Russell Kirk Lives On

We support our Publishers and Content Creators. You can view this story on their website by CLICKING HERE.

Russell Kirk is best described as a cheerful malcontent: ever aware that we are peering over the brink into a gulf of dissolution, yet filled with wonder and gratitude at the fact that “you and I are moral beings meant to accomplish something good, in a small way or a big, in this temporal world.”

A world that damns tradition, lauds equality, and welcomes change; a world that has clutched Rousseau, swallowed him down, and demanded prophets yet more radical; a world scarred by industrialism, standardized by the common man, consolidated by government; a world harrowed by war, trembling between the colossi of East and West, and peering over the brink into a gulf of dissolution. So Burke would see us, and know he had failed.1

Russell Kirk wrote these words in 1950 in an attempt to answer the question, “How dead is Edmund Burke?” Looking over the ruins of the first half of the twentieth century, Kirk saw little, if any, remnant of the principles for which Burke stood in his own day. By the close of the eighteenth century, any widespread adherence to custom, prescription, and ordered liberty in the West had been swept away by what Burke called “armed doctrine”2—the twin forces of revolution and ideology. Even by the point of his own death, Burke knew he had failed. He spent the majority of his parliamentary career in the opposition; worse still, the acquittal of Warren Hastings in 1795 put a dismal end to Burke’s longest fought battle in the House of Commons. He died two years later.

As a politician, Burke certainly failed. Yet, as Kirk writes,

Burke was more than a defeated politician. He was the founder of modern conservative thought; and most of what genuine conservatism survives among us, in the English-speaking world, is the shadow of Burke’s creation; and so he is not wholly dead.3

Today, seventy-four years after Kirk wrote this seminal essay, Burke is anything but dead. And the lion’s share of the credit for this goes to Kirk himself, whom Roger Scruton called “Burke’s most original American disciple.”4

I start with Burke because Kirk did; and conservative thought relies on tradition. In the American context, conservatism comes down to us from Burke by way of Kirk: from an eighteenth-century Anglo- Irish statesman through a twentieth-century American man of letters. The world described by Kirk in 1950—the world that signified Burke’s failure—is hardly dissimilar to the one Kirk faced at the end of his life, and the one that confronts us today. We might well ask now, over two centuries after Burke’s death and a mere three decades after Kirk’s, how dead is Russell Kirk? Does he see us, in the year 2024, and acknowledge that he, too, has failed?

The Politics of Prudence

Russell Kirk stood at the helm of the American conservative movement for the greater part of the twentieth century, up until his death in 1994. However, like Burke, Kirk is hardly a household name today. Also like Burke, he is anything but dead. For whatever principled conservatism survives among us, as Americans in the twenty-first century, is the shadow of Kirk’s efforts.

Russell Kirk originally published The Politics of Prudence in 1993. The book is a compilation of lectures, most of which were delivered at the Heritage Foundation, over the course of Kirk’s prolific career.

Now in its third edition, three decades removed from its first printing, The Politics of Prudence is a testament to how Kirk’s conservative outlook weathered the storm of the second half of the twen- tieth century, and a guide to how we might proceed in the equally uneasy twenty-first.

Kirk is difficult to summarize. The special challenge of The Politics of Prudence is that it is an edited collection of lectures, delivered at various points in Kirk’s life. The breadth of topics is wide. Another difficulty is the nature of Kirk’s thought in general. Many of Kirk’s expressly political works, such as The Conservative Mind, are works of synthesis. They work not so much in service of one distinct thesis, but with the objective of leaving an impres- sion on the moral and political imagination of the reader. To do so, Kirk draws from a wide range of writers, statesmen, and events in order to weave a coherent—if not discursive—narrative of what it looks like to gaze at the world as a conservative.

One clear through-line of the book, however, is Kirk’s disdain for ideology. He sets up this project in the first chapter, titled “The Errors of Ideology,” in which he describes ideology as nothing less than an “inverted religion.” Following the works of Kenneth Minogue and J. L. Talmon, Kirk defines ideology as a “dogmatic political theory which is an endeavor to substitute secular goals and doctrines for religious goals and doctrines,”5 often with the ultimate goal of liberation—the ideologue’s substitute for salvation. This is pernicious because the attempt to estab- lish, by one’s own efforts and knowledge, a heaven on earth, results in “terrestrial hells,” since ideolo- gies “corrupt the vision of salvation through grace in death into false promises of happiness in this mundane realm.”6

For evidence, we do not need to look any further than the calamities of the twentieth century, themselves a product of a tripartite battle between three great ideologies: fascism, communism, and liberalism. Though it is abundantly clear that the societies fueled by liberal ideology in the last century offered far preferable conditions of life than the societies fueled by fascism or communism, we must resist the temptation to rest assured that the ideology of the west is beyond reproach:

An innocent ideology is as unlikely a contraption as a Christian Diabolism; to attach the sinister tag “ideology” would be like inviting friends to a harmless Halloween bonfire, but announcing the party as the new Holocaust.7

For Kirk, all ideologies, no matter the trappings, are dangerous lies, since they demand allegiance to a false religion.

