Russell Kirk (1918-1994)
50 anni di The Conservative Mind

 

I testi completi in lingua inglese degli interventi di Lee Edwards, Gleaves Whitney e Annette Y. Kirk pubblicati su il Domenicale. Purtroppo non abbiamo avuto modo di fornire la traduzione.

Russell Kirk
and the Conservative Movement
Remarks at Piety Hill, Mecosta, Michigan, June 7, 2003
by Lee Edwards

There was no conservative movement when The Conservative Mind was published in the spring of 1953. There was rather an inchoate and disputatious gaggle of thinkers, writers and politicians whose differences seemed to outweigh their similarities.

The philosophers included Friedrich A. Hayek, a classical liberal economist born in Austria; Richard Weaver, a Southern agrarian who taught English at, not Vanderbilt University, but the University of Chicago; and Whittaker Chambers, an ex-Soviet spy turned fervent anti-communist.

Among the popularizers were radio commentator John T. Flynn, an unregenerate America Firster; Newsweek columnist Raymond Moley, a one-time top adviser to Franklin D. Roosevelt; and William F. Buckley, Jr., who in his best-selling "God and Man at Yale," repeatedly referred to himself as an individualist.

The politicians numbered Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio, who said he was a liberal conservative; Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin, who saw Communists under almost every State Department bed; and Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, who called himself a Jeffersonian Republican in his first Senatorial race.

A few years before the appearance of The Conservative Mind, the liberal critic Lionel Trilling had complained rather than boasted that "liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition" in America. Conceding that a conservative or reactionary "impulse" existed here and there, Trilling still insisted that conservatism expressed itself only in "irritable mental gestures which seem to resemble ideas."

For conservatives, there was much to be irritable and even worried about. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, traditional conservatives like Richard Weaver and classical liberals like Hayek (author of the widely reviewed The Road to Serfdom) were convinced that the "central values of civilization" were in danger. The place of the individual and the "voluntary group" had been undermined by "extensions of arbitrary power."

Freedom of thought and expression were threatened by power-seeking minorities. These dire developments had been fostered by an historical view that denied "all absolute moral standards," questioned the rule of law, and contributed to a decline of belief in "private property and the competitive market." (My, how little has changed.)

There were a few encouraging signs. Since 1944, the weekly newsletter Human Events had been publishing thoughtful and often trenchant essays by the leading conservatives and anti-communists of the day. The fortnightly The Freeman was started in 1950 but was soon riven by political disputes. A youth organization, the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists, was launched in 1952, and despite its contradictory name began to build its membership. But there was no theme to this pudding of traditional conservatives, classical liberals and anti-communists.

Furthermore, conservatives confronted an adversary in modern liberalism that loomed so large and enjoyed such universal acclaim as to appear irresistible. David had faced only one Goliath while across the field of battle from conservatives was an army of Goliaths.

Small wonder, then, that Richard Weaver first wanted to call his book about the fallacies of modern life, The Fearful Descent. His publisher selected another title and in early 1948, Ideas Have Consequences appeared.

Weaver argued that ideas like nominalism, rationalism, and materialism had led inexorably to what he saw as the moral "dissolution" of the West. Man had turned away from first principles and true knowledge and had eagerly embraced rampant egalitarianism and the cult of the mass. Weaver's book was unquestionably a jeremiad, but it did offer three reforms that could help mankind recover from the scourge of modernism: a defense of private property, a purification and respect for language, and an attitude of piety toward nature, each other, and especially the past.

Ideas Have Consequences did not go unnoticed. Liberals like Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr praised it highly. Conservervative philosopher Eliseo Vivas called Weaver "an inspired moralist" while political scientist Willmoore Kendall nominated the author for "the captaincy of the anti-Liberal team." But an incensed reviewer called Weaver--who was a Southern Protestant--"a propagandist for a return to the medieval papacy." Another denounced his book as part of a University of Chicago Press "chain of reaction" that included Friedrich Hayek.

This critic was on to something. For all their differences, the classical liberal Hayek and the traditional conservative Weaver both traced the decline of the West to "pernicious" liberal ideas--for Hayek, it was economic planning, for Weaver, moral relativism. Hayek proposed the alternative road of individual freedom within a framework of carefully limited government. Weaver insisted that a good society required a foundation of certain eternal truths.

