SOURCE: Henrie, Mark C. “Russell Kirk's Unfounded America.” Intercollegiate Review 30, no. 1 (fall 1994): 51-57.

In the following essay, Henrie offers a ruminative examination of Kirk's intent and accomplishment as an historian, drawing primarily upon The Roots of American Order and America's British Culture.

In the very first Federalist paper, Alexander Hamilton claimed that at stake in the process of American constitution-making was a matter of world-historical importance. He wrote that the outcome of the American experiment would determine “whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”¹ From this perspective, the new American republic would constitute not simply a new nation among others, but a novus ordo seclorum, “a new order for the ages”; for the first time, the characteristically modern project of controlling fate...