How does one avoid falling into the clutches of disastrous ideology? Kirk’s answer is prudence.“To be ‘prudent’ means to be judicious, cautious, sagacious. Plato, and later Burke, instructs us that in the statesman, prudence is the first of the virtues.”8 The first step is to recognize the imperfectibility of man, and the inability of political policies and institutions to correct for this fact. Political stability is possible only when the statesman and the citizenry embrace the principle that “Utopia means ‘Nowhere,’ ”9 and that institutions are far easier to destroy than to build, let alone rebuild.

What is more, we avoid becoming ideologues by living with more than just ideas—“abstractions, fancies, for the most part unrelated to personal and social reality”10—and immersing ourselves in customs, conventions, and a concrete sense of patrimony. After all, errant political philosophies like liberalism and Marxism can be conquered at the philosophical level because they are metaphysically incoherent; they cannot but dwell in the abstract. But a politics of principled realism must gain footing from the “artificial products of a long social experience, the result of centuries of trial and reflection and sacrifice.”11

Ten Conservative Principles

In the place of abstract theory, Kirk offers concise lists in order to introduce his readers to various principles, figures, and events that exemplify conservative thought and action. The Politics of Prudence contains four of these lists, the first of which is titled “Ten Conservative Principles,” which is only one iteration of many that Kirk published throughout his life. Alongside his warnings against ideology, the ten principles serve as the foundation for the rest of The Politics of Prudence, and as a useful summary of Kirk’s political vision.

Kirk urges us to take such a list with the following grain of salt: “Being neither a religion nor an ideology, the body of opinion termed conservatism possesses no Holy Writ and no Das Kapital to provide dogmata.”12 Rather, the conservative can receive general direction from the words and actions of those who share an anti-ideological frame of mind. Kirk describes his first list as a “summary of conservative assumptions,” that can find expression in a diversity of ways, depending on circumstances.13

The first of these principles is the most important: “The conservative believes that there exists an enduring moral order.”14 What is more, this order is made for man—whose nature is also enduring and unchanging. A collapse of moral order all but guarantees a collapse of the social order; and attempts to change morality, and to change man along with it, will certainly reach the same disastrous end.

Second, the conservative adheres to custom, convention, and continuity: “[A]dherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried,” in Lincoln’s memorable words.15 Similarly, the third principle highlights the value of prescription, a word seldom used today outside of a physician’s office. In a remarkable turn of phrase, Kirk defends the virtue of prescription by asserting that “the great mysterious incorporation of the human race has acquired a prescriptive wisdom far greater than any man’s petty private rationality.”16

The fourth principle takes on the subject of the book: namely, that conservatives are primarily concerned with prudence. In matters of policy, the prudent statesman judges consequences and weighs options, knowing full well that any action—most especially rash action—will likely result in unforeseen evils, for “sudden and slashing reforms are as perilous as sudden and slashing surgery.”17

Kirk’s fifth principle recognizes the principle of variety, by which he means that stable and long-last- ing societies contain varying, often intricately linked, levels of material condition, power, and modes of life. Egalitarianism and uniformity promote stag- nation, at best, and most leveling attempts merely replace one set of hierarchies with another.

Sixth, conservatives embrace human imperfectibility as an irrevocable feature of earthly existence. A society will never be perfect, and anyone who promises such will most certainly introduce terrestrial hell. This is not Kirk’s call to remain complacent with societal ills. Rather, it is a call to proceed with caution, recognizing that “all we reasonably can expect is a tolerably ordered, just and free society, in which some evils, maladjustments, and suffering will continue to lurk.”18

The seventh principle emphasizes that freedom and private property are inextricably linked. Wide- spread ownership of private property not only ensures a general level of productivity and quality of living, but also instills individuals, families, and communities with a sense of responsibility and stewardship:

To be able to retain the fruits of one’s labor; to be able to see one’s work made permanent; to be able to bequeath one’s property to one’s posterity; to be able to rise from the natural condition of grinding poverty to the security of enduring accomplishment; to have something that is really one’s own.19

This is not a liberal understanding of private property, but a deeply rooted sense of the value of productivity and labor, and what is at stake when this is lost.

