MICHAEL P. FEDERICI is Professor of Political Science
at Mercyhurst College and the author of Eric
Voegelin: The Restoration of Order

Russell Kirk: A Critical Biography of a
Conservative Mind by James E. Person,
Jr. (Lanham, MD: Madison Books,
1999). 249 pp.
Russell Kirk and the Age of Ideology by W.
Wesley McDonald. (Columbia, MO:
University of Missouri Press, 2004).
243 pp.
The Postmodern Imagination of Russell
Kirk by Gerald J. Russello. (Columbia,
MO: University of Missouri Press,
2007). 248 pp.
The Essential Russell Kirk: Selected
Essays, ed. George A. Panichas.
(Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2007).
642 pp.

The decades that follow the death of
prominent intellectuals are filled with
attempts by detractors and supporters to
assess the importance of their work and life.
This is more than a matter of making a
legacy; it can determine the prejudice with
which future generations read a thinker’s
works or if they are read at all. Not long after
his passing in 1994, books and articles appeared
that purported to provide an estimation
of Russell Kirk’s contribution to literature,
letters, social criticism, political thought,
and politics. In this early phase, critics have
speculated about the influence of Kirk and his
relevance to the coming generations. It is also
part of the early assessment of Kirk to debate
the record, that is, to get the record straight
regarding what he claimed and believed.

A man of letters and liberal learning, Kirk
was a prolific author whose writings are not
confined to one or even two academic fields.
Therefore, the evaluation of his work is far
more difficult than it is for more specialized
authors. Assessing Kirk’s contribution is also
encumbered by his avowed conservatism.
Liberals and progressives are inclined to
dismiss Kirk’s work because it is an affront to
their social and political beliefs. Conservatives,
by contrast, are prone to overlook its
weaknesses because they find in it validation
of their social, religious, and political beliefs.
While this is generally the case, some conservatives
of Straussian or libertarian influence,
like Harry Jaffa, Walter Berns, Peter Viereck,
and Frank Meyer, were contemptuous of
Kirk. While Kirk did not relish the cultural
and intellectual wars, he did not always shy
away from them. Consequently, the evalua-
tion of his contribution to American letters
and life is likely to be part of the same
conflicts that provided the context for much
of his writings. In certain cases, the debate
has more of the tone of a political campaign
than of an emotionally detached discussion
among scholars and critics.

Alan Wolfe, for example, published a
review of George Panichas’s anthology of
Kirk’s writings, The Essential Russell Kirk, in
the July 2007 issue of the New Republic that
portrays Kirk as a hypocritical conservative
ideologue who repeated a few unoriginal
ideas in his more than two dozen books and
thousands of essays, articles, and reviews. If
Wolfe is correct in his evaluation, Kirk’s
influence will likely fade before too long or
he will be cast as a right-wing intellectual
charlatan who failed to counter the thesis of
Louis Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition in America.
In 1953, Hartz argued that there is only one
American tradition and it is of liberal pedigree.
Conservatism has never been a major
part of American intellectual or political life.
The publication of four recent books including
the Panichas anthology (Russell Kirk and
the Age of Ideology, Russell Kirk: A Critical
Biography of a Conservative Mind, The
Postmodern Imagination of Russell Kirk, The
Essential Russell Kirk: Selected Essays), suggests
otherwise. These books call into question
Wolfe’s assessment of Kirk’s contribution
to American thought and his interpretation
of Kirk’s work. They also, by implication,
question the validity of the Hartz thesis.
They consider Kirk a serious thinker who
added intellectual weight to the conservative
movement when it needed it most, as the
welfare state and war state were on the rise
and standards in education and culture generally
were moving toward one or the other
progressive ideology and away from the
Great Tradition. Wolfe may not agree with
Kirk’s intuitions about the American social
and political order but his criticisms of Kirk
go beyond professional and civil disagreement
to vituperation. That Wolfe is so annoyed
by Kirk’s ideas and that he feels
compelled to attack him in such an uncivil
manner may indicate that Kirk’s influence
and the power of his ideas are far greater than
Wolfe cares to admit. If Kirk is truly the
mediocre thinker that Wolfe claims, then
why not ignore him and allow the judgment
of time to pass his works into obscurity? Or
why not, at the very least, take his views at
face value and provide counter-arguments
that expose their weaknesses. Rather than
rise to the challenge, Wolfe dismisses Kirk
with arrogant contempt.

