America's British Culture

In America's British Culture, now in paperback, Russell Kirk offers a summary account and spirited defense of the culture that the people of the United States have inherited from Great Britain. Kirk discerns four essential fashions in which the British mind and experience have shaped American culture. The language and literature of England carried with it a tradition of liberty and order as well as certain assumptions about the human condition and ethical conduct. American common and positive law, being derived from English law, gives fuller protection to the individual than does the legal system of any other country. The American form of representative government is patterned on the English parliamentary system. Finally, there is the body of mores - moral habits, beliefs, conventions, customs - that compose an ethical heritage.