Eighth, conservatives value voluntary community, while resisting involuntary collectivism. One of the clearest lessons from the twentieth century is the horrors of collectivism. While many Western liberals and libertarians since the Second World War have abused this lesson to promote a corrosive individualism, conservatives need to be ever wary of centralized, statewide efforts to curtail the freedoms of communities. For Kirk, the more distant one gets from one’s community, the more power grows abstract and vague. Following Edmund Burke and his“little platoons,”20 Kirk urges us that many small, strong intentional communities acting in concert is far preferable to a centralized administrative state composed of bureaucrats and experts.

Kirk’s ninth principle stresses the need for “prudent restraints upon power and upon human passions.”21 In order to avoid tyranny, the power of one’s government needs to be checked; yet, individuals can only be so free to do as they please. For in the absence of reasonable constraints upon human action, “society falls into anarchy,” and “anarchy never lasts long,” since experience teaches us that nature abhors a vacuum of power, and what succeeds anarchy will most likely be a tyranny or oligarchy. Thus, conservatives must uphold prudent restraints on both individual and corporate power; these are preserved by both habit and custom, as well as legislative design, so that a government can justly maintain “a healthy tension between the claims of authority and the claims of liberty.”22

The tenth principle addresses the relationship between continuity and change: acknowledging that change is both natural and good, the conservative avoids the “cult of Progress” by keeping in mind that history is not an inevitably linear march toward greater heights, but a constant tension between what Coleridge called Permanence and Progression. “The Permanence of a society is formed by those enduring interests and convictions that give us stability and continuity… the Progression in a society is that spirit and that body of talents which urge us on to prudent reform and improvement.”23 Without a healthy dose of both, we steer ourselves toward anarchy or stagnation.

So who are the conservatives today? Along what lines can we judge the prudent versus the ideologically enthused? Kirk answers with an approving nod to Eric Voegelin: the battle today is not between liberals and totalitarians, but between those who

fancy that the temporal order is the only order, and that material needs are their only needs, and that they may do as they like with the human patrimony. On the other side of [the] line are all those people who recognize an enduring moral order in the universe, a constant human nature, and high duties toward the order spiritual and the order temporal.24

Here, Kirk returns to the first and most important principle—viz., adherence to an unchanging moral order according to which humans are made—and deepens the point. Such an order implies that man has participation in and a duty toward that which is beyond him. Without this attitude, we risk “total surrender to the antagonist world.”25

An Appeal to the Moral Imagination

“We have taken arms against a sea of troubles,” Kirk proclaims. And the primary advance of this battle depends on “the recovery of right reason and moral imagination.”26 For guidance, Kirk devotes the bulk of The Politics of Prudence to the individuals, books, and events that give form to his principles. We meet the usual suspects—Burke, Tocqueville, and Disraeli—along with some less popular figures like W. H. Bradley, Paul Elmer More, Wilhelm Roepke, and Orestes Brownson.

One could certainly quibble with some of Kirk’s choices, and perhaps we should. For example, Kirk devotes an entire chapter to the Southern poet, Donald Davidson, lauding his contribution to anti-modern thought in postbellum America. As compelling as Davidson’s writing can be, he was also a staunch segregationist, and his position on race was not incidental to his overall outlook. Conservatism slips into reaction when the desire to preserve an institution eclipses moral imperatives. Kirk would certainly agree, and therefore his unqualified praise of Davidson is a blemish on an otherwise commendable book.

But we risk missing the heart of Kirk’s project if we take his suggestions too rigidly. Many of his choices are personal, particularly his list of “Ten Exemplary Conservatives.” Though all of the individuals he chooses share “the longing for order and permanence, in the person and in the republic,” Kirk expresses that he is “including particular public figures or shapers of ideas who formed my conservative mind.”27

Among these shapers of ideas are a good many authors who never “plunged into the hurly-burly of practical politics.”28 Kirk is emphatic that men of letters have the most influence on the direction of culture and morals. Just as the life of societies is infinitely complex and mysterious, so too is the life of an individual. Only a lunatic would claim that his opinions and inclinations are the sum total of his own fully-reasoned propositions. Nay, one discovers his moral and political convictions just as much as he consciously becomes a partisan of a particular politics—conservative, liberal, radical, or otherwise. This discovery is rarely produced by tracts of political theory, rather by great works of art: “It is not civics courses, primarily, that form minds and consciences of the rising generation: rather, it is the study of humane letters.”29

