IC’s Top 25 Philosophical and Ideological Conservative Books-No. 7 - Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot

 by Enrico Peppe  

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In this classic work, Russell Kirk attempted to explicate a body of belief, to arrange a synthesis of thought, to outline a broad panorama of one distinct branch of political philosophy.

The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot
by Russell Kirk
Regnery Publishing, Inc.; 7th edition (November 25, 2001) (first published 1953)
Ppbk., 535 pgs.
ISBN: 0895261715 

Kirk attempted to explicate a body of belief, to arrange a synthesis of thought, to outline a broad panorama of one distinct branch of political philosophy.

In 1953, this particularized avenue knew no name. It came to be known as "Conservatism." Along with Buckley's God and Man at Yale, the Cold War ascended with two real enemies. The mollified Liberalism of Viereck, the patronizing tone of Trilling, and the sterile "realpolitique" of the Eisenhower Group met face-to-face with a substantial dialectic.

Things would never be the same!

There isn't a single historian specializing in the Right who hasn't given Kirk his due:

From an old, great anthology by Gottfried and Fleming,

Kirk attempted to 'prove that, contrary to those who contend progressive thinking the American mainstream, liberal ideas have not generally defined the American Experience.' (Kirk) offered a genealogy that included Edmund Burke, John Adams, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and T.S. Eliot, (as proof).

and,

(He) undertook 'to define conservatism as a body of belief.' While granting that 'any informed conservative is reluctant to condense profound and intricate intellectual systems to a few pretentious phrases,' Kirk nevertheless organized canons of conservative thought in an attempt to suggest a coherent philosophical vision.

(Gottfried would gently revise his thinking on Kirk as time passed).

Schneider, in his great anthology (see my IC review of his book) points out the two great influences on Kirk as Richard Weaver (see my IC review) and Burke.

[For Kirk] . . . Burke's conservatism represented the politics of a prescriptive tradition, a social order based on inherited traditions, whether embodied by religion, the rule of law, or an aristocratic order. For Kirk, such a tradition was sadly lacking in American politics . . . the book contributed to the rebirth of the term conservatism in national consciousness; the name conservative was employed to describe not only the intellectual position (he) espoused but also to describe any opponent of liberalism, modernism, and the State.

Chilton Williamson, in his anthology of interpretive essays on great conservative thinkers, thinks of Kirk as the forerunner of the paleoconservative movement and pays explicatory homage thus (The Conservative Bookshelf, published by the Citadel Press. I have charted Kirk's heroes for convenience and elucidation):

1. The Politics of Prescription: Burke
2. Liberty under Law: Adams, Hamilton, Fisher Ames
3. Romantics and Utilitarians: Bentham, Scott, Canning, and Coleridge
4. Southern Conservatism: Randolph and Calhoun
5. Liberal Conservatives: Cooper and Tocqueville
6. Traditional Conservatism: John Quincy Adams, Brownson, and Hawthorne
7. Imaginative Conservatism: Disraeli and Newman
8. Legal-Historical Conservatism: James Fitzjames Stephen, Sir Henry Maine, and W. H. Lecky
9. Frustrated Conservatism: Lowell, Godkin, Henry and Brooks Adams
10. Twentieth Century English Conservatism: George Gissing, Balfour, W. H. Mallock
11. Critical Conservatism: Babbitt, More, Santayana
12. Poetical Conservatism: Eliot, Betjemen, Frost

The above, according to Williamson, in one way or another, exhibit an enthusiasm for,

. . . the preeminence of British and American conservatism in preserving, substantially intact, the European-American conservative tradition over a period of two centuries; the nonideological nature of conservative thought, which amounts to a habit of mind rather than an intellectual system; and more speculatively, the prospect for an American revival, postwar, of conservative instincts and ideas in reaction to the catastrophic implosion of Europe's ideological totalitarian regimes.

Williamson rightly recognizes Kirk's conundrum in creating a Mind so vast as to include the likes of Burke on one hand; Bentham, on the other:

Kirk:

A task for conservative leaders is to reconcile individualism (which sustained nineteenth century life even while it starved the soul of the nineteenth century) with the sense of community that rang strong with Burke and Adams. If conservatives cannot redeem the modern masses from the sterile modern mass-mind, then a miserable collectivism impoverishing both soul and body impends over Britain and America.

