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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Reviving America's battered soul, October 21, 2000
"Those who have gone far toward deifying majority rule and popular government as ends in themselves may think they have found allies in the Founders... [They are] wrong." - Clarence B. CarsonClarence Carson's *The American Tradition* is an attempt by the author to counteract the efforts made by modern intellectuals to innoculate American students against an understanding of their country's true essence. For the basic ideas of the Founding Fathers, Carson argues, "did not just slip away because of defective memory", but as a result of the concerted efforts of modern liberals at "undermining, distorting, obscuring and defaming the American tradition". By "tradition" Carson means "a body of beliefs, customs, habits, ways of doing things which are handed down from generation to generation" (p22), originating in the convergence of popular practices, just as a trail in a forest is shaped by repeated use. This he contrasts with ideologies, which are exhaustive models of reality, originated by intellectuals and generally imposed by force on the rest of the population. Using these two concepts, the author divides America's history into three stages: the colonial era, during which an authoritarian tradition prevailed; the late 18th and 19th centuries, which were characterized by the emergence and preservation of a tradition of freedom; and the late 19th and 20th centuries, during which collectivists ideologies systematically displaced the specifically American ideals, resulting in the statist onslaughts of the thirties and sixties, and the modern socio-democratic status quo. "Lest we forget", Carson attempts to salvage the original American tradition of freedom, discarding the anti-concept of "democracy" and the treacherous identification of Americanism with "pragmatism", and reviving such crucial notions as the Higher Law; Republican government; federalism; individualism; political equality; individual rights; voluntarism; and internationalism - all of which together represent the core of the American tradition. Even though I do not completely agree with the author's analysis (I think that he underestimates the role of intellectuals in shaping the classical liberal tradition, for instance; and I found his discussions on "rights and responsibilities" dangerously close to justifying conscription), I believe this book should be read by all Americans today, especially those who have not yet realized how far their country's founding principles have been betrayed by its intellectuals and political leaders for several generations. To quote Carson, what such people "do not perceive is the illusory character of what is said to be preserved and the very real uses of power which have been introduced." Virtually all the chapters abound in penetrating insights, but I particularly loved the last one, where Carson tries to identify the mistakes that were made by the Founders when drafting the Constitution, reminding me of the similar work being done by Judge Narragansett at the end of *Atlas Shrugged*. But while Ayn Rand's fictional character identified contradictions in the document and added at least one crucial clause, the flaws Carson points out are mostly errors in formulation, which left the Constitution open to subversion by misinterpretation. The similarities between Carson's and Ayn Rand's views are striking, all the more so as Carson is a Protestant with a rather negative opinion of Rand as a philosopher. I wonder just how much influence she had on him. In his *Swimming Against the Tide*, his volume of "Memoirs and Selected Writings", he expressed his opinion of Rand as a "great artist" and an able defender of the Free Market, but rejected both her atheism and her defense of rational egoism (which he misconstrued.) But whatever their differences in metaphysics and ethics, their analyses of political, economic and intellectual trends are extraordinarily convergent, making Carson's books a welcome addition to any Objectivist library.
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by Alfred Lansing
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