The two writers and their works represented the libertarian and conservative strains of American conservatism that began to merge, if fitfully, around 1950 under the twin threats of welfarism at home and Communism abroad.

Several other events now combined to further shape the conservative movement--the conviction of former Soviet spy Alger Hiss, the publication of Bill Buckley's God and Man at Yale, and the appearance of Whittaker Chambers' magisterial memoir, Witness.

The Alger Hiss-Whittaker Chambers spy case of 1948-1950 was a defining event for American conservatism, with liberals passionately defending the Harvard-educated Hiss, whom they considered one of their own, and conservatives siding with Time editor Chambers and his Congressional champion--Richard Nixon. Chambers reluctantly testified before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1948 that as an underground communist espionage agent in the 1930s, he had known a young State Department official named Alger Hiss. Hiss vehemently denied the charge and sued for libel, forcing Chambers to produce secret government documents he had hidden in a pumpkin on his Maryland farm. The documents confirmed that the two men had been part of a Soviet espionage apparatus during the New Deal years.

After two nationally publicized, contentious trials, Hiss was convicted of perjury--the statute of limitations on espionage having lapsed--and was sentenced to prison for four years. The Right felt vindicated, the Left violated, perceiving that the generation of the New Deal was as much on trial as Hiss himself. "The Hiss case," the historian George Nash wrote, "forged the anti-communist element in an emerging conservatism."

God and Man at Yale was one of the most discussed books of 1951--it made number sixteen on the New York Times best-seller list one month after publication. Dedicating the book to God, country, and Yale "in that order," Bill Buckley charged that Yale had abandoned both Christianity and free enterprise or what he called individualism (a term he borrowed from the militantly anti-government writer Albert Jay Nock). Buckley said that the Yale faculty members--and he named names--who fostered atheism and socialism ought to be fired. He coupled Darwinism, Fabian Socialism, and Pragmatism with Marxism and Nazism. He recommended instead the ideas of John Locke, Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, and Jesus. He said that the primary goal of education was to familiarize students with an existing body of truth, of which Christianity and free enterprise or individualism were the foundations. But, Buckley reported, "individualism is dying at Yale, and without a fight."

When Whittaker Chambers published his 800-page autobiography, Witness, in 1952, it became an instant bestseller and for good reason: it was a dramatic story of spies, espionage, and betrayal with an apocalyptic warning about the epic battle being waged between the West and its totalitarian enemies. The book held special attraction for conservatives because it asserted--as conservatives had been doing for years--that America faced a transcendent not a temporary crisis; that the crisis was one of faith, not simply politics or power; and that secular liberalism was as much an enemy of America as communism because it was at its roots another form of communism.

But where was the phalanx of opposition to the clear and present danger of socialism at home and communism abroad? Newly elected President Dwight D. Eisenhower had promised he would go to Korea and negotiate an end to the fighting of that inconclusive war. Before long Ike would be singing the praises of Modern Republicanism and approving the creation of a gigantic new federal entity--the Department of Health, Education and Welfare.

What theme could unite American libertarians, conservatives, and anti-communists in an intellectual and political movement that would challenge the liberal establishment, not just now and then, but each and every day?

Hayek had not provided the answer in The Road to Serfdom, and in fairness how could an Austrian emigre and academic be expected to? Weaver had not outlined a strategy for freedom and against tyranny in Ideas Have Consequences, and indeed should a professor of English be asked to? And for all his rhetorical power and historical insight, Chambers had declared in Witness that he was joining the losing side when he became an anti-communist.

Things were equally gloomy in the realm of politics. In the spring of 1953, Senator Taft ("Mr. Republican") was diagnosed with cancer and was dead before the end of summer. General Douglas MacArthur, hero of the South Pacific in World War II, and near victor of the Korean War, had long since faded away. The remaining champion was the fiery anti-communist Joe McCarthy. From February 1950, when he declared in a Wheeling, West Virginia, speech that communists were still employed by the State Department, until December 1954, when the U.S. Senate "condemned" his conduct, McCarthy was at the center of the American political stage.

