OPINION:
RUSSELL KIRK: AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE
By Bradley J. Birzer
University Press of Kentucky, $34.95, 608 pages
As an aging man, Russell Kirk was appalled one day to find his daughter watching a television set, an invention he decried as the great perverter of man’s imagination. Being on the third floor, he promptly tossed the device out the window, thus securing a moral victory.
That anecdote, though admittedly cartoonish, is a helpful analogy in understanding Russell Kirk’s place as a leading thinker in the 20th-century conservative movement. He was, as Bradley Birzer paints him in this eminent biography, a man of both immeasurable influence and perpetual nostalgia for an age gone by. He was a key intellectual player in the forging of modern conservatism, yet in many ways remained a philosophical outsider to his own political movement.
Mr. Birzer begins the story in the vast desert of Utah, where Kirk served during World War II near a weapons test site. Here, Kirk developed his earliest thoughts on modernity and the devastating effects it was having on humanity. Progressivism had already been in America’s political fabric for decades, and Kirk began to see mass warfare and dehumanization as its logical consequence. He saw evidence everywhere of the failure of human reason to make the world more humane, and so he turned to stoic philosophy for solace, hoping to outlast the world’s barbarity.
After the war, Kirk pursued graduate studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Here, Kirk’s innate affinity for tradition and historic institutions found a true home. He grew in reverence for the Catholic Church here, though he would remain a nominal Protestant until his mid-40s. His academic promise blossomed in Scotland, and he would soon catch the eye of readers across the United States.
Kirk’s chief contribution to political thought came early in his career with the publication of “The Conservative Mind” (1953). In this magnum opus, Kirk synthesized what he considered the best elements of western political thought into a coherent political philosophy for the post-war conservative movement. At the heart of this book was Edmund Burke, the 18th-century British philosopher and member of Parliament. Kirk gravitated to several core tenets of Burke’s thinking: his belief in a governing Providence, his respect for long-established tradition, his commitment to slowness in political change, and his belief that property rights and freedom go hand in hand. Kirk proved, through numerous examples, that these concepts had deep roots in the American political order and could mount a credible response to the incessant march of progressivism in the United States. The book became a bestseller, and it put the conservative movement on a firm and rigorous ideological footing.
Though Kirk could have thrived in the academy, he chose to exert a more direct influence on culture by writing as a public intellectual. He became one of the first committed writers for National Review, which William F. Buckley launched in 1955. He also launched his own journal, Modern Age, in 1957, though he would leave after two years due to editorial disputes. Modern Age was Kirk’s attempt at establishing a “republic of letters,” a thinking community of traditionalist conservatives that could refertilize the highest echelons of American culture with rigorous truth and poetic beauty. But that vision eroded in fairly short order as the editorial board favored a more practical direction for the journal, placing a lighter emphasis on what Kirk, with T.S. Eliot, called “the permanent things.”
Kirk strove to articulate a jovial, liberated conservatism that saw true freedom as existing within the God-ordained structures of social life. He did not believe in freedom for freedom’s sake, but rather freedom for the sake of virtue and love. His philosophy is not first a political ideology, but a holistic vision of life itself, and he got annoyed by conservatives who seemed to overlook that vision and instead preoccupied themselves with political theatrics. Kirk considered that preoccupation unhealthy and a sign of ignorance toward the most important goal of all: cultivating a morally and spiritually enlightened culture.
There are some instructive differences between Kirk and other conservatives. Kirk was not a social egalitarian, but believed social classes to be necessary. He was fairly critical of America’s penchant for individualism, which he thought could easily subvert God by idolizing the self or the will of the people. He was cautious about the scope of what free markets could deliver, and he opposed nationalism and interventionism in foreign policy. These beliefs put him at odds at various times with libertarians, neoconservatives, and mainstream conservatives who viewed social egalitarianism as the bedrock principle of America’s founding. Some conservatives called him an elitist, an isolationist, and even a collectivist. While those epithets are unfair, the deeper criticisms highlight the areas where Kirk’s brand of conservatism lost out in the broader conservative movement.
Mr. Birzer’s penetrating look at the life and thought of Russell Kirk places him at the fountainhead of the conservative movement we have inherited today. Love or hate Kirk, this should be required reading for conservatives who wish to rediscover their roots, and perhaps refurnish our politics with the permanent things.
• Daniel Davis is a Washington writer.
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