Myron Magnet's The Founders At Home: The Building of America, 1735-1817

My friend and City Journal colleague Myron Magnet has delivered an absolutely terrific new book for history buffs and lovers of America. It’s called The Founders at Home and it’s a wonderfully retold tale of the intellectual underpinnings of the nation’s founding, with a special eye toward what the founders’ houses had to say about their ideals.

I’ve been reading portions of this book as they were published in City Journal, but the book includes lots of new material. And, as I expect from Myron, the writing is graceful and the scholarship and thinking are profound:

A key reason the Revolution succeeded was its strictly limited scope. The Founders sought only liberty, not equality or fraternity. They aimed to make a political revolution, not a social or economic one, and they didn’t seethe with an Old-World intensity of social rancor or class rage. … Because democratic self-government requires a special kind of culture — one that fosters self-reliant selves — the Protestantism of the Founding Fathers also helped the Revolution succeed. Their Protestant worldview placed an intense value on the individual — his conscience, the state of his soul, his understanding of Scripture, his personal relation to God, his salvation. It was an easy step for them to assume that, as each man was endowed by his Creator with an immortal soul immediately related to God, so he was similarly endowed with rights that are “not the Donation of Law,” as Constitution signer William Livingston put it, but “prior to all political Institution,” and “resulting from the Nature of Man.”

You don’t need me to tell you that the work of these past giants is under threat from the intellectual pygmies who command the political heights today. A book like this isn’t just a delight, it’s also a bulwark against the ignorance and misinformation that leaders like Barack Obama encourage and on which they depend.

Great Christmas gift, truly. A 35 dollar list price, but only around 22 bucks from Amazon. It’s about 17 dollars on Kindle but, in my opinion, the beautifully produced hardcover is well worth the extra fin. This one you’ll want to keep on your shelf.