Modern Age - Fall 2015 - 19

THE GERMAN ROOTS OF AMERICAN ORDER

political philosophy. No greater mistake could be made than to
look for his sources in Locke, Montesquieu, or Rousseau. Jeffersonian democracy was born under the sign of Hengist and Horsa,
not of the Goddess Reason."34 "These ideas remained popular
throughout the nineteenth century," as H. Trevor Colbourn has
shown.35 Ceaser notes that the "Gothic thesis managed to survive the Revolutionary period and continue as a major theme of
American political thought until the World Wars, when the German forests lost much of their luster, as well as their foliage."36

A

s late as the 1950s, the "Gothic thesis" provided the implicit
narrative behind Winston Churchill's History of the EnglishSpeaking Peoples, published after but conceived before World
War  II. While critical of many aspects of the thesis, he admits,
"In the tribal conceptions of the Germanic nation lie, no doubt,
many of those principles which are now admired, and which have
formed a recognisable part of the message which the Englishspeaking peoples have given to the world."37
The Founders were traditionalists in law, religion, and politics,
and they believed in the coherence of the Christian, classical,
and German traditions. For us, legislatures formulate and pass
new laws to solve problems inherited from the past or created
by changed circumstances or to resolve crises that must be met
by "thinking outside the box." We find it hard to accept that, for
Whigs, the role of legislators is not to create new laws but to discover and restore the original condition of the common law.
Bailyn sees the role of the common law in the Founding. "The
common lawyers the colonists cited . . . sought to establish right
by appeal to precedent and to an unbroken tradition evolving
from time immemorial, and they assumed, if they did not argue,
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Modern Age - Fall 2015

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