The public debate about whether America is a proposition nation has pitted those who describe themselves as heritage Americans against those who believe anyone who embraces the ideals of America is just as American. Vivek Ramaswamy, writing in the New York Times, said:
There are two competing visions now emerging on the American right, and they are incompatible. One vision of American identity is based on lineage, blood and soil: Inherited attributes matter most. The purest form of an American is a so-called heritage American – one whose ancestry traces back to the founding of the United States or earlier.
. . .
The alternative (and, in my view, correct) vision of American identity is based on ideals.
A similar debate is unfolding in the United Kingdom, where controversy rages over what it means to be English. The distinguished history professor Robert Tombs argued that, “Being English is not a matter of your ancestry,” but can be taught and learned, for example by studying Rudyard Kipling and “singing the national anthem.”
In the age of “inclusiveness” it is understandable that recent immigrants would prefer to define national identity as a set of ideals. After all, that is the only definition that can fully include them. As they see it, by embracing American or British ideals, they can claim to be just as American or British as anyone whose family has deep historical roots—perhaps even more so, if they can claim to have a stronger commitment to the relevant ideals.
Professor Tombs perhaps has that in mind when he criticizes Englishmen who campaign to denigrate English history in the culture wars, by peddling “evil British Empire” narratives and demanding reparations for historic injustices that they pin uniquely on England. Tombs says,
Schools, universities and cultural institutions across England – from the National Trust via the Museums Association to the Church of England – are busy undermining Englishness by propagating distorted and negative histories, to make the native-born ashamed and the newly arrived resentful. . . . At the root of many of our most debilitating national problems – including excessive immigration – are decisions deliberately made by thoroughly English (or sometimes Scottish) politicians, officials and lawyers.
Ideals are, of course, a fundamental part of national identity. Man cannot flourish by blood and soil alone. He must also have ideals by which to live. That is part of the inheritance that parents try to conserve for their children. They do not only wave flags and build memorials, important as these are, but they also try to pass on their poetry, their songs, their ideals, their sense of who they are as a people.
In that light, it is easy to see what Professor Tombs means when he argues that without English culture “the UK is an empty shell.” But does it follow that studying Kipling makes anyone English?
Human beings look to others for inspiration, and the American founders looked to Rome. Did the founders want to understand “the idea of Rome” so they could build their own republic on the same idea, as alleged by adherents of the proposition nation?
In his essay “A Teaching for Republicans: Roman History and the Nation’s First Identity,” M. E. Bradford explored the influence of ancient Rome on the founding of the American Republic. He argued that we cannot understand this by trying to isolate what one might call “the idea of Rome” in an abstract sense, looking at factors such as civic nationalism or the rule of law,
Rome was not made but grew. . . Romans did not connect their purchase on the favor of the gods with an original commitment to political “propositions” or a plan for improving the world. The ontological fact of Rome, rooted in familial piety, flourishing in patriotic zeal, was logically prior to any meaning it acquired.
Therefore, it is necessary to understand how the founders themselves understood “the Roman experience” as an analogy for their own republic. Bradford argues that,
What our fathers called Washington City is thus, at one and the same time, a symbol of their common political aspirations and a specification of the continuity of those objectives with what they knew of the Roman experience.
To Bradford, “the Roman experience” is not merely an idea, or an independent set of propositions from which we can derive the aspirations of the Romans and, by extension, the American founders. Rather, Bradford argues, it is a historical reality of time and place: “This Rome was no construct issuing from deliberations upon the abstract ‘good,’ no fancy of the ‘closet philosophers.’”
Bradford argues that the “first Americans,” by which he means “the generation that achieved our independence,” looked to Rome to “learn from its triumphs and its ruin.” They wanted to understand Rome in the very practical sense of identifying the factors that led to its rise and fall.
How Rome at large became strong and then, by stages, lost that strength is what fascinated the generation which made a new republic in this new place.
We can, of course, gainfully study—in an abstract sense—what the world learned from the Romans. Abstract inquiry has great value in the wider philosophical context. But a nation is not a philosophy classroom. Bradford rejects the notion that Rome was founded on some kind of self-conscious and deliberate “plan for improving the world.” Viewing the Roman republic as a proposition nation entails reasoning theoretically backwards, beginning with philosophical lessons we derive from Roman history and, on that premise, arguing that Rome must have been founded for the purpose of teaching the lessons we have derived.
It is misguided to distill a national identity comprising nothing more than the ideals of its people—the propositional nation. But, at the same time, it is impossible to understand a nation without reference to the ideals of its people, precisely because ideals are an intrinsic component of a nation. Both the people and their ideals make up a national identity.
A people in a time and place cannot be understood without reference to their ideals. But a nation’s ideals, standing alone or apart from the nation’s people, do not define national identity because a nation is not defined by ideas alone. A set of propositions, extracted from the people and floating ethereally as a theoretical ideal, does not constitute the essence of the nation.
On a superficial reading, it might be supposed that Murray Rothbard would see America as a proposition nation. After all, he depicted the American Revolution as a “libertarian revolution” inspired by ideals of liberty and property derived from Lockean theories of natural rights. Rothbard saw universal ideals as ideals formed and refined through logical reasoning in the abstract or philosophical sense. This might seem to suggest that he would read historical documents the same way—as a mere statement of abstract universal rights disconnected from any particular people.
But Rothbard’s view of natural rights was rooted in specific Lockean theories of self-ownership, not in the progressive human rights tradition that one now finds in such documents as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Indeed, Bradford endorsed Rothbard’s historical analysis, writing that, “I agree with Murray Rothbard that the American Revolution exploded against remote and arbitrary power.” The revolt against despotism is not purely a blood and soil instinct, but also one rooted in the ideal of liberty.
Bradford’s analysis should not be understood as an argument that the ideals of liberty and property are irrelevant in understanding the American republic, or that ideals have played no role in shaping the American people. His message, rather, is that a nation’s ideals cannot be understood without reference to specific people, in a specific place and time.
This connectedness between people and ideals can be seen in “Nations by Consent: Decomposing the Nation State,” where Murray Rothbard conceptualized the nation as a community that includes specific values but also includes other things like family, ethnicity, tradition:
Contemporary libertarians often assume, mistakenly, that individuals are bound to each other only by the nexus of market exchange. They forget that everyone is necessarily born into a family, a language, and a culture. Every person is born into one or several overlapping communities, usually including an ethnic group, with specific values, cultures, religious beliefs, and traditions. He is generally born into a “country.” He is always born into a specific historical context of time and place, meaning neighborhood and land area.
