Contributing to a festschrift devoted to George Carey, our own Peter Lawler reflects on the American founding and the complicated set of sometimes inconsistent principles that is our intellectual inheritance. If it turns out that there is no univocal theory that can decisively be articulated as ours, it becomes impossible for us to simply rely upon tradition. The Lockean strain within our foundational premises counsels a repudiation of tradition—a conservation of the old is replaced by indefinite progress towards the new. Anyway, it’s difficult for radically autonomous individuals to collectively recognize a tradition that collectively binds them—their tendency is to choose History over the restraints of any particular historical bequest. And the Christian Thomism that runs through the founding is at best ambiguously traditional—Christianity presents itself as a radical rupture in human time and demands personal rebirth in light of that truth. Our peculiar modern predicament might demand that we assess ourselves theoretically, that we think through in some measure what it means to be a human being and to be an American.