To millions, he was Mr. Anti-Communist, a fearless prosecutor of traitors and fellow-travelers. To many others, he was a reckless character assassin. A new word, McCarthyism--the making of baseless accusations--was coined by his enemies. Defiant friends wore the label proudly.

McCarthy had a fatal flaw--he rarely listened to anyone, even his closest advisers, particularly when they counseled caution. Whittaker Chambers often expressed his concern about McCarthy to Bill Buckley, stating that the senator was "a slugger and a rabble-rouser" who "simply knows that somebody threw a tomato and the general direction from which it came." McCarthy, said Chambers, had only one tactic--"attack"--and that was not sufficient.

In the middle of the tumultuous McCarthy era--known as the Reign of Terror in many liberal history books--when passionate charge and countercharge about black lists and Red Channels filled the air, a young unknown scholar published an intellectual history of conservative thought that permanently changed the public's perception of conservatism.

Russell Kirk was only thirty-five in the spring of 1953 when his seminal work, The Conservative Mind, appeared. At first, liberals joked that the title was an oxymoron, but they were forced to revise their opinion when they read Kirk's "eloquent, defiant, impassioned cri de coeur for conservatism." His book was a 450-page overview of the leading conservative thinkers of the previous 150 years and a scathing indictment of every liberal nostrum from human perfectibility to economic egalitarianism.

The Conservative Mind begins not with a whimper but with a bang:

"The stupid party": this is John Stuart Mill's description of conservatives. Like certain other summary dicta which nineteenth-century liberals thought to be forever triumphant, his judgment needs review in our age of disintegrating liberal and radical philosophies.

The passage fairly takes your breath away, even today, and it certainly did so fifty years ago when complacent liberals like Trilling pretended to be upset that conservatism could only express itself in "irritable mental gestures" and conservatives conceded publicly that they were on the losing side.

Not so Russell Kirk, this passionate young American scholar, who in the words of his publisher Henry Regnery, "has discovered a great truth and wishes to communicate his discovery to others." And what had he discovered?

That modern American conservatism rested securely on the words and deeds of a gallery of conservative heroes stretching back to the 18th century and beginning with the founder of the "true school of conservative principle," Edmund Burke. Burke, Kirk pointed out, was not an isolated example but the first of a remarkable group of conservative politicians, poets, and philosophers, including Benjamin Disraeli and John Cardinal Newman in Great Britain, and the remarkable Adams family, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Orestes Brownson in America.

These were not second-rate thinkers and scribblers but men of distinction and purpose who made a difference in their countries and in their centuries by their exposition of and commitment to first principles. And what were these principles? The audacious Dr. Kirk asserted that the essence of conservatism lay in six canons:

A divine intent rules society as well as conscience--"political problems, at bottom," he wrote, "are religious and moral problems."
Traditional life is filled with variety and mystery, while most radical systems are characterized by a narrowing uniformity.
Civilized society requires orders and classes--"the only true equality is moral equality."
Property and freedom are inseparably connected.
Man must control his will and his appetite, knowing that he is governed more by emotion than reason.
"Change and reform are not identical"--society must alter slowly.
Before the liberals had caught their breath, the New York Times favorably reviewed The Conservative Mind as did Time, one of whose senior editors called it the most important book of the twentieth century. Indeed, of the first fifty reviews, an amazing forty-seven were favorable. No modern conservative writer had ever before received such glowing notices. The political philosopher Robert Nisbet wrote Kirk that with one book, he had done the impossible: He had broken "the cake of intellectual opposition to the conservative tradition in the United States."

But Kirk had done far more than that. He had made American conservatism intellectually respectable. No longer would it be said that conservatives were the "stupid party." Nor that conservatism was only concerned with the past and was indifferent to the future.

In the last chapter, "The Promise of Conservatism" (its very title setting the author apart from the deep pessimism of ex-communist Whittaker Chambers and his stoic acceptance of defeat), Russell Kirk argued that the principal interests of true conservatism and old-style libertarian democracy were approaching identity.

