A review of Robert R. Reilly’s America on Trial: A Defense of the Founding.
The approach Reilly takes in defending the Founding is to demonstrate that the principles upon which it was based were the most positive and productive ideas of Western culture. The application that the Founders gave to those principles was unquestionably original, but the principles themselves were not. The Founders took full advantage of the pregnant ideas that had been bequeathed to them by a tradition whose three originating sources were the thoughts of ancient Greece, Judaism, and Christianity. His book, Reilly explains, “is not so much about the Founding itself as the provenance of its ideas,” the ideas that made the United States possible.