Russell Kirk is best known for his book
The Conservative Mind (1953) and it is because
of it that he is considered by many to
be the father of American intellectual conservatism.
As George Nash makes clear in his
The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America
Since 1945, American intellectual conservatism
is by no means a monolithic movement.
In fact, Kirk made great efforts to distance
himself and his Burkean conservatism from its
libertarian and neoconservative varieties. He
was intent on articulating what he deemed to
be authentic conservatism, yet he was no
political ideologue. In fact, he deplored all
attempts to replace the open search for truth
with ideological dogma. For this reason, his
books and essays do not contain political
platforms or plans for how political power
should be used to solve social problems. Nor
do they promise a social, political, or existential
reality that differs in structure from what
history demonstrates.

Kirk cautioned that the devil we know is
apt to be better than the one we bring to life
by attempting to change the human condition.
His canons of conservatism are less like
dogmatic principles than they are reflections
of a disposition of character and mind. They
are not a blueprint for social or political
action; they are guiding principles for those
who wish to be liberally educated and possess
a corresponding character. Kirk’s aim was
intellectual insight and in its pursuit he spent
most of his adult life living as an independent
scholar. He wrote thirty books, including
three novels and three volumes of short
stories and thousands of essays, book reviews,
articles, and newspaper columns. The Panichas
anthology contains a wide array of Kirk’s
writings and is a good starting point for
readers who are curious about Kirk’s many
topics, although it does not include selections
from his novels or short stories. In addition to
a preface, an overview of each section and a
brief description of each entry are included as
well as a bibliography of Kirk’s books, including
those he edited and selected, secondary
sources on Kirk from such authors as
M.E. Bradford, Francis Canavan, Russell
Hittinger, John Lukacs, Forrest McDonald,
Gerhart Niemeyer, and Peter Stanlis.

The four books considered in this essay
were written or compiled by authors who are
sympathetic to Kirk’s general worldview.
Person’s Russell Kirk: A Critical Biography of a
Conservative Mind, is the most effusive in its
praise for Kirk. Its virtue is that it covers the
wide spectrum of Kirk’s work in an expository
and systematic way. For readers who are
new to Kirk’s work, it provides a clear
overview of the many aspects of his intellectual
life and a biographical description of
Kirk’s life. Person traces the familial and
intellectual influences on Kirk and he draws
insightful parallels between Kirk and thinkers
such as G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, and J.
R. R. Tolkien. His book includes an extensive
biographical chapter and separate chapters
on Kirk’s short stories and novels. Of the
three books, this one devotes the most attention
to describing Kirk’s fiction and placing
it within his larger corpus. Person argues that
Kirk’s fiction has been unjustifiably overlooked
compared to his other works. He uses
secondary literature and reviews of Kirk’s
fiction to illustrate the high regard in which
it was held by such literary figures as Madeleine
L’Engle, Ray Bradbury, Flannery O’Connor,
and T. S. Eliot.

What Person’s book does not do is search
for the philosophical shortcomings or underdeveloped
aspects of Kirk’s theories. It also
classifies Kirk as a “strict constructionist” and
an opponent of historicism. The first case is
a misreading of Kirk’s constitutionalism and
the second is a partial truth in need of careful
analysis and theoretical distinction. Kirk was
not a strict constructionist in the sense of
individuals who literally and narrowly read
and interpret the Constitution. Kirk favored
“liberal construction” of the Constitution in
a way that was informed by original intent.
He argued for “reasonable attachment” to
the text of the Constitution and he considered
John Marshall as an exemplar of this
approach to jurisprudence. Kirk was no legal
fundamentalist. He understood the need for
judges to exercise prudential judgment but
he also cautioned against giving judges too
much room to reconstruct the Constitution
in accordance with their particular ideological
preferences. Adherence to the Burkean
dictum that change must maintain continuity
with the past animates Kirk’s search for
prudent judgment in law and politics.

