Russell Kirk and the CriticsRussell Kirk and the Critics by Gerald J. Russello4 T HE INTERCOLLEGIATE REVIEW—Spring/Summer 2003 flect Kirk’s own view. Kirk used the quota-tion to

Russell Kirk and the Critics by Gerald J. Russello

THE INTERCOLLEGIATE REVIEW—Spring/Summer 2003 3

Russell Kirk and the Critics

Gerald J. Russello

Gerald J. Russello is a New York City lawyer who iscompleting a book on the thought of Russell Kirk.

Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind: FromBurke to Santayana (1953) was an unequivo-cal challenge to Lionel Trilling’s confident1950 assertion that liberalism was so domi-nant as to be the sole intellectual tradition inAmerica. The book unearthed a series ofthinkers who embodied a tradition opposedto radicalism in all its forms—not least,Kirk implied, the soft radicalism of Ameri-can liberalism. The book received unex-pectedly favorable reviews in Time and TheNew York Times Book Review, transformingthe publication of a thick book by an ob-scure author into an intellectual event.

Confronted with such an unexampledchallenge, prominent representatives of theAmerican liberal order responded with criti-cal counter-attacks. The New Republic pub-lished a review titled “The Blur of Medioc-rity” by Francis Biddle, who had been At-torney General under Roosevelt and a judgeat Nuremberg. Presidential candidateNorman Thomas, critic and poet JohnCrowe Ransom, and Professor ClintonRossiter all cast a critical eye on portions ofKirk’s argument.1 This extensive press, bothpositive and negative, helped launch Kirkas a conservative standard-bearer.

Strikingly, most of the critical objectionsraised in contemporary reviews of The Con-servative Mind seem far more time-boundthan does Kirk’s book itself. In reviewingthe charges of these temporally parochial

critics, the conviction grows that Kirk’s bookcertainly warrants its status as a classic ofconservative thought.

Some critics focused on Kirk’s allegedignorance of the class struggle. In UnitedNations World, Norman Thomas foundKirk’s idea of a “democracy of elevation”wanting, because Kirk did not appreciate“socialism, the welfare state, and the in-come tax.”2 In the Western Political Quar-terly, Gordon Lewis, reading Kirk “like asocialist,” complained that Kirk failed toaccept the evidence of “a growing rigidity inclass membership” and the emergence ofan American proletariat.3 (Lewis alsothought Kirk did not sufficiently credit re-cent sociological work demonstrating thatrationality is shaped “to a significant degreeby the sexual foundations of experience.”)Conversely, other reviewers criticized Kirkprecisely for his interest in class struggle:Biddle understood Kirk to be endorsing a“pre-modern” from of hierarchy opposedto democratic equality.

A young Peter Gay writing in PoliticalScience Quarterly expressed shock overKirk’s statement that the right to propertycould be more important than the right tolife.4 Gay was referring to a quotation fromPaul Elmer More that did not entirely re-


4 THE INTERCOLLEGIATE REVIEW—Spring/Summer 2003

flect Kirk’s own view. Kirk used the quota-tion to illustrate More’s wide-ranging cri-tique of modernity, which he generally sup-ported. But Kirk himself did not endorseany unrestricted “right to property,” and heparted company with such conservatives asRichard Weaver who contended that prop-erty was a “metaphysical right.”5 Even if itwere, Gay completely avoided the deeperargument that More and Kirk were advanc-ing: that there may be principles more im-portant than the preservation of life.

Some critics sought to undermine thework by questioning Kirk’s choice of con-servative thinkers. Bernard Crick in theReview of Politics opined that “Kirk hasgathered together under the name of mod-ern conservatism as weird a collection ofunlikelies as ever went to sea in a sieve.”6

And Harvey Wheeler in Shenandoah askedof Kirk’s account “whether more than thatone tradition cannot be justly identifiedwith the Anglo-American conservativemind.” Wheeler took particular exceptionto the “highly selected segment of theBurkean tradition” Kirk emphasized, andhe wondered at the omission of Hamilton,Bolingbroke, and Walter Lippman.7 Itwould take Kirk another decade to explainwhy Bolingbroke, though admirable, wasno conservative, going beyond hisunpersuasive exclusion of Bolingbroke inThe Conservative Mind on the grounds ofnon-theism.8 Wheeler, however, did notidentify his own criteria for who should beconsidered a conservative.9 His “argument”amounted to a preference for one set offigures over another.