I will further discuss Kirk's weaknesses later on. For now, let's look at his Canons and the dialectic he feels ensues.

Kirk's Mind holds to the following:

1. There is a firm belief in a transcendent order, a body of natural law. These laws rule society and individual conscience. All problems political and secular are at root, religious. Justice is meted out for the benefit of a community of souls.

2. Human existence operates within variegated variety and mystery. The notion of logic, of ideology within the confines of egalitarianism and utility is "verboten."

3. Equality exists in God's Eyes. Civilized society requires orders, classes, and distinction. "Equality of condition . . . means equality in servitude."

4. Economic levelling is not progress. Freedom and property are closely linked.

5. Custom, convention and old prescription are checks both upon man's anarchic impulse and upon an innovator's lust for power.

6. "Recognition that change may not be salutary reform: hasty innovation may be a devouring conflagration, rather than a torch of progress." Prudence in all things is the apotheotic maxim, especially as to the keystone of social preservation. Men in power must hold to the virtue of prudence.

Kirk's dialectic, the Radical Mind, holds that:

1. Men are not born evil. Man is perfectible and illimitable. Positive legislation and the alteration of environments produce good and are positive instruments of meliorism.

2. The wisdom of our ancestors is highly secondary to right reason, right impulse, and right determinism. There is a contempt for tradition.

3. Collectivity in property is a rational answer to the problem of economic and political inequality.

4. Order and privilege are at the root of societal arrangement. Total democracy is the ideal. Yet, centralization and consolidation will yield a levelling preferred immensely to a cruel elite.

5. The state is not ordained of God (as with Burke). It exists for the betterment, for the perfectibilty of mankind.

There is no way I can leave out Kirk and his book as an immensely important work as regards the movement of the Right. He has had a profound impact on brilliant minds, whether they be in hagiographical bent or toward pure criticism.

But: I don't like Kirk or his writings.

Why?

1. The book under review is essentially an overgrown term paper written in pompous prose and so eclectic in its selection of character examples as to render any philosophical conclusion meaningless. As a result, it is a muddled compendium leading toward no distinct definition of a movement. Kirk, himself, in his lifetime, proffered disdain toward both Neoconservatives and Libertarians. Yet, his work is so "Chinese-Menu-ey" that George Will can claim Burke and Disraeli while Rothbard can claim Nock. Neither of the above two can claim Kirk, who merely catalogued anti-Marxists.

W. Wesley McDonald has argued that Kirk was a "fine thinker," but "doesn't really provide . . . rigorous philosophical argument." Agreed.

2. Kirk's continual harping re: "moral imagination" strikes me as semantically dull and again, as a phrase so eclectic that the New Age Bunch might find some affinity. This Bunch, by the way, would find the same hesitancy toward free enterprise as did Kirk (at least Kristol doesn't attempt to skirt around capitalism).

3. Kirk's stolid attempt to infuse natural law into a phantasmagoria of diverse thinking lends little to scholarship of the Right. He is not in the same league as Rothbard and Mises in this regard. Even Rand is a better Thomist!

4. Some Paleoconservative insistence on harnessing the Kirkian spirit has in fact protracted the insidiousness of the World Empire Neo people. Paul Gottfried gets it right:

There was . . . nothing as destructive that the Old Right did to itself as marching under the 'conservative' banner, because it opened the way to the social democrats and Jacobins who began to pose with leftist acceptance as the true (Buckleyite and later Brookean) 'conservatives.'

Remember Kirk played the term, "conservative," as against "liberal," and thus bunglesome political talk became commonplace.

5. Finally, and for me, most loathsome is the strong feeling I have that Kirk was not that serious about the significance of political philosophy and its effects on common thought. In Lew Rockwell's Speaking of Liberty, I believe the crux of my dislike is crystallized (p. 395):

In Kirk's hands, conservatism became a posture, a demeanor, a mannerism . . . a constant strain in Kirkian conservatism (was) . . . his opposition to ideology, a word that Kirk demonized. This allowed him to accuse Mises and Marx of the same supposed error. In fact, ideology means nothing more than systematic social thought. Without systematic thought, the intellectual shiftiness of statist impulse gets a free ride.

Dr. Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind must be read. It is a tremendously important and dangerous read.

The Conservative Mind is available on Amazon.com.

Book Reviews, IC’s Top 25 Conservative Books, Political Theory, Humanities, Language, Academia, Histo

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