Founders’ Keepers

We Still Hold
These Truths

Rediscovering Our Principles, Reclaiming Our Future
by Matthew Spalding
ISI, 288 pp., $26.95

At the end of this new book, Matthew Spalding calls for “a commitment at every level of education to promote awareness and appreciation of the true principles of the American Founding.” Only in this way, he argues, can we restore the public consensus necessary to sustain a healthy pluralism. Otherwise, we will continue to regress down the path of might-makes-right politics with bureaucrats and interest groups vying to have their way through administrative agencies and the courts.

Spalding’s own effort is an excellent example of what such a renewed civic education would look like. Well organized, clearly written, expertly argued, We Still Hold These Truths provides, perhaps, the single best introduction to the political thought of the American Founding. Spalding largely takes a unifying approach to the Founding Fathers and the scholars who have studied them. We may speak of an American founding because there was a “principled consensus,” he writes, among those great men of the late 18th century, “transcending important differences of practical application and party competition.” He acknowledges the legitimate contributions of different elements to that consensus, such as British custom, colonial experience, Christian faith, Lockean liberalism, and classical republicanism. But it is clear that he is most interested in the role of political ideas. Early chapters provide just enough historical context to set the scene, and those interested in further reading will find footnotes modestly sprinkled throughout and a superb bibliographic essay.