WARREN BURGER, MARGIN NOTE ON ORDER

In the inside rear cover of his copy of Vernon Parrington's The Romantic Revolution in America: 1800-1860 (1927), Warren Burger wrote the following:

"After much of this reading, I am certain of but one thing - there must be order in the relations of men as there is order in the universe - not as exact, not as regular, not as inflexible, but order none the less.
Just as surely, this order must be by consent of those regulated. In a modern society, what form of order is the most tolerable?"

I am not sure what else might be included in "this reading" for Burger, but I will hazard a guess. In this volume of Parrington, Burger marked only a few pages. Many of the margin notes that I have in other volumes are written in a similar script, however, which suggests that they may have been written at the same time. Based on internal references and the publication dates of the books in question, I am guessing that these notes were written in the 1970s at the earliest, and some of them as late as 1980.

In addition to Parrington, the books are: H.R. Hays, From Ape to Angel (1958), Samuel Lubell, The Hidden Crisis in American Politics (1970), R.L. Bruckberger, Image of America (1959), and H.A. Overstreet, The Mature Mind (1949). Bruckberger contains a personal letter dated March 3, 1980. A few other books in the collection mainly have writing that is different: a tight cursive script in both pen and ink. Here, the printing is deliberate, all in pencil, and the short passages of reflections tend to circle around general problems of American democracy.

PS: for an earlier post of mine on Burger's margin notes from the same collection, see here.