Confronted by arrogant collectivists and the eager architects of the New Deal, he said, conservatives must "defend constitutional democracy as a repository of tradition and order," while intelligent democrats must "espouse conservative philosophy as the only secure system of ideas with which to confront the planners of the new order." He pointed out that even Harvard Professor Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., a Jackson-FDR Democrat, admitted the pressing need for an intelligent American conservatism. Which is precisely what Russell Kirk had provided in The Conservative Mind.

There was another critical contribution of the work and its author: Russell Kirk was proud to be a conservative. The true conservative, he insisted, was not the cruel caricature of "a dull, boorish, bigoted and avaricious being" presented by most liberal and radical journalists and politicians.

The true conservative, he said, could in fact be many different people: a "resolute and strong-minded" clergyman, a farmer who "holds fast" to the wisdom of his ancestors, a truck driver in the very heart of the metropolis, a proprietor of an ancient name endeavoring to moderate inevitable change by "prudence and good nature," an old-fashioned manufacturer (paternalistic and shrewd), a physician, a lawyer, or a schoolmaster.

All of these people--all true conservatives--prefer, Kirk said, "the old and the tried to the novel and the dubious," and in whatever they do, endeavor "to safeguard the institutions and the wisdom" of the past, not slavishly but prudently.

Of all The Conservative Mind's contributions, the most important politically (as William Rusher has noted) was that he gave the American conservative movement its name.

There was an epiphany from east to west and north to south. Conservatives looked up from reading The Conservative Mind and said, nodding their heads, "Yes, that is what I am--a conservative--and proud to be one."

They were not classical liberals or libertarians or individualists or objectivists or liberal conservatives or Jeffersonian Republicans but simply and plainly, conservatives.

Consider the undeniable impact of The Conservative Mind on the two other principal founders of modern conservatism--William F. Buckley, Jr. and Barry Goldwater.

In God and Man at Yale (published in 1951) Buckley made only passing and rather dismissive reference to conservatism, arguing that the two great battles at Yale and in America were Christianity versus agnosticism and atheism, and individualism versus collectivism. Buckley declared himself to be an individualist (or libertarian), not a conservative.

When he first ran for the U.S. Senate in 1952, Goldwater never once described himself as a "conservative." He called himself many things, including a "progressive," but never a conservative.

Yet, only a few short years later, both Buckley and Goldwater were self-proclaimed conservatives--Buckley in his new magazine, National Review, and Goldwater in the Senate and on the campaign trail, and proud of it. What had happened in the interim? One thing and only one thing: the publication of The Conservative Mind. Clearly the sequence of events was not coincidence but cause and effect.

If Russell Kirk had done nothing else in his life but write The Conservative Mind, he would have earned the enduring gratitude of every conservative in America. But that is not the end of the story or the sum of his contributions to the conservative movement.

Over the following decades, Russell Kirk wrote a syndicated newspaper column that appeared in most of our nation's largest cities. He provided the readers of National Review, the leading journal of conservatism, with his insights into American higher education with his regular feature, "From the Academy." He lectured on hundreds of college campuses before often large and always enthusiastic audiences. Throughout the fifties and sixties Russell Kirk was the most popular conservative lecturer in America, second only to Bill Buckley. We can only conjecture how many young minds became conservative as a result of Dr. Kirk's willingness to go anywhere to talk about the permanent things.

He debated the most famous liberals in the land, including Harvard's Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Norman Thomas, the perennial Socialist Party presidential candidate, Senator and later vice president Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, and Senator Eugene McCarthy whose spirited challenge of President Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1968 Democratic primaries helped convince Johnson to announce his intention not to seek reelection. Although inclined to speak too quickly and in tones so soft as to be almost inaudible, Dr. Kirk nevertheless more than held his own against these masters of the political underworld.

And he wrote, oh how he wrote. He published twenty-eight books and hundreds of articles, reviews, essays, and introductions. He wrote ghostly short stories and gothic novels. He wrote about politics, culture, economics, education, and the Constitution. He suggested a program for conservatives and offered an intelligent woman's guide to conservatism.

