Remembering Russell Kirk, 30 Years Later
Thirty years ago today, Russell Amos Kirk died. Even though I was born two years after his passing, I have felt Dr. Kirk’s influence my whole adult life. I first read him as a student at Hillsdale College, where he had once taught. In The Conservative Mind and his other books, I encountered a tradition so much more substantive than the right-wing politics I had known until then.
At the heart of Kirk’s conservative vision is a conviction of the spiritual continuity in Western civilization. He believed that certain “permanent things” – freedom, justice, love – transcend history. Our forebears struggled to preserve them for us, and now their restoration, renovation, and repair is our obligation.
The American Founding plays a key role in Kirk’s account of the permanent things. In The American Cause, The Roots of American Order, and elsewhere, he traced the origins of our constitution from ancient Jerusalem and Athens, to Magna Charta, all the way down to the Framers in Philadelphia. The Founding deserves Americans’ loyalty because is a particular expression of certain universal principles. Our written Constitution, he taught, was one of the great instruments for order in the world – but he did not hubristically believe that Americans could simply achieve world peace by exporting our liberal ideas or institutions. True statesmanship, Kirk knew, requires prudence, not ideological fervor.
Kirk’s conservatism, though, is as much literary as it is political. Many of the writers profiled in The Conservative Mind are poets or novelists, and his finest book is his biography of T.S. Eliot. We do not live by mere logic or a leveling rationality; humane letters are essential to cultivating a people’s moral imagination. Unlike other, more elitist conservatives in the academy, Kirk never saw this high culture as something at odds with the people at large. He believed, instead, that it could be the highest expression of a country’s true spirit.
Read more in Providence.