This is why, aside from Edmund Burke, T.S. Eliot figures most prominently in Kirk’s thought. Eliot was a convicted thinker, famously declaring his critical stance as “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, [and] Anglo-Catholic in religion.” Less noted is the line that immediately follows:

I am quite aware that the first term is completely vague, and easily lends itself to clap-trap; I am aware that the second term is at present without definition, and easily lends itself to what is almost worse than clap-trap, I mean temperate conservatism; the third term does not rest with me to define.30

In other words, “One cannot get drunk or quench one’s thirst with labels on bottles.”31 Kirk ably depicts Eliot’s ability to transcend the ideological fancies of the early twentieth century in pursuit of the “enduring truths and ways of life and standards of order.”32

For Kirk, Eliot is the modern man of letters par excellence; he saw in Eliot a deep reverence for the “Permanent Things” alongside a healthy avoidance of unnecessary ideological commitments. Both of these are necessary for the cultivation of the moral imagination, which must be the root of one’s politics.

A Final Exhortation

Many conservative writers are driven by some combination of anger, pessimism, and cynicism. Thankfully, Russell Kirk was not one of them. The Politics of Prudence is specifically addressed to what Kirk called “the rising generation.” And his “Exhortatory Epilogue” indicates a profound, if tempered, sense of hope that despite our wounded nature, some humble redemption can be accomplished in this valley of tears. Like Barry Goldwater, Kirk is best described as a cheerful malcontent: ever aware that we are peering over the brink into a gulf of dissolution, yet filled with wonder and gratitude at the fact that

you and I are put into this present realm of being as into a testing ground…. As Stefan Andres expresses it, “We are God’s Utopia.” You and I are moral beings meant to accomplish something good, in a small way or a big, in this temporal world.

Conservatives rarely win. Indeed, the history of conservatism since Burke has been a salvaging act, a series of “rear-guard actions against the antagonists of order.” This is not so much a lamentation as a recognition that the push for conscious conservation only emerges in times of disorder. The irony of conservatism is that the more relevant it is, the worse things probably are. The best we can do is to glean some guidance from the past in order to live in accordance with right reason in our own time and place.

This task is daunting at an individual level, and often impossible at a collective one. Yet, if we lose our sense of reality and allow our energies to be consumed by flights of fancy, we risk carrying on the more obscene habits of the twentieth century. At all times our choice is between order and disorder; prudence and ideology; truth and falsehood. The Politics of Prudence is a welcome guide to the rising generation into a more dignified way of life.

Republished with gracious permission from New Polity.

The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now.

Notes:

1 Russell Kirk, “How Dead is Edmund Burke?,” The Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal, November 30, 2009. Originally published in Queen’s Quarterly 57 (Summer 1950): 160–71.

2 Edmund Burke, “Two Letters Addressed to a Member of the Present Parliament, on the Proposals for Peace with the Regicide Directory of France by the Right Honourable Edmund Burke: Letter No. 1, On the Overtures of Peace,” from Select Works of Edmund Burke, vol. 3 (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, Inc.), 59–152 at 76.

3 Kirk, “How Dead is Edmund Burke?”

4 From Roger Scruton’s foreword to Russell Kirk, Edmund Burke: A Genius Reconsidered (Wilmington, DE: Inter- collegiate Studies Institute, 2009), ix.

5 Russell Kirk, The Politics of Prudence (Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 2023), 5.

6 Ibid.

7 Ibid., 8–9.

8 Ibid., 10.

9 Ibid.

10 Ibid., 14.

11 Ibid., 21.

12 Ibid., 17.

13 Ibid., 19.

14 Ibid.

15 Abraham Lincoln, “Cooper Union Address,” February 27, 1860.

16 Kirk, Politics of Prudence, 21.

17 Ibid., 22.

18 Ibid., 23.

19 Ibid., 24.

20 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co., 1987), 41.

21 Kirk, Politics of Prudence, 25.

22 Ibid., 26.

23 Ibid., 27.

24 Ibid., 30–31.

25 Ibid., 45.

26 Ibid.

27 Ibid., 66.

28 Ibid., 86.

29 Ibid., 9.

30 T. S. Eliot, For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order (London: Faber & Gwyer, 1928), ix.

31 Paul Valéry, Cahiers, ed. Judith Robinson (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1973), 1220–21.

32 Ibid., 84.

The featured image, uploaded by Crisco 1492, is “Sillhouette of man cut-out on rooftop, Windsor, Ontario, 2014-12-07.” This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.