He even wrote speeches for a presidential candidate--Barry Goldwater--and spoke widely on his behalf, once debating the renowned political scientist, Hans Morgenthau. In the last fortnight of the 1964 presidential struggle, Russell and Annette Kirk campaigned throughout Southern California on behalf of Goldwater, often in company with Hollywood actors and actresses.

Annette, resplendent in orange dress and wide-brimmed orange hat, would be asked in airports and department stores, "Are you a famous star?" Russell would beam.

Election Day brought a humiliating defeat for the conservative candidate, but one week earlier, Ronald Reagan had delivered an eloquent television address for Goldwater that made him a national political star and led to his running for and winning the governorship of California. Sixteen years later, Reagan was elected president after campaigning unabashedly--not as a classical liberal or libertarian--but as a conservative, the political beneficiary of a book written almost thirty years earlier. The power of ideas, indeed.

Dr. Kirk shared his ideas with everyone, high and low, from presidents to research assistants to political dissidents to hobos. More than one president sought him out for advice and counsel.

In April 1972, President Nixon invited the Kirks to the White House for a private conversation. Outside the Oval Office, great crowds of young people were protesting the administration's decision to shore up Saigon's resistance to the Communists. Inside, the president and the conservative intellectual talked for forty minutes, particularly about American decadence, about which Nixon had spoken recently, citing the recent riots in the cities and the widespread use of drugs. "Dr. Kirk," asked the president earnestly, "have we any hope?

No human institution lasts forever, replied Dr. Kirk, but the United States is young as great powers go and our present troubles, he said, may be succeeded by an age of greatness.

Nixon visibly brightened, and as the conversation drew to a close, President Nixon asked Dr. Kirk, "What one book should I read?" When he asked Henry Kissinger or Daniel Patrick Moynihan that question, they gave him lists of books but he did not have time for a dozen books--what one book should he read? Dr. Kirk did not hesitate: T. S. Eliot's Notes Toward the Definition of Culture.

Why? demanded the president. Because, answered Dr. Kirk, Eliot discusses the relationship which should exist between men of action and men of ideas and touches upon many of the fundamental difficulties of culture in the twentieth century and the norms upon which civilization rests--the very things that he and the president had been discussing.

I wonder what one book Ayn Rand or most authors would have recommended. It is a measure of the man that Dr. Kirk did not suggest The Conservative Mind.

I have related the Nixon anecdote because it tells us so much about Russell Kirk and his refusal to be swayed by the impulse of the moment and because it is of many such anecdotes that appear in his marvelous memoir, The Sword of Imagination, which you must read if you want to understand the man who helped make the conservative movement.

Let me mention two other Kirk books that have made a difference in modern American conservatism.

Twenty-one years after The Conservative Mind, Dr. Kirk published The Roots of American Order which traced the beliefs and institutions that nurtured the American Republic. He used the device of five cities--explaining that the first roots of American order were planted in Jerusalem with the Hebrew perception of a purposeful moral existence under God. They were strengthened in Athens by the philosophical and political self-awareness of the Greeks. They were nurtured in Rome by the Roman experience of law and social awareness. They were intertwined with the Christian understanding of human duties and human hopes, of man redeemed. They were joined by medieval custom, learning and valor. And then these roots were enriched by two great political experiments in law and liberty occurring in London and Philadelphia.

It is an amazingly erudite book, drawing on Plato, Cicero, Saint Augustine, Hobbes, Locke, John Knox, Hume, Montesquieu, Blackstone, Jonathan Edwards, Abraham Lincoln, and Orestes Brownson, to name but a few. It is the mature work of a master of letters.

Nineteen years after The Roots of American Order and one year before his death, Kirk published The Politics of Prudence, based upon a series of lectures delivered at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., most of them to young conservatives.

He offered a defense of prudential as opposed to ideological politics, hoping to persuade the rising generation "to set their faces against political fanaticism and utopian schemes." He rejected the dictionary definition of ideology as "the science of ideas," arguing, rather, that it was "inverted religion," promising collective salvation here on earth through violent revolution. He also rejected ideology because it made political compromise impossible. Its narrow vision, he said, brought about civil war and the destruction of beneficial social institutions.

