Jean Jaurès, a socialist moderate, is supposed to have told the French parliament around the turn of the 20th century that he and his comrades were “the true inheritors of the hearth of our ancestors.” They have “maintained the fire” of the nation’s past, he said, whereas his opponents, the nationalists, “have preserved only the ashes.” Sometimes the wrong people can have the right line.
Tradition is kept alive by rediscovery. It’s arduous work. And each generation must do it, guided by the ones that preceded it. Timothy Sandefur, the vice president for litigation of the Goldwater Institute, has done his part. First, with The Conscience of the Constitution (2013). Now, with Proclaiming Liberty: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and the Declaration of Independence (Cato Institute, 512 pp., $24.95). Sandefur also helps preserve an intellectual tradition: that of historians such as John Phillip Reid and Jack P. Greene. They studied the American marvel in the context of, perhaps partly in response to, the various radicalisms of the second half of the 20th century. Sandefur responds to ours, such as the seedy and cynical 1619 Project. Those who are determined to find only sins in history are doomed to misread it.
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