McDonald’s book, Russell Kirk and the
Age of Ideology, and Russello’s book, The
Postmodern Imagination of Russell Kirk, provide
a deeper understanding and criticism of
Kirk’s view of history, economics, literature,
education, and more highly specialized topics
like historicism. Kirk opposed abstract
and ahistorical conceptions of history including
those that selectively mined the historical
record in order to support a priori, ideologically-
constructed conceptions of life. But
Kirk did accept the idea of historical meaning
and he insisted that without the concrete
experience of historical life, insights into the
human condition would give way to reified
ideological dogmas like the inevitability of
class warfare and revolution of Marxism.
Meaning could be found in history but not the
logic of its development. History will someday
end but its course and completion are a
mystery. Progress is evident in history but not
inevitable. Likewise, human beings are susceptible
to both losing insights once gained
and failing to live by the wisdom of the ages.

Person’s analysis incorporates much of the
secondary literature on
Kirk including several
book reviews. He does not
hesitate to come to Kirk’s
defense if he feels a critic
has unfairly characterized
Kirk’s work. From this
analysis one gets a sense
for how Kirk’s books were
received both within and
outside the conservative
movement. The final
chapter on Kirk’s significance
and influence is
somewhat skimpy, in part
because the author’s intention
is to provide “a
clear, insightful reading of
[Kirk’s] life and works
through revisiting his own writings and those
of his critics” rather than to “plumb Kirk’s
innermost being [or] venture a greatly ambitious
interpretation of his works” (215). For
this reason, Person’s book is not the place to
find a rigorous examination of Kirk’s contribution
to political, economic, and social
thought.

Person, McDonald, and Russello agree
that Kirk’s chief virtue may be that he
introduced his readers to thinkers who had
been forgotten, were misinterpreted, or who
were in need of reconsideration given the
cultural developments of the twentieth century.
Kirk, for example, was part of a growing
number of scholars who recognized the
relevance and insight of the New Humanism
of Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More. He
also inspired renewed interest in Orestes
Brownson and, most of all, Edmund Burke.
He wrote not only about such thinkers in his
books but he was instrumental in seeing that
their works were brought back into print.
Person also makes clear that Kirk, whatever
one may think of his decision to live in his
ancestral home of rural Michigan, was not an
intellectual recluse or an
antiquarian. Kirk widely
traveled, was a voracious
reader of a variety of
books, and a prolific correspondent.
He exchanged
thoughtful letters
on historical, theoretical,
and economic theories as
well as current affairs with
the likes of William F.
Buckley, Jr., John Lukacs,
Eric Voegelin, T. S. Eliot,
Ray Bradbury, Flannery
O’Connor, and many others.
He also incorporated
the works of contemporary
writers like Wendell
Berry, Robert Nisbet,
David Riesman, and Wilhelm Röpke into his
writings.

McDonald’s book, Russell Kirk and the
Age of Ideology, can be described as an intellectual
biography. It divides Kirk’s work
into categories (e.g., conservatism, moral
imagination, the permanent things, community,
freedom, leadership) that allow for an
examination of the full range of Kirk’s work
with particular attention to his political theory.
It also maintains a level of critical distance
missing from Person’s book. McDonald, for
example, calls into question Kirk’s rejection
of modern technology. To McDonald’s
thinking, Kirk understands that technology
and industrialization can contribute to the
uprooting of communities, but he fails to
search for ways that might allow technology
and economic development to contribute to
community life. It is not that Kirk was
unrealistic about technology. McDonald
explains that, “even in his most nostalgic
moments, he realized that the pastoral world
of sturdy yeoman farmers and the landed
gentry of Jane Austen’s England or the antebellum
South had vanished forever” (135).
But McDonald adds that Kirk’s “recommendations
for controlling the alarming rapid
progress of the modern forces of urbanization
and industrialization were neither precise
nor extensive” (135). Yet McDonald
does not disguise his respect for Kirk. He
believes that Kirk is a seminal thinker who
deserves the attention of scholars who want to
understand American history, American culture,
and the conservative intellectual movement
in America. McDonald identifies the
primary influences on Kirk including Burke,
Brownson, and Babbitt. But he also has a
good sense for Kirk’s indebtedness to John
Lukacs, Christopher Dawson, John Henry
Newman, Eric Voegelin, Wilhelm Röpke,
Robert Nisbet, and T. S. Eliot. Although
McDonald emphasizes Kirk’s rejection of
ideology, Herbert Butterfield is missing from
McDonald’s analysis of Kirk’s historical conservatism.
Butterfield’s little book, A Whig
Interpretation of History, is one that Kirk cited
and one that crystallizes many of Kirk’s
central points regarding ideology and history.
McDonald does emphasize the importance
of the New Humanists on the development
of Kirk’s literary and social criticism.
He explains Kirk’s place in the conservative
movement and his significant differences
with Straussianism and neoconservatism. For
readers interested in understanding the deep
intellectual and political divide between traditional
conservatism and neoconservatism,
McDonald’s final chapter is a good starting
point.