Wheeler referred specifically to the omis-sion of Eliot as evidence of the “incompat-ibility of Kirk’s conservatism with the doc-trines of...Eliot in particular.”10 Wheelerthought that adding Eliot’s “eternalThomism” would contradict the “value-free relativism of the anthropologist” thatwas “fundamental” to both Kirk and

Burke.11 To include Eliot, Wheeler argued,would transform The Conservative Mindfrom an exposition of conservative prin-ciples into an “analysis of the Thomistictradition in Anglo-American conserva-tism.” Kirk later did add Eliot, calling him a“principal conservative thinker” of the twen-tieth century and placing him as a bookendto Burke.12 But instead of creating aThomistic defense of conservatism, Kirkfocused on the importance of the poet toculture. A poet is able to reconstruct orderthrough the use of imagination: “From thebeginnings of European literature until thiscentury,” Kirk would write, “the enduringthemes of serious poetry have been those oforder and permanence,” especially in timesof disorder.13

The belated inclusion of Eliot served an-other purpose as well. Eliot’s essay “Tradi-tion and the Individual Talent” allowedKirk to resolve the difficult problem of therelationship between individual freedomand the claims the larger society. FrankMeyer, for example, thought that howevermuch Kirk professed to favor individualfreedom rather than oppression, he in factdesired a form of “status society.” Thus,Kirk’s thought, “stripped of its pretensions,is, sad to say, but another guise for thecollectivist spirit of the age.”14 In The Con-servative Mind, by opining with Burke that“the individual is foolish but the species iswise,” Kirk lent some credence to this charge.But as he developed his conservative vision,Kirk clearly moved away from this view. Hecame instead to adopt Eliot’s understand-ing that a tradition is only living when it isused and adopted by individuals actingwithin a culture.

Moreover, an appreciation for the indi-vidual is implicit in the text of The Conser-vative Mind itself. The book is, after all, astudy of particular individuals rather thanan account of abstract ideas. Kirk made thisemphasis more explicit in his later histori-



cal writings, adopting John Lukacs’ “par-ticipatory history,” which mingles objectiv-ity and subjectivity in the creation of his-torical knowledge by placing the individual’sdepiction of reality at the center of the his-torical imagination. Kirk came to believethat “historical consciousness necessarily isentwined with the mystery of personal con-sciousness, and involves not only history,but also psychology and philosophy.”15 Inhis study of Eliot, he would write that “ourpresent private condition and knowledgedepend upon what we were yesterday, ayear ago, a decade gone; if we reject thelessons of our personalpast, we cannot subsist foranother hour.”16 Becauseof the necessity of indi-vidual action, history be-comes infused with amoral purpose that is ab-sent if the historical pro-cess is external to its par-ticipants.

John Crowe Ransomidentified a more centralissue for Kirk to resolve:“the badge the conserva-tive wears must have twofaces. One is resistance tothe new event; this is the fighting face.... Theother is acceptance after the event, permit-ting the expectation that when once the newways are shaken down and become old waysthey too will be loved.”17 Lewis found thispattern of resistance to, and subsequentacceptance of, change to be the “weaknessof logic characteristic of all conservativethought: it erects a philosophy which mustoppose fundamental change and then, whenchange has been affected by the operationof social-cultural factors, it proceeds to in-corporate its compelled accommodation tothe new facts as an example of the remark-able wisdom of willing concession.”18 Herethe reviewers were trying to place Kirk in a

Catch-22: If he acknowledged the conser-vative acceptance of change, he would be-come a mere temporizer; if, instead, herepaired to eternal principles he would be amere reactionary. Karl Mannheim providedthe most detailed account of this dilemmaof conservatism in his essay “ConservativeThought,” which appeared in the same yearas The Conservative Mind.19

The reviews also expressed a sometimesthinly-disguised disdain for the conserva-tive temperament. Lewis called this Kirk’s“impassioned nostalgia for a dead societyand a clever contempt for all the schools of

political thought” at-tempting to deal withcurrent problems. Con-servatism is a sort ofmental defect, hostile tothe modern world andholding on to lost cer-tainties without any ba-sis for doing so. The Con-servative Mind forWheeler “soothes [the]pent-up injury, forlorn-ness and frustration” ofthose conservatives whoare left behind by mod-ern life.20 In America, this

claim was most forcefully advanced by Ri-chard Hofstadter, who thought conserva-tism reflected a “paranoid style.”

In Karl Mannheim’s account of the con-servative dilemma, conservatism arose as areaction to the modern world, and thatreaction is expressed as a class struggle.Mannheim argued that while “traditional-ism” is a permanent psychological trait,conservatism is a definable social phenom-enon that emerges only when societies areconfronted by massive change. Specifically,“traditionalism can only become conserva-tism in a society in which change occursthrough the medium of class conflict—in a



class society. This is the sociological back-ground of modern conservatism.”21

In his 1957 article “Conservatism as anIdeology,” a young Samuel Huntington tookMannheim one step further and dividedconservatism into three categories: the situ-ational, the aristocratic, and the autono-mous. He concluded that only situationalconservatism could have any lasting power.Such a conservatism is “that system of ideasemployed to justify any established socialorder...against any fundamental challengeto its nature or being.”22 An aristocraticconservative was a mere reactionary; a con-servative holding to “autonomous” truthsagainst present circumstances really was noconservative at all. In Huntington’s read-ing, Kirk was an “autonomous” conserva-tive who sought to turn back the clock in thename of “a strained, sentimental, nostalgic,antiquarian longing for a society which ispast. [Kirk] and his associates are out oftune and out of step in modern America.”23

A true conservatism, for Huntington,“appears only when the challengersto...established institutions reject the fun-damentals” of those institutions.24 Once thatchallenge passes, conservatism too disap-pears. In Huntington’s view, the funda-mental American social order is a liberalone. Conservatism emerges occasionally asa shield to protect the liberal, because liber-alism cannot generate sufficient loyalty toguarantee its own survival. “In preservingthe achievements of American liberalism,American liberals have no recourse but toturn to conservatism.”25 Ralph Gilbert Rossmade the same point, claiming that “[w]henconservatives ask what, basically, they wantto conserve, one of the first things theyshould think of is the liberal tradition.”26

Explicitly drawing upon Mannheim,Jerry Muller has stated in a recent editedanthology that “conservatism as an articu-lated intellectual position only arises whenthe legitimacy of existing institutions can

no longer be taken for granted, either be-cause those institutions are under ideologi-cal attack or because of social, political andcultural developments that tend to under-mine their authority or their functioning.”27

Those “autonomous” conservatives whobelieve in enduring truths, Muller contends,are only fooling their readers, or perhapsthemselves. Consequently, “historical utili-tarianism” becomes for Muller the corner-stone of conservative thought: conserva-tives preserve what works, and generate thereasons for preservation later. Because Kirk’semphasis on an evocative and imaginativeconstruction of conservatism does not fitwithin the Mannheim typology, Muller doesnot include any of Kirk’s work in his anthol-ogy.

Kirk was no “situational” conservative,nor any mere defender of the achievementsof liberalism. The Conservative Mind was(in the words of historian George Nash) an“all-out assault” on almost every existingliberal policy or position.28 Were Kirk asituational conservative, he would not haveassumed liberalism could not be salvaged,as he did from the 1950s. In an early essay,“The Dissolution of Liberalism,” he con-cluded that liberalism was moribund fromthe beginning, “for lack of a higher imagi-nation.”29 Because it lacked any real narra-tive power, liberalism could not hold thepopular imagination; liberalism soon“ceased to signify anything, even among itsmost sincere partisans, [other] than a vaguegood will.”30 Kirk held this opinion in theEisenhower years, even before the culturalrevolutions of the 1960s and the rise of theNew Left. And unlike Lionel Trilling, Kirkdid not see socialism or a degraded massculture as the only alternatives.31

Kirk’s essay, “The Books of Conserva-tism,” speaks to the question of criteria forjudging historical change and is his answerto Mannheim and Muller. Kirk distinguishesconservatism from reaction in that “the



conservative hopes to reconcile what is mostimportant in old customs with the changethat any society must experience if it is toendure.... [While] the reactionary desires areturn to conditions of an earlier period.”In other words, the reactionary is himselfan ideologue. The reviewers of The Conser-vative Mind could not see a way for conser-vatives to avoid the charge of hypocrisy,first opposing change but then acquiescingto it. But to demand an unconditional re-turn to a former “golden age” is itself aspecies of ideology, one which Kirk rejected.The past can never be known fully, as heknew from Lukacs; nor, as the liberal re-formers thought, can a perfect future bepredicted. The criterion for conservativereform is what can be preserved under thecircumstances, not what change has beenaccepted.

Huntington’s view notwithstanding, Kirkwas not really an “autonomous” conserva-tive either. While the relationship betweenKirk and natural law thinking is complexand changed over time, he did not believethat the natural law was necessarily instan-tiated in particular social arrangements thathad to be preserved, come what may.32 Thenatural law’s primary function is to guideindividuals in accord with right reason, Kirkthought; it is only secondarily a blueprintfor positive law. “Natural law is not a harshcode that we thrust upon other people:rather it is an ethical knowledge” employedto restrain will and appetite on the indi-vidual level.33

Kirk considered figures like AbrahamLincoln and Woodrow Wilson to be con-servatives, and he did not advocate a returnto an aristocratic form of government—atleast not in America, which had never knownsuch a social form.34 Lincoln he praisedquite explicitly: “For the first time, we see aman from the common clay as defender oforder.”35 Present-day conservatives, hethought, needed to devise “other instru-

ments and methods” to defend order andnot rely on what worked for Burke or otherearlier conservatives.36 In light of Kirk’sclearly stated position, the reviewers’ specu-lations about Kirk’s “medievalism” or hisidolatry of the eighteenth-century appeardeeply mistaken. The typical caricature ofKirk as an ersatz eighteenth-century coun-try squire is belied by his own expresseddistaste for a century he described as “anage of gilded selfishness and frivolous intel-lectuality—an age almost without a heart.”37

Indeed, Burke was a conservative hero toKirk precisely because he was “essentially amodern man, and his concern was with ourmodern complexities” in a way that (forexample) Bolingbroke was not.38

In contrast to the Mannheim/Huntingtonmodel, which viewed conservatives as anecessary but temporary evil, RichardHofstadter believed the new conservativesof the 1950s were actively dangerous to thesocial order. In his 1965 book, The ParanoidStyle in American Politics, he famously de-scribed conservatives, the main exponentsof the “paranoid style,” as afflicted withdebilitating status anxiety. Hofstadter’sstudy was only the best known of a numberof analyses in the 1960s that sought to traceconservatism to an “authoritarian person-ality,” interpreting it as a kind of mentalillness.39 Both old-line WASP families andnew immigrants were insecure in postwarAmerica, leading them to lash out at othersand credit conspiracies directed against theirway of life. What Hofstadter called the “ul-tra-conservatives” were animated by “arather profound if largely unconscious ha-tred of our society and its ways;” they werecharacterized by a “restlessness, suspicionand fear.”40

This understanding of the conservativetemperament continues today: consider, forexample, the media caricature of evangeli-



cal Christians as poor and easily led. RogersSmith of Yale, in an important article argu-ing for an appreciation of America’s “mul-tiple traditions,” nevertheless describes theconservative traditions as promoting“[r]acial, nativist, and religious tensions...asthe Buchanan and Duke campaigns, theChristian Coalition, the Los Angeles riots,the English-only agitation [and] renewedpatterns of racial segregation” illustrate. Hejudges the conservative traditions “so ir-reparably different and dangerous that theydo not merit equal status in the politicalcommunity.”41

But Kirk was not a representative of anyparanoid style. In “Conservatives andFantastics,” he directly criticized the radicalelements of the nascent conservative move-ment, such as the John Birch Society. The“freaks, charlatans, profiteers and foolishenthusiasts,” while at times borrowing (orbeing given) the conservative label, must bedistinguished from conservatism proper.42

And far from suffering status anxiety, Kirkseemed supremely confident as a conserva-tive spokesman, living happily far away fromurban centers in his ancestral home in ruralMichigan. Kirk’s humble and contentedway of life was a direct contradiction to theHofstadter thesis that “conservatism hasmuch to do with the selfish possession ofwealth and power and little to do with moralpurpose, much less Christian love.”43

Moreover, Kirk contended, there waslittle genuine evidence for the “authoritar-ian personality” thesis. The contributors tocollections such as The New American Right(which included Hofstadter, David Riesmanand Nathan Glazer, among others) at-tempted to fit everyone with whom theydisagreed, from “old American families,Irish, Germans, Catholics, Protestants [and]Jews” into their search for the “New Ameri-can Right.” While “ingenious,” these de-scriptions for Kirk were “thoroughly un-convincing.”44 There was nothing to unite

these disparate groups except for the con-tributors’ dislike of them.

Neither a Mannheim-inspired under-standing of conservatism as the defense ofliberalism nor a Hofstadter-based claim thatconservatism is nothing more than a socialpathology does justice to the task Kirk setfor himself in The Conservative Mind. Sowhat was it that Kirk was attempting? DavidFrum, in a recent assessment of Kirk, pro-vides a clue. He writes that “Russell Kirkinspired the conservative movement bypulling together a series of only partiallyrelated ideas and events into a coherentnarrative.... Kirk did not record the past; hecreated it.”45 Earlier, in 1989, J. DavidHoeveler, Jr. described conservatism as “thatquality of imagination and insight, of his-torical memory, of awe, of sympathy, thatmakes the empirical data of life somethingmore—a habitable world, an inner envi-ronment that is personal and familiar.”46

The Conservative Mind was Kirk’s first large-scale attempt to use imagination in the ser-vice of historical memory.