In contrast, the politics of prudence was based on the certain knowledge that human nature and human institutions are imperfectible and that aggressive "righteousness" in politics ends in slaughter. Prudential politics accepted that political and economic structures are not to be erected one day and demolished the next: They develop over centuries "almost as if they were organic."

I happened to be in the audience for several of the Heritage lectures, and I can attest that the young men and women present--and they usually constituted a majority of the audience--hung on every word.

In one lecture, Dr. Kirk offered ten articles of belief that reflected, he said, the emphases of American conservatives of the era. The differences between the ten articles of belief in the 1980s and the six canons of The Conservative Mind in the 1950s are instructive. As Dr. Kirk said, the diversity of ways in which conservative views may find expression is proof that conservatism is no fixed ideology. The ten conservative principles were:

The conservative believes that there exists an enduring moral order.
The conservative adheres to custom, convention, and continuity. Burke's reminder of the necessity for prudent change is in the mind of the conservative, but necessary change ought to be gradual and discriminatory.
Conservatives believe in what may be called the principle of prescription, that is, of things established by immemorial usage.
Conservatives are guided by their principle of prudence.
Conservatives pay attention to the principle of variety.
Conservatives are chastened by their principle of imperfectibility.
Conservatives are persuaded that freedom and property are closely linked.
Conservatives uphold voluntary community quite as they oppose involuntary collectivism.
The conservative perceives the need for prudent restraints upon power and upon human passions.
The thinking conservative understands that permanence and change must be recognized and reconciled in a vigorous society.
We can hope that at least some of the eager, bright-eyed young politicians sitting in the auditorium of the Heritage Foundation will remember these principles and put them into practice as they rise in the world of politics. Such a rising generation will lift all hearts.

One of Dr. Kirk's favorite conservatives was Orestes Brownson, who told the students of Dartmouth College 150 years ago:

"Ask not what your age wants, but what it needs; not what it will reward, but what, without which, it cannot be saved; and that go and do; and find your reward in the consciousness of having done your duty."

That is of course what Russell Kirk did his whole life. In the final pages of The Sword of Imagination, Dr. Kirk wrote that during his lifetime he sought three ends:

To conserve a patrimony of order, justice and freedom; a tolerable moral order, and an inheritance of culture;

To lead a life of decent independence, living by his efforts, so that he could utter the truth and make his voice heard.

To marry for love and to rear children who would come to know that the service of God is perfect freedom.

By the grace of God and his own talents, Russell Kirk achieved all three ends and provided a raison d'etre for all of us.

How important has Russell Kirk been to the conservative movement? You can no more separate the two than you can separate the vine from the branches.

In summing up the conservative movement, George Will once remarked that before there was Ronald Reagan there was Barry Goldwater; and before there was Barry Goldwater, there was National Review; and before there was National Review, there was Bill Buckley.

But Will did not go far enough. Before there was Bill Buckley, there was Russell Kirk, who understood that ideas, as Reagan once said, "truly rule our world." Dr. Kirk and his many many works will endure because they are filled with the ideas and the virtues that the world must have if it is to endure.

Thank you.

Lee Edwards, Ph.D., is a Distinguished Fellow in Conservative Thought at The Heritage Foundation, Washington, D.C. Dr. Edwards has published thirteen books, including a political history of the American conservative movement and a forthcoming history of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI). This essay was presented as the concluding talk at the ISI Graduate Fellows Retreat, Culture and Tradition: Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind Today, June 7, 2003, in Mecosta, Michigan. A version of it has been published in Italian on the cultural weekly magazine il Domenicale, on the June 21, 2003 issue.

 

American Civilization:
Older than You Think
by Gleaves Whitney

The book that made Russell Kirk famous was The Conservative Mind. The book that made him great was The Roots of American Order. A comparison of the two books shows how Kirk’s historical vision became more far-seeing from the 1950s to the 1970s, during the first two decades of his career.

The timing of The Conservative Mind was serendipitous. It appeared in 1953, shortly after the progressive literary critic Lionel Trilling claimed that there were no more conservative intellectuals in America. Conservatism, argued Trilling, had been reduced to “irritable mental gestures.” Kirk saw the latent possibilities in American conservative thought better than Trilling did. His Conservative Mind would seize the threads of conservative thought that ran through American culture, and organize them and work them into a coherent pattern. The resulting picture would make an important contribution to America’s understanding of herself.

