Modern Age - Fall 2015 - 28

MODERN AGE

FALL 2015

Origin of the New England Towns, historians such as Herbert Baxter
Adams, a founder of the American Historical Association, argued
that the British settlers of North America were "merely only one
branch of the great Teutonic race, a single offshoot from the tree
of liberty which takes deep hold upon all the past."1
The stakes in this debate were political as well as intellectual.
Proponents of the Gothic thesis aimed to prove, in James Ceaser's words, that "constitutionalism derived from mores or 'culture' rather than from theoretical principles."2 One implication
was that people or peoples of non-Germanic origin lacked the
habits and assumptions necessary to sustain ordered liberty. Not
coincidentally, most admirers of Gothic liberty were old-stock
Americans who opposed immigration from outside Northern
Europe.
The Gothic thesis should not be reduced to crude racialism.
But if it is to offer lessons to a multiethnic society, it has to be
modified from its original form. Kopff is right that we can learn
from the ancient Germans. In order to do so, however, we need
to identify those aspects of their customs that teach something
of permanent rather than merely contingent importance.
To put the same point in a slightly more abstract way, history
cannot dismiss theory or philosophy so easily as the Gothic thesis
suggests. The ancestral may contain elements of the good, but
these elements are worth recovering because they are good-
not simply because they are ancestral. This process of recovery
inevitably calls on nonhistorical elements of reflection and judgment. Facts become examples in the light of reason.

J
28

efferson understood that history offers political instruction
only when it is subjected to rational scrutiny. Rather than



Modern Age - Fall 2015

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https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/isi/modernage_2018winter
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https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/isi/modernage_2015fall
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