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The Essential Russell Kirk: Selected Essays
As the author of The Conservative Mind and other seminal books, Russell Kirk is usually thought of as one of the American conservative political movement’s most important progenitors. But as this collection demonstrates, Kirk was perhaps at his best as an essayist. This volume also confirms that Kirk’s was principally a literary and historical conservatism that refused to fit the irreducible complexity of human experience to the requirements of any ideological straitjacket.
With The Essential Russell Kirk, literary critic George A. Panichas captures the breadth and depth of Kirk’s intellectual project by gathering together forty-four of the most masterful of Kirk’s essays, along with a unique chronology told in Kirk’s own words and a substantial introduction that articulates the deep humanism that animated Kirk’s philosophy. The result is a carefully assembled volume that gives us a fuller picture of an extraordinary man and writer, one whose labors had, and continue to have, remarkable repercussions on the American literary and political landscape.
With The Essential Russell Kirk, literary critic George A. Panichas captures the breadth and depth of Kirk’s intellectual project by gathering together forty-four of the most masterful of Kirk’s essays, along with a unique chronology told in Kirk’s own words and a substantial introduction that articulates the deep humanism that animated Kirk’s philosophy. The result is a carefully assembled volume that gives us a fuller picture of an extraordinary man and writer, one whose labors had, and continue to have, remarkable repercussions on the American literary and political landscape.
525 pages, Paperback
First published December 20, 2006
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About the author
Russell Kirk
185 books304 followersFor more than forty years, Russell Kirk was in the thick of the intellectual controversies of his time. He is the author of some thirty-two books, hundreds of periodical essays, and many short stories. Both Time and Newsweek have described him as one of America’s leading thinkers, and The New York Times acknowledged the scale of his influence when in 1998 it wrote that Kirk’s 1953 book The Conservative Mind “gave American conservatives an identity and a genealogy and catalyzed the postwar movement.”
Dr. Kirk wrote and spoke on modern culture, political thought and practice, educational theory, literary criticism, ethical questions, and social themes. He addressed audiences on hundreds of American campuses and appeared often on television and radio.
He edited the educational quarterly journal The University Bookman and was founder and first editor of the quarterly Modern Age. He contributed articles to numerous serious periodicals on either side of the Atlantic. For a quarter of a century he wrote a page on education for National Review, and for thirteen years published, through the Los Angeles Times Syndicate, a nationally syndicated newspaper column. Over the years he contributed to more than a hundred serious periodicals in the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, Austria, Germany, Italy, Spain, Bulgaria, and Poland, among them Sewanee Review, Yale Review, Fortune, Humanitas, The Contemporary Review, The Journal of the History of Ideas, World Review, Crisis, History Today, Policy Review, Commonweal, Kenyon Review, The Review of Politics, and The World and I.
He is the only American to hold the highest arts degree (earned) of the senior Scottish university—doctor of letters of St. Andrews. He received his bachelor’s degree from Michigan State University and his master’s degree from Duke University. He received honorary doctorates from twelve American universities and colleges.
He was a Guggenheim Fellow, a senior fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, a Constitutional Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a Fulbright Lecturer in Scotland. The Christopher Award was conferred upon him for his book Eliot and His Age, and he received the Ann Radcliffe Award of the Count Dracula Society for his Gothic Fiction. The Third World Fantasy Convention gave him its award for best short fiction for his short story, “There’s a Long, Long Trail a-Winding.” In 1984 he received the Weaver Award of the Ingersoll Prizes for his scholarly writing. For several years he was a Distinguished Scholar of the Heritage Foundation. In 1989, President Reagan conferred on him the Presidential Citizens Medal. In 1991, he was awarded the Salvatori Prize for historical writing.
More than a million copies of Kirk’s books have been sold, and several have been translated in German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Korean, and other languages. His second book, The Conservative Mind (1953), is one of the most widely reviewed and discussed studies of political ideas in this century and has gone through seven editions. Seventeen of his books are in print at present, and he has written prefaces to many other books, contributed essays to them, or edited them.
Dr. Kirk debated with such well-known speakers as Norman Thomas, Frank Mankiewicz, Carey McWilliams, John Roche, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Michael Harrington, Max Lerner, Michael Novak, Sidney Lens, William Kunstler, Hubert Humphrey, F. A. Hayek, Karl Hess, Clifford Case, Ayn Rand, Eugene McCarthy, Leonard Weinglass, Louis Lomax, Harold Taylor, Clark Kerr, Saul Alinsky, Staughton Lynd, Malcolm X, Dick Gregory, and Tom Hayden. Several of his public lectures have been broadcast nationally on C-SPAN.
Among Kirk’s literary and scholarly friends were T. S. Eliot, Roy Campbell, Wyndham Lewis, Donald Davidson, George Scott-Moncrieff, Richard Weaver, Max Picard, Ray Bradbury, Bernard Iddings Bell, Paul Roche, James McAuley, Thomas Howard, Wilhem Roepke, Robert Speaight
Dr. Kirk wrote and spoke on modern culture, political thought and practice, educational theory, literary criticism, ethical questions, and social themes. He addressed audiences on hundreds of American campuses and appeared often on television and radio.
He edited the educational quarterly journal The University Bookman and was founder and first editor of the quarterly Modern Age. He contributed articles to numerous serious periodicals on either side of the Atlantic. For a quarter of a century he wrote a page on education for National Review, and for thirteen years published, through the Los Angeles Times Syndicate, a nationally syndