John Randolph

by M. E. Bradford

John Randolph of Roanoke: A Study in American Politics, by Russell Kirk.

For Southerners of my antique persuasion, Russell Kirk’s John Randolph of Roanoke is a locus classicus. And for most American conservatives, it is a work of decisive importance, a path leading into a neglected portion of our common patrimony, a portion now not well understood, even in the South. For in this book is organized and preserved, with grace and economy, the still persuasive testimony of the most noble and disinterested of the Old Republicans, the American political figure who, in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, set his face most resolutely against the great god Whirl. John Randolph embodied the wisdom of the Antifederalists. And in that role acted out, bespoke, what now appears to be our most durable inheritance from the Virginia dynasty. To see Kirk’s study of Randolph’s career (first published in 1951) reissued in one of the handsome editions of the Liberty Press is therefore an occasion for real rejoicing. For, in this era of unchallenged statism, we stand in need of Randolph’s public example as never before: his searching critique of the “metaphysical madness” which comes from an ideological reading of the Revolution. Dialectics and abstraction threaten the very foundations of our civil order. And require of us that we be able, through the study of his language and his thought, to invoke the shade of the American Burke. [Read more...]