In The Conservative Mind Kirk examined the thought of 31 men – from Edmund Burke and John Adams to George Santayana and T. S. Eliot – demonstrating that Anglo-American culture was not just progressive but also strongly traditionalist. The traditions from which early Americans drew most directly were British in origin. The experience with representative government, the body of common law, the similar folkways, the shared language and literature – all of course were traceable to the British Isles. Kirk’s trans-Atlantic pantheon of thinkers left no doubt that Philadelphia was the offspring of London, which would influence the former colonies both during and after the American Revolution, beyond even the formative years of the republic.

Yet, already in The Conservative Mind one sees the seed idea for an even greater vision. Among the more obscure but fascinating figures in the 1953 book was a nineteenth-century American writer named Orestes Brownson. Brownson had been a communist before his conversion to Catholicism. Few Americans today know it, but Brownson coined an expression that President John F. Kennedy would co-opt in his famous Inaugural Address: “Ask not what your country can do for you, but ask what you can do for your country.” (Kennedy, alas, never attributed Brownson.)

More significantly, Brownson wrote a book that Kirk regarded as one of the better treatments of political thought and institutions in the United States; it was called The American Republic, and it would give form to Kirk’s vision of Western civilization and America’s place in it. In The American Republic Brownson argued that each great nation seemed to have a civilizing, even a providential mission. So, for example, the great mission of the Hebrews was to receive God’s revelation and articulate the moral code by which all humankind should live. The great mission of the Greeks was to discover the universal laws of thought and principles of aesthetics. The great mission of the Romans was to establish a just and ordered regime under the rule of law, etc.

America, too, was a great nation – a novus ordo seclorum – a new order of the ages. But what was her civilizing mission? Brownson speculated that it was to learn the lessons previous civilizations could teach, exceed them where possible, and reconcile the claims of order with those of freedom. This last idea regarding order and freedom would take hold of Kirk’s imagination and animate much of his work.

In the early 1970s, some two decades after The Conservative Mind appeared, Kirk would flesh out Brownson’s speculations in his masterpiece, The Roots of American Order. Like the 1953 book, the timing of The Roots would be serendipitous and would further America’s understanding of herself. Appearing in 1974 just prior to the nation’s bicentennial celebrations, The Roots was not just a rehash of the British elements in American thought and culture. Rather, Kirk cast his net wider to show the extent to which the American mind owed great debts to the Continent and Holy Lands. Paradoxically, the American Revolution – the “miracle in Philadelphia” – could not have occurred had it not been for the salutary influence that ancient cities like Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome exerted on the American mind.

Take the idea of freedom. In The Roots Kirk showed how even in its American formulations, the idea of freedom is meaningless – even dangerous – without a strong leavening of order. Many young people nowadays balk at such a notion; their ideal is the unencumbered self; and their credo is, “do your own thing.” But what many young people today fail to realize is that freedom can only exist if it is in right relation to order. The two are always in tension: too much order, and the polity devolves into cultural, social, or political tyranny; too much freedom, and the polity dissolves in anarchy, chaos, and license. The challenge is always to balance the claims of order with those of freedom. Only then can a “tolerable order” (one of Kirk’s favorite expressions) be achieved.

But where does this idea of ordered freedom come from? Certainly not from the utopian dreams or ideological formulations of radicals. Kirk shows, on the contrary, how good order arises from the accumulated wisdom of the species. It is knowledge gained in a tough school – the school of historical experience. For this reason, America’s founding fathers recognized that American history did not start strictly in 1776, when independence was declared, or in 1492, when, as the old children’s rhyme says, “Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” No, the founders recognized that American history had even deeper roots that gave the nation sustenance. Those roots went back to ancient, medieval, and early modern peoples, who left posterity insights into the idea of a tolerable order. The Hebrew patriarchs and prophets, for example, left an unrivaled patrimony of moral order. Jesus, St. Paul, and other Christian apostles left a timeless legacy of spiritual order. Pythagoras and Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, left an enduring tradition of philosophical order. And Cicero and Roman republicans left a muscular heritage of juridical and political order. Deep roots indeed.

