Hail Captain Kirk.(The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot )(Book Review)

The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot (1953) By Russell Kirk

Russell Kirk's classic text The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot turns 50 this year. Kirk's civilized polemic has persuaded generations of conservatives that they are not alone in their political instincts. Recently, C-SPAN paired Kirk with William F. Buckley, Jr. in an episode of its acclaimed "American Writers" series as founders of American conservatism.

Seen from the post-Reagan, post-Berlin Wall, post-Fox News era, it may be hard to see what the fuss was about when this book was first published. Conservative pundits are now easy to find, conservative books regularly climb the bestseller lists, and influential think tanks promote conservative positions. But in 1953 Kirk was almost alone, and his discovery of an Anglo-American conservative tradition was a major intellectual event. Publications from Time to the New York Times Book Review discussed this polished dissertation from a young Michigan scholar fresh from St. Andrew's University in Scotland.

The book is an assault on every liberal piety of the 1950s, from urban renewal to the inevitability of a socialist future, from a limitless notion of "rights" to the belief that a tolerable society could survive without faith and community. It suggested that political liberalism had brought "the decay of manners, the corruption of morals, the discontent of a proletarian population [and] the mass mind that is the consequence of intellectual vulgarization." The surest way to preserve freedom and prosperity, Kirk argued, was to revive older conservative perspectives. The book is also an extended reflection on our British heritage. Kirk identified the places in Britain's history in which our traditions of ordered liberty, free markets, respect for custom, and individual freedom are rooted.

The introduction, "The Idea of Conservatism," is perhaps the best-known part of the book. Common wisdom in the '50s held that conservatism had no guiding ideals, but merely defended whatever existed. Kirk, however, identified six basic principles that united most conservatives: a belief in a transcendent order; affection for the variety and mystery of human existence; conviction that society requires classes; belief that freedom and property are closely linked; faith in custom and convention; and a recognition that change for its own sake is not reform. Kirk answered the strongest criticism of conservatism by explaining that these principles were not mere defenses of the status quo but the flexible supports of a stable social order. Conservatives now had a baseline of ...