Consequently, The Conservative Mindwas not the linear, deductive treatise onconservatism that some were expecting. Itwas, as Kirk later said, an “historical analy-sis of a mode of regarding the civil socialorder.”47 The Conservative Mind created, asNash noted, a “genealogy” from which con-servatives could draw. In faulting Kirk forcreating a tradition that was not really there,the critics radically misunderstand hisachievement. The dichotomy between a“true” and a “false” conservatism that thereviewers focused on indulges precisely theliberal abstraction that The ConservativeMind avoids.

Bernard Crick thought that Kirk was inan intellectual quandary because, “[h]avingno significant conservative tradition, Ameri-cans are put to the unconservative task ofinventing one.”48 But invention need not be



antithetical to conservatism. From his stud-ies of Burke, Disraeli, Eliot, and others, Kirkbelieved that tradition always partakes ofinvention. Facts have no life of their own: itis imagination that makes tradition out ofhistory. The narrative of conservatism thathe composed was itself an embodiment ofthe imagination that became the touch-stone of his conservatism.

The imagination is not primarily ratio-nal, but embraces the feelings and affec-tions; it is something outside the individual,but which (in Burke’s words) the individual“owns” and “ratifies;” it is not based uponcalculation; and it is something in additionto the physical realities of our “shiveringnature.” While its core remains the same, itmust be “expressed afresh from age to age,”primarily through literature and art, butalso through political statesmanship.49 Theimagination, moreover, is always present;the only question for Kirk is whether theimagination will be respected and employed,or ignored.

Kirk thought that a return to the imagi-nation was a crucial step in the recreation ofcultural order. “Whether to throw awayyesterday’s nonsense to embrace tomor-row’s nonsense, or whether we find our wayout of superficiality into real meaning, mustdepend in part upon the images which wediscover or shape.”50 Kirk identified severalauthors as inspiring this strand of moder-nity-critique: Max Picard, Gustave Thibon,and Charles Baudouin.51 The now unknownBaudouin, for example, in The Myth of Mo-dernity, demolished the false objectivity ofthe modern world: “To believe what we seeis a view of reality is a naiveté of which only‘modern man’ is capable. In short, althoughthey repudiate the superstition of the word,our contemporaries accept without flinch-ing the superstition of the fact, which is noless deceptive.”52

In a pair of prescient essays, written notlong after The Conservative Mind, Kirk viv-

idly describes a coming “Age of Sentiments,”dominated by the Image, which will dis-place the modern “Age of Discussion,” char-acterized by a love of rational argument andthe tyranny of the Fact.53 The Age of Discus-sion “broke the cake of custom inChristendom...engulfed Burke’s prejudiceand prescription [and] subverted men’sancient reluctance to abandon the ways oftheir ancestors.”54 In the new age

[t]he immense majority of human beings willfeel with the projected images they beholdupon the television screen; and in those view-ers that screen will rouse sentiments ratherthan reflections. Waves of emotion will sweepback and forth, so long as the Age of Senti-ments endures. And whether those emotionsare low or high must depend upon the folkwho determine the tone and temper of televi-sion programming.55

That is, the emotions will depend on thequality of imagination that stirs them. Butwhile Kirk was no unqualified admirer ofthe Age of Sentiments, he did not despairabout its arrival: “[f]or the most part, theAge of Discussion was an age of shams andposturings.”56 Like its fruit, liberalism, Dis-cussion lacked “vitality.” Mired in abstrac-tions and endless argument over first prin-ciples, or indeed, whether there were anysuch principles, rejecting authority and tra-dition, it failed to move hearts. The conser-vative imagination, however, could be fit-ted to survive where liberalism could not.What conservatives needed was a “deliber-ate revival of the concept of traditional wis-dom,” which would survive the end of theAge of Discussion.57

Such an alternative vision has some claimto being called “postmodern.” The contro-versy over postmodernism—its definitions,future, and merits—would at first blushseem to have little to do with traditionalistconservatism. Postmodern figures have dis-tinguished themselves in their devotion toobscure and abstract reasoning and leftist



political causes. Nevertheless, as early as1982, Kirk suggested that “the Post-Mod-ern imagination stands ready to be cap-tured. And the seemingly novel ideas andsentiments and modes may turn out, afterall, to be received truths and institutions,well known to surviving conservatives.”58

Though himself implacably hostile topostmodernism, E. Christian Kopff has per-ceptively described Kirk’s postmodern af-finities. “Kirk presented America with anattitude, a style, a persona.” He quotes Kirkas asking, “What are you and I? ... In largepart we are what we imagine ourselves tobe. William Butler Yeats advises us to clapmasks to our faces and play our appropriatepart: the image becomes reality.”59 Even thecarefully constructed image of Kirk as aneighteenth-century gentlemen, living a lifeof letters in a rural “Victorian villa, fur-nished with furniture salvaged from oldhotels and churches,” is evocative of thepostmodern propensity for self-creation.60

The connections between post-modern-ism and conservatism in fact run deep.61

One of the earliest uses of the term is attrib-uted to Bernard Iddings Bell, the Episcopalcanon whom Kirk admired. In his 1926book, Postmodernism, Bell was already pre-dicting the collapse of modernity. Moder-nity was born in the destruction of belief inthe infallibility of the Bible through the newscripture scholarship. The book of naturebecame the new holy writ. Now, the indi-vidual intellect could perceive the infalliblelaws of nature and divine the form andstructure of the universe, and eventually,the principles of society and moral con-duct. But science operates only within theframe of the measurable; it cannot answer“why” anything is. Bell called for a return toreligion, in a “postmodern” form, groundedin the Incarnation and receptive to miracles.“The time would seem to be at hand for anew school of religious aspirants, one inaccord not with the prejudices of scientists

of a generation ago, but rather consonantwith the convictions of scientists today.Fundamentalism is hopelessly outdated.Modernism has ceased to be modern. Weare ready for some sort of Postmodern-ism.”62

Some conservative writers have alreadybegun to follow this lead.63 Vigen Guroianhas drawn out the connections betweenKirk and what Guroian calls the“postmodern” Eliot.64 David Walsh, in hisGuarded by Mystery: Meaning in aPostmodern Age attempts to groundpostmodern thought in a new understand-ing of the transcendent, which, Walsh ar-gues had been lost—but not rejected—bymodernity.65 And Peter Augustine Lawler,in his recent book Postmodernism RightlyUnderstood, sets out a conservativepostmodern tradition that he argues is fullyin accord with the larger Western philo-sophical tradition. Lawler describespostmodernism “rightly understood” as arejection of “modern rationalism or science,and to some extent rationalism simply, fortheir futile attempt to eradicate the mysteryof being, particularly human being.”66

Even if Kirk would not fully adopt any ofthe current versions of postmodernism,conservatism and the conservative imagi-nation have contributions to make to thepostmodern age. Eugene Genovese hascharacterized modernity as presenting aunique “difficulty to conservatism,” because“[t]houghtful conservatives know that theyplunge into difficulty whenever they be-come aware of themselves as conservative.”In order to defend what they thought wasworth conserving, conservatives believedthat they had to engage liberalism on itsown terms, in a “dialectical” mode thatpresupposes a “collective of propositions, alogic” that is foreign to the rhetorical, di-dactic, and imaginative modes more ame-nable to conservative expression.67 This ca-



pitulation to liberalism, has, according toJames Kalb, failed to produce any signifi-cant defense of conservative thought. In-stead, conservatism cannot even present itspositions in a persuasive way because con-servatives “cannot even talk...in languagevery different from that of triumphant lib-eralism.”68

In retrospect, the weakest part of Kirk’sbook is the most quoted: Kirk’s famous“canons” of conservatism. Such a catalogueplayed right into the hands of Huntingtonand others, who thought they exemplified aconservative abstraction at odds with thehistorical texture of the remainder of Kirk’saccount. Lewis concentrated on this precisepoint: “any attempt to build philosophicfoundations for [the conservative] attitudeis invariably evidence that the attitude nolonger claims the instinctive allegiance” ofthe culture; “far too much of genuineconservatism...is a matter of feeling andinstinct and emotion to be satisfactorilyreducible to the forms of logical assertionand proof.”69 Although Kirk never re-nounced the canons, they continued tochange; by his last books, there were ten,but in newer editions of The ConservativeMind, Kirk admonished that “if one seeksby definition more than this, the sooner[one] turns to individual thinkers, the surerground [one] is on.”70 Rather than continueto push these abstract canons, Kirk stressedother themes implicit in The ConservativeMind, such as the imagination, which is notmentioned among the canons.

Now that liberalism has died in all butthe most recalcitrant corners, the projectbegun with The Conservative Mind morefully comes into focus. Postmodernism hasreintroduced sentiment, contingency, lo-cality and imagination into social discourse,which are the areas that occupied much ofKirk’s work. In The Conservative Mind, Kirkattempted to create a conservative moodrather than an ideological program, and the

alternative language he created for conceiv-ing the conservative program remains themost viable in the post-liberal age.

Mystery lay at the heart of Kirk’s under-standing of the conservative temperament.There is the mystery of free will, of indi-vidual choice, of divine Providence, and ofthe creation and sustaining of tradition.Modernity denigrated mystery in the nameof a scientific or politically revolutionarymeta-narrative, but “modernity has notdiscovered convincing answers to the ques-tions that these myths raise; rather, moder-nity has endeavored to shrug away the pro-found lessons that lie implicit in thesemyths.”71 The postmodernists, on the otherhand, while recognizing mystery, too oftenuse it only as an opportunity for an endlessplay of meaningless word games. Conser-vatives, in contrast, keep a healthy respectfor the irreducible core of human experi-ence that must be expressed in ways otherthan through reason: “Tenebrae are woveninto human nature, whatever the melioristssay.”72 Through his imaginative recreationin The Conservative Mind of a tradition thatcould find a home in a postliberal era, Kirkhelped illumine the shadows surroundingthe mysteries of life.

1. Charles Brown, Russell Kirk: A Bibliography (ClarkeMemorial Library, 1981).

2. Norman Thomas, Book Review, United NationsWorld (August 1953): 34-35.

3. Gordon K. Lewis, “The Metaphysics of Conserva-tism,” Western Political Quarterly (1953): 728, 735.

4. Peter Gay, Book Review, The Political Science Quar-terly 68:4 (December 1953): 586, 587.

5.. Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (paper-back ed., University of Chicago, 1984), 131.

6. Bernard Crick, “The Strange Quest for an Ameri-can Conservatism,” The Review of Politics (1953): 359,371-372. See also Huntington, 471-472, cited below.

7. Harvey Wheeler, “Russell Kirk and the New Con-servatism,” Shenandoah (1953): 20, 23.

8. Kirk, “Rhetoricians and Politicians,” The KenyonReview 26:4 (Autumn 1964): 764; Kirk, “Bolingbroke,



Burke, and the Statesman,” The Kenyon Review 28:3(Summer 1966): 426

9. Wheeler, 25.

10. Wheeler, 24.

11. Wheeler, 29.

12. Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind (7th ed.,Regnery, 1986), 491. Hereafter CM.

13. CM, 496.

14. Frank S. Meyer, “Collectivism Rebaptized,” in InDefense of Freedom and Related Essays (Liberty Fund1996), 13.

15. John Lukacs, Historical Consciousness: The Re-membered Past (Transaction Books 1994), xiii.

16. Kirk, Eliot and His Age: T. S. Eliot’s Moral Imagi-nation in the Twentieth Century (Sherwood Sugden,1988), 82. First published in 1971.

17. John Crowe Ransom, “Empirics in Politics,” TheKenyon Review 15 (1953): 648, 650.

18. Lewis, 730.

19. Karl Mannheim, “Conservative Thought,” in FromKarl Mannheim (Oxford University Press, 1971).

20. Wheeler, 33.

21. Samuel P. Huntington, “Conservatism as an Ide-ology,” American Political Science Review 51 (1957):454, 459.

22. Huntington, 454-55.

23. Huntington, 455.



26. Ralph Gilbert Ross, “The Campaign Against Lib-eralism, Cont’d,” Partisan Review 20: (September-October 1953): 568, 574.

27. Jerry Z. Muller, ed. Conservatism: An Anthology ofSocial and Political Thought from David Hume to thePresent (Princeton University Press, 1997), 422.

28. George Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Move-ment in America (Basic Books, 1979), 65.

29. Russell Kirk, Enemies of the Permanent Things(Sherwood Sugden, 1988), 33. First published in1969. Hereafter EPT.

30. EPT, 40.

31 CM, 476.

32. For a discussion of Kirk’s views, see Peter Stanlis,“Russell Kirk and the Roots of American Order,”(unpublished manuscript), 5.

33. Russell Kirk, “The Case for and Against Natural

Law,” (Heritage Lecture No. 469, 1993), 3. See alsoRussell Kirk, “Natural Law,” Notre Dame Law Review69 (1994): 1046.

34. CM, 417.

35. Russell Kirk, The Roots of American Order (OpenCourt, 1978), 450.

36. CM, 425.

37. Russell Kirk, Beyond the Dreams of Avarice: Essaysof a Social Critic (Sherwood Sugden, 1991), 184. Firstpublished in 1956. Hereafter BDA.

38. Russell Kirk, Edmund Burke: A Genius Reconsid-ered (Wilmington: rev. ed. Intercollegiate StudiesInstitute, 1997), 8. First published in 1967.

39. Nash, 125-126.

40. Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in Ameri-can Politics and Other Essays (Knopf, 1965), 44-45.

41. Rogers M. Smith, “Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdaland Hartz: The Multiple Traditions in America,”American Political Science Review (September 1993):549, 563.

42. Russell Kirk, Confessions of a Bohemian Tory(Fleet, 1963), 285.

43. Mark C. Henrie, “On Russell Kirk, Happy atHome,” New Oxford Review (July-August 1994), 22,23.

44. Russell Kirk, Book Review, Annals of the AmericanAcademy of Political and Social Science (May 1956):184-185.

45. David Frum, “The Legacy of Russell Kirk,” TheNew Criterion 13:8 (December 1994): 15.

46. J. David Hoeveler, Jr., “American IntellectualConservatism: Is There a Usable Past?” The Intellec-tual History Newsletter 11 (June 1989): 4, 16.

47. CM, iv.

48. Crick, 365.

49. RT, 71.

50. Kirk, “The Rediscovery of Mystery,” Imprimis 6:1(January 1977), 1, 3.

51. Russell Kirk, “Obdurate Adversaries of Moder-nity,” Modern Age 30:1 (Summer/Fall 1976), 204.

52. Charles Baudouin, The Myth of Modernity (Allen& Unwin, 1950), 82.

53. “The Age of Discussion,” BDA, 43; “The Age ofSentiments,” The Wise Men Know What Wicked Thingsare Written on the Sky (Regnery, 1987), 111.

54. CM, 295-296.

55. RT, 134. Original emphases.



56. RT, 136.

57. CM, 296.

58. Kirk, “Conservatism: A Succinct Description,”National Review 34:17 (September 3, 1982): 1080-84,1104.

59. E. Christian Kopff, The Devil Knows Latin: WhyAmerica Needs the Classical Tradition (IntercollegiateStudies Institute, 1999), 183.

60. Gregory Wolfe, “The Catholic as Conservative,”Crisis 11:9 (October 1993), 25, 27.

61. The traditionalist Burke scholar Francis Canavan,S.J., for example, identified Roberto Unger’s Knowl-edge and Politics, an early postmodern critique ofliberalism, and Thomas A. Spragens’ The Irony ofLiberal Reason as together comprising “the definitivecritique of liberal rationalism.” “The Irony of LiberalReason,” The Review of Politics 44:4 (Oct. 1982): 615-617.

62. Bernard Iddings Bell, Postmodernism and OtherEssays (Morehouse Publishing Company, 1926), 53-54.

63. See, for example, Glenn Hughes, ed., The Politicsof the Soul: Eric Voegelin on Religious Experience

(Rowman & Littlefield, 1999).

64. Vigen Guroian, “Moral Imagination, HumaneLetters, and the Renewal of Society,” Heritage Lec-ture (April 29, 1999), 4.

65. David Walsh, Guarded by Mystery: Meaning in aPostmodern Age (The Catholic University of AmericaPress, 1999).

66. Peter Augustine Lawler, Postmodernism RightlyUnderstood (Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), 109.

67. Eugene Genovese, The Southern Tradition: TheAchievement and Limitations of an American Conser-vatism (Harvard University Press, 1995), 20.

68. James Kalb, “The Tyranny of Liberalism,” Mod-ern Age 42:3 (Summer 2000), 241, 245.

69. Lewis, 729.

70. CM, 10.

71. Kirk, “The Salutary Myth of the OtherworldlyJourney,” The World & I (October 1994): 425-437.The quote is found on page 426.

72. Kirk, “A Cautionary Note on the Ghostly Tale” inWatchers at the Strait Gate (Arkham House, 1984),xii.

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Russell Kirk and the CriticsRussell Kirk and the Critics by Gerald J. Russello4 T HE INTERCOLLEGIATE REVIEW—Spring/Summer 2003 flect Kirk’s own view. Kirk used the quota-tion to