McDonald also does an excellent job explaining
Kirk’s hostility to libertarianism.
The differences between Ludwig von Mises,
for example, and Kirk are significant. The
former subordinates community to economic
freedom while the latter insisted that economic
production and wealth are means to a
higher end: life in community and the development
of the soul. McDonald also explains
Kirk’s depreciation of reason and his emphasis
on intuition. McDonald states Kirk’s view
that “man is aided by intuitive knowledge
supplied by the moral imagination” (77).
This view is difficult to reconcile with Kirk’s
affirmation of the natural law tradition and as
a consequence McDonald considers Kirk’s
understanding of reason “intellectually confusing”
(80). McDonald suggests that Kirk
has undervalued the role of reason in the
search for truth because he overreacts to the
Enlightenment tendency to divorce rationality
from transcendence and tradition.

Gerald J. Russello’s The Postmodern Imagination
of Russell Kirk is unlike both the Person
and McDonald books. It is less interested in
expository analysis and more focused on
Kirk’s imagination and its commonality with
a certain kind of postmodernism. Readers
who are familiar with Kirk may find this
thesis strange, but Russello is careful to qualify
his argument by defining postmodern imagination
in a way that separates the more
radical brand of postmodernism from Kirk’s
work. Kirk was opposed to modernity and
the modern imagination shaped by the Enlightenment
and romantic naturalism. He
took from Voegelin the notion that the very
essence of modernity is gnosticism, a desire
to change the order of being through progressive
or revolutionary politics. Kirk’s work
is an effort to get beyond modernity and to
restore an older way of conceiving of life that
has its roots in the classical and Judeo-Christian
tradition.

Kirk is first and foremost a Burkean. Like
Burke, he believes that “a state without the
means of some change is without the means
of its conservation.” Consequently, Kirk
does not advocate a return to a golden age in
the past. Rather he argues that the past
provides the historical experience that is
necessary to know the boundaries of what is
possible in human affairs. Politics, he never
tired of reminding his readers, is the art of the
possible. At the same time, there is a universal
moral order that is the standard for justice
and happiness. The historical record, as well
as literary representations of the human search
for knowledge of this order, are invaluable
parts of contemporary efforts to know what
is prudent in political and social life. In short,
historical context matters because it creates
inescapable contingencies that modern thinkers
tended to overlook due to their faith in
science and the perfectibility of human nature.
Where Kirk tends to separate from most
postmodernists is that he argued for the
existence of a normative reality that was
known from historical experience and tradition.
If Kirk’s imagination is postmodern, it
is so because it attempts to reconstitute the
older classical and Judeo-Christian tradition
in a way that will carry the West beyond
modernity to an age of moral realism. Kirk
was engaged in an act of recovering order
that creatively integrated the past with the
specific challenges of order in the contemporary
world. The Burkean tension of change
and continuity was at the root of his efforts to
make the past a living force on the present.

Russello struggles to explain Kirk’s individualism
and to reconcile it with the central
role of community in his social and political
theory. Kirk’s individualism is informed by
Aristotle, Burke, and especially Babbitt. It is
a reaction to the atomistic individualism of
utilitarians like Bentham and J. S. Mill,
collectivists like Marx, and the romantic
individualism of Rousseau. It finds its defining
characteristic in a quality of will that
Babbitt called the “inner check” and a quality
of imagination that Burke called the
“moral imagination.” Abiding by the inner
check and moral imagination, the individual
is drawn into community, where the social
and political nature of humans can be actualized
and happiness can be experienced.
Kirk maintains this understanding of community
while rejecting modern collectivism
in all its manifestations. The latter is not
community but, rather, its ideological parody;
Kirk was sensitive to the difference. In this
sense he shared much with the sociologist
Robert Nisbet in arguing for traditional
forms of community that were receptive to
diversity and sectional associations and suspicious
of a conforming uniformity that destroyed
genuine individuality.

