On Albion’s Sons

If you have a chance, you should read the book Albion’s Sons. It’s a book about four groups from Britain that settled early America and how drastically different they were and how each tried an entirely different theory of rule and culture. All of them became America, in the end. But seeing how radically different they were is very interesting.

The Scots were decentralized and independent and liberal, but in constant conflict with one another. The Cavaliers in Virginia built a very rigid, stratified, and centralized society that was in constant tension with itself and required heavy-handed enforcement of the system. The Quakers had a very fraternal and communitarian society with much much less centralized power and law, but had very intensely strong social power structures (soft power, social praise and harsh shaming, reputation destruction and reputation building). And the Puritans liked nice, structured systems of law that covered all the details and kept society orderly. They loved law and education and suing people.

The Puritans and Cavaliers were more hands-on as far as centralized structures of law and order, and the Quakers and Scots-Irish were more hands-off, but with very different approaches. They all experimented with different forms of liberty. Liberty within the structure of the law, liberty within the structure of social/moral norms, liberty within the structure of a defined social structure, and liberty as you can define it for yourself with very few defined moral/social norms or defined social or legal structures.

And they all had problems. Some solutions were certainly better for certain desired outcomes, but the idea that having just the right system would somehow make universal problems among humans and their most common solutions (such as force and violence) disappear suddenly was and is simply wishful thinking.

Even the best systems have to assume that things won’t go according to plan, and you will need contingencies and institutions to handle it when that happens. That’s very much what the founding American documents were. Contingency plans for all the ways things can and will go wrong and solutions to deal with it. And if you read this book, you can see why they thought they needed them. It really is amazing that these groups managed to work together, much less stay together and form any kind of cohesive society.

People talk so much about America and its founding and the people involved, but often know so little about it. This book is the cure for that. And it’s impeccably researched. It’s enormously long, but incredibly informative. I would put it up there with DeToqueville as a source. Its much less grand and philosophical, of course, but it’s a lot easier to understand.