The Roots of American Order was published by Open Court in 1974. Kirk’s thesis is comprehensive: American civilization did not spring from Enlightenment ideology (as progressives claim) or from a revolutionary break with the past (as radicals insist), but from the gradual accumulation of moral, political, and legal wisdom originating in four cities: Jerusalem (divine moral order), Athens (rational inquiry and political philosophy), Rome (law and governance), and London (common law and parliamentary institutions).
Kirk structures the book chronologically: beginning with the Hebraic origins of moral order (the Ten Commandments, the prophetic tradition), proceeding through Greek philosophy (Aristotle’s constitutional theory, Stoic natural law), Roman jurisprudence (Cicero’s republic, the concept of positive law), medieval Christianity (Aquinas’s synthesis), English constitutionalism (Magna Carta, the common law, the Glorious Revolution), and culminating in the American founding (the Constitutional Convention as the heir of all these traditions).
The argument is that the founders were not Enlightenment rationalists who started from first principles (as Locke appears to do in the Second Treatise) but practical men steeped in classical learning, English legal precedent, and Christian moral conviction. The Constitution is not a social contract devised by reason but an arrangement that codifies the accumulated experience of Western civilization.
Collecting The Roots of American Order
First edition (Open Court Publishing, La Salle, Illinois, 1974): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $75–$200
- Very good: $30–$75
Projected values (2026–2036): Strong appreciation. Kirk’s most ambitious historical work.
From Jerusalem to Philadelphia
Kirk argues that American civilization rests on four cities: Jerusalem (the moral order of revealed religion), Athens (philosophical reason and democratic experiment), Rome (law and republican governance), and London (common law, parliamentary liberty, and the Burkean tradition). The American Founders, in Kirk’s telling, were not revolutionaries but inheritors of this accumulated wisdom, applying centuries of Western experience to the specific conditions of a new continent. The book is Kirk at his most sweeping and his most learned.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does Kirk differ from neoconservatives? Kirk was a traditional or “paleoconservative” — rooted in Burke, agrarian localism, and religious tradition. He was suspicious of neoconservatism’s enthusiasm for global democracy promotion and free-market ideology, regarding both as forms of the very ideology that Burke opposed. He famously remarked that neoconservatives confused Tel Aviv with the American republic.
Is Kirk read by liberals? Some. Kirk’s erudition and literary quality ensure that serious scholars across the political spectrum engage with his work, even when they disagree. His influence extends beyond politics into literary criticism, education theory, and cultural analysis.