Russello, like Person, includes a biographical
chapter but the bulk of his book is
analytical. It has a knack for finding aspects
of Kirk’s work that are less well-known and
explaining their importance. For example,
Brownson’s idea of territorial democracy
influenced Kirk’s understanding of community
and place and their relationship to American
constitutionalism. Politics by legislation
seemed to Kirk to follow the tradition of
Enlightenment rationalism. Territorial democracy,
by contrast, has a more organic
element to it. Traditions develop within the
context of real legal and political disputes that
are worked out in accordance with common-
law principles rather than by the confrontation
of competing ideologies in legislative
politics. This allows for regional and
sectional differences that avoid an artificial
uniformity that crushes local difference and is
blind to community circumstances.

The same is true for Kirk’s view of economics.
He was not an ardent advocate of
capitalism, a term he reminded his readers
that came from Marx. He stood with Röpke
in advocating a “humane economy” that put
community before the utilitarian ends of the
marketplace. Kirk found much of modern
life to be vulgar, and he sought to reorient the
imagination to the beautiful. This meant a
reordering of the goods that constitute the
good society. What mattered most for Kirk
was the order of the soul from which emanated
the order of communities and nations.
The economy, in this sense, was an abstraction
unless it included the full range of human
life, especially those aspects that gave to it its
meaning, purpose, and human texture.

Kirk was not an advocate of state-imposed
uniformity, and he held the American
preference for decentralized political power
and local autonomy as sound prejudice. He
rejected the notion of an “American way of
life” as an empty abstraction that could be
filled, at a given time, with the content of this
or that ideology. Kirk was a patriot but he
was not a nationalist. He opposed an activist
foreign policy that would destroy the traditions
of other nations in order to replace them
with American consumerism and populist
democracy. Kirk was content living in a
diverse world, and he was skeptical that
American values and traditions could be
transplanted to foreign lands. After all, American
values were not themselves one monolithic
set of beliefs; they were multiple sets of
local and regional customs and traditions that
may only be appropriate in certain parts of
the U.S., not across national boundaries.
This was one instance in which Kirk had
profound disagreements with neoconservatives.

What becomes clear from Russello’s book,
whether he intends it or not, is that the
conservative movement has splintered into
intellectual and political factions. As the
movement has grown, Kirk’s place in it has
become more ambivalent in recent years.
Russello, along with Person and McDonald,
suggests that Kirk’s canons of conservatism
“have become hallmarks of most forms of
conservatism since the 1950s” (5). Yet, all
three books illustrate that Kirkian conservatism
is at odds with the kind of contemporary
political conservatism found in the Republican
Party or conservative media outlets. It
also tends to contrast to the kind of intellectual
conservatism found in the academy. The
appropriate question seems to be whether
Kirk’s canons can be identified in conservative
political and intellectual life today. This
does not mean that the absence of Kirk’s
influence on contemporary American politics
is evidence that his ideas lack salience.
Rather, Kirk was not primarily interested in
electoral politics nor did he hold much faith
in academia to restore sound thinking. He
understood that politics was itself determined
by deeper cultural and intellectual influences
that included the arts, literature, philosophy,
religion, and community life. In short, it was
not by politics alone that American and
Western civilization would be restored. Kirk
took the long-term approach. He chose to
make the cultural ground fertile so that in
generations to come the fruits of his intellectual
labor would be a force in the struggle to
improve the quality of civilization. It may be
that his influence will be greater in this
century than the last. Like the conservative
ideas he spent a lifetime explaining, Kirk’s
conservatism requires time to germinate.
Political trends will come and go. Shortsighted
individuals will overreact to the ruptures
of politics. Kirk took the longer view
and thus he recognized with T.S. Eliot that
there are no lost causes because there are no
gained causes. His many books and essays
have fertilized the minds and imaginations of
three generations of Americans. What such
sowings yield may not be known for three
more generations.