miss Kristen Sifert, Miss Amy Verkest, Mr. Matthew Davis, Mr. Earl Ryan, and Mr. William Fahey.
1
The Necessity for a General Culture
The Necessity for a General Culture
What Does Culture Mean?
This slim book is a summary account of the culture that the people of the United States have inherited from Britain. Sometimes this is called the Anglo-Saxon culturealthough it is not simply English, for much in British culture has had its origins in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. So dominant has British culture been in America, north of the Rio Grande, from the seventeenth century to the present, that if somehow the British elements could be eliminated from all the cultural patterns of the United Stateswhy, Americans would be left with no coherent culture in public or in private life.
When we employ this word culture, what do we signify by it? Does culture mean refinement and learning, urbanity and good taste? Or does this culture mean the folkways of a people? Nowadays the word may be employed in either of the above significations; nor are these different meanings necessarily opposed one to the other.
Our English word culture is derived from the Latin word cultus, which to the Romans signified both tilling the soil and worshipping the divine. In the beginning, culture arises from the cult: that is, people are joined together in worship, and out of their religious association grows the organized human community. Common cultivation of crops, common defense, common laws, cooperation in much elsethese are the rudiments of a peoples culture. If that culture succeeds, it may grow into a civilization.
During the past half-century, such eminent historians as Christopher Dawson, Eric Voegelin, and Arnold Toynbee have described the close connections between religion and culture. As Dawson put it in his Gif ford Lectures of 1947,
A social culture is an organized way of life which is based on a common tradition and conditioned by a common environment.... It is clear that a common way of life involves a common view of life, common standards of behavior and common standards of value, and consequently a culture is a spiritual community which owes its unity to common beliefs and common ways of thought far more than to any unanimity of physical type.... Therefore from the beginning the social way of life which is culture has been deliberately ordered and directed in accordance with the higher laws of life which are religion.
Dawson gives us here a quasi-anthropological definition of culture. At the beginning of the twentieth century, historians and men of letters would have raised their eyebrows at this sociological approach. The principal dictionaries of nine decades ago offered diverse definitions of the wordthe agricultural meaning, the biological one, the bacteriological one, and others; but the common apprehension of culture ran much like this: The result of mental cultivation, or the state of being cultivated; refinement or enlightenment; learning and taste; in a broad sense, civilization, as, a man of culture.
This latter employment of the word, connoting personal achievement of high standards in manners, taste, and knowledge, conjuring up the image of the virtuoso, is not archaic today. But the prevailing anthropological understanding of the word signifies the many elements which a people develop in common. We may take as a working anthropological definition that offered by H. J. Rose, in a footnote to his
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