Modern Age - Fall 2015 - 11

THE GERMAN ROOTS OF AMERICAN ORDER

Germanic origins of parliament and were convinced that among
the Saxons, "every Freeman, that is, every Freeholder, was a Member of their Wittinagemor [sic], or Parliament."9
In From Plato to NATO, David Gress makes a serious case
(despite the humorous title) for seeing Western civilization as
characterized by the interaction of classical, Christian, and German. This is a return to a metanarrative popular among English
Whigs and the American Founders, who valued these traditions
as containing complementary elements essential for human fulfillment and political freedom. The German legacy was the source
of personal virtue, consensual institutions, and the old common
law before the Norman Conquest in 1066 introduced feudalism
and inherited (instead of elective) monarchy. Ceaser explains its
appeal: "Liberty and constitutionalism in this account owed their
origins to robust Nordic habits and practices, not to philosophical thought."10
Because the primary classical source for these ideas was Tacitus, the Whig Thomas Gordon gave up writing political polemics
like Cato's Letters with John Trenchard, and devoted the last forty
years of his life to translating Tacitus with extensive introductions
that drew Whig lessons from ancient history. William Blackstone,
author of the influential Commentaries on the Laws of England
(1770), urged lawyers to study the "fountains" of their profession,
"the customs of Britons and Germans, as recorded by Caesar and
Tacitus."11 In the previous century Sir Edward Coke presented
Magna Carta as a defense not of feudal but of common law: "This
Statute of Magna Charta is but a confirmation or restitution of
the Common Law."12 Scholars now believe that the opposition
to King John that led to Magna Carta in 1215 was based on the
king's refusal to honor his coronation oath.13 Coke may have been
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Modern Age - Fall 2015

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