Orestes Brownson’s presence looms large in Russell Kirk’s celebrated 1953 tome, in large part because, for Kirk, Brownson represents a luminous thinker unjustly neglected by modern scholars. Even further, Brownson seems to be a central figure not only in the nineteenth-century development—or maintenance—of order in American society, but, for Kirk, is someone whose prose remains genuinely instructive for contemporary citizens; he is “one of those dead who give us life. . . .”