Quiz - Lesson 5: The State in America - Carolina Museum of the Marine

The English settlers who went to North America in the 17th century brought their culture, including their political tradition, with them. They did here what settlers the world over do: they reproduced their native culture in the new place. So while George Grant is right that we have no pre-modern history, it doesn’t matter because the people who settled here did have a pre-modern cultural history.

The elite among the English settlers in British America, especially in the South, established schools to teach young people Greek and Latin and the literature of classical Greece and Rome in order to make explicit their pre-modern tradition to their children.

The English settlers had to create a home out of an untamed wilderness, and they did it without help from the British government. They built their material world from the ground up, and in doing so, they developed a political tradition that is quite the opposite of the one in Britain. In British America, the people developed the idea that sovereignty rests in the people of each community, and in time, they understood themselves as being sovereign political societies within their states, and not in some far-away central government.

They simply decided that the modern national state is a gross moral and political error, and they went back to the pre-modern arrangement of many small, independent jurisdictions that is the best way to preserve liberty.

Political Thought in American Tradition

Quiz – Lesson 5: The State in America

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