But, as Steven Lenzner has pointed out, Strauss himself noted, in that very chapter, Burke’s recognition of natural rights that must be respected by any legitimate law and regime. Much of the hostility toward Burke-a defender of ordered liberty in America, India, Ireland, and the Caribbean against British imperialism and the slave trade, and in France against totalitarian democracy-is rooted in a common but narrow academic reading of the final chapter of Leo Strauss’s Natural Right and History. The result is an impoverished vision of American constitutionalism with little grounding in the character of our people, rendering it too weak to withstand the onslaught of resentment and totalitarian ideology fostered for decades in our educational institutions and lately set loose on our streets.

Unfortunately, while Locke’s influence is all-but-universally recognized, with arguments focused on the extent of his originality and the centrality of his thought for the founding generation, there is a determination in some quarters to deny all but completely the relevance of Burkean understandings within our tradition. More simply, it often devolves into the question: “Locke or Burke?” The debate is misguided for several reasons: it creates needless division (and the occasional purge in foundations and academic departments) at a time when many conservatives have concluded America’s very existence is under attack the leftward lunge of “never Trumpers” has made a key point of contention, the supposed duty to make over the world in our own image, obsolete and it overlooks the fact that both Locke and Burke expounded and helped embed in America the essential elements of natural rights, ordered liberty, and the rule of law central to our constitutional order. The debate centers on the question whether the United States is primarily liberal or conservative, founded in essence through promulgation of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, or through a historical process stretching back centuries and punctuated by critical documents like the Mayflower Compact, Declaration, and Constitution, and by development of institutions and practices such as the common law. For decades, now, many among that ever-shrinking group of centrist and conservative academics have engaged in sometimes acrimonious debates over the sources and nature of our constitutional order.

The memory of water by emmi itaranta