Once Rome was “baptized” by Christianity, by men such as St. Ambrose and St. Augustine of Hippo, the foundations of Christendom would be set in place, and Western civilization would arise. A significant branch of that civilization would include the British achievement and, by extension, the American achievement.

It was fortunate for humankind that America’s founding fathers understood the civilizational contributions of Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, and London. It was fortunate that the founders incorporated many of those contributions into the life and institutions of the new American polity. The “miracle in Philadelphia” was very much a miracle of the ages. Because the founders got freedom right, because they understood that freedom can only exist in tension with a tolerable order, America had the opportunity to be “a city upon a hill.” In The Roots of American Order, Kirk showed how this great city was built on the foundations of still older cities.

Whether the city continues to be built depends on the knowledge and commitment of the rising generation. “Will the moral and social order that Americans have known for two centuries and more endure throughout the twenty-first century?” Kirk asked. “That may depend on whether enough men and women in these United States, informed by study of the institutions and convictions that have been developed over three thousand years, make up their minds to stand by the Permanent Things.”

Gleaves Whitney is the director of the Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies, and is the first senior fellow of the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal, Mecosta, Michigan. A version of this essay has been published in Italian on the cultural weekly magazine il Domenicale, on the June 21, 2003 issue.
 

Russell Kirk and His Quest
by Annette Y. Kirk

For those of us who knew and loved Russell Kirk, the promulgation of his wise words is both a duty and an honor. In this regard, T.S .Eliot’s words seem especially appropriate:

“The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.”

During the thirty years I was married to Russell, I witnessed time and again his ability not only to interest his listeners but to inspire them as well. Russell strove to write evocative prose in an effort to reach those who perceived that civilization was fast becoming decadent. He sought to articulate this loss and to give hope that renewal was possible by reminding us that if there was to be an outer order in society, there needed to be an inner order in the lives of its members .He spoke to us of an eternal contract between those who have died, those who are living and those who are yet to come and of the paradoxes and mysteries of life.

Russell desired us to recognize that a conservative disposition always displays piety toward the wisdom of its ancestors. By piety he meant reverence not only for things spiritual but also for habit, custom, tradition and history which provides us with an understanding of the limits of our intellects. He taught the young that their role here was important beyond themselves and beyond politics. Whenever he told them tales of wonder---often of his own invention---he held them in charmed awe.

Russell’s emphasis on things of the heart and the hearth was evident in his enjoyment of everyday life. He derived profound insights from ordinary events, from reading to our four daughters, from gardening and when on long walks. “In the spring of life,” he reflected, “nearly everything is wondrous. The fortunate are those who have not lost their sense of wonder; who subsist upon the bread of spirit, laughing at the stones of dullness and hard materialism….Only by transcending the ravenous ego, and by sharing their joy with others, do mortals come to know their true enduring selves and to put on immortality.”

For two decades, weekend seminars were held here for students and scholars several times a year. These seminars addressed a variety of topics including, “Our Classical Patrimony”, “Historical Consciousness”, “Literature in an Ideological Age”, and “Can Virtue Be Taught?” During the year, several graduate students and scholars resided here in the village of Mecosta while working on their dissertations or on their books.

A year after Russell died, in 1995, my son-in-law, Jeffrey Nelson, an editor and publisher, and I founded the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal to continue these seminars and the residential program here as well as to arrange for publication of Russell’s books and the cultural quartery that he founded, THE UNIVERSITY BOOOKMAN.

This year many events are occurring to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of THE CONSERVATIVE MIND, a book the New York Times said made conservatism respectable, gave it an identity, a geneology and catalyzed the postwar conservative movement.” In his most well known book, Russell set forth this description, “The conservative is concerned , first of all, for the regeneration of spirit and character—with the perennial problem of the inner order of the soul, the restoration of the ethical understanding, and the religious sanction upon which any life worth living is founded. This is conservatism at its highest.”

Annette Y. Kirk is founder and president of the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal in Mecosta, Michigan. A version of this essay has been published in Italian on the cultural weekly magazine il Domenicale, on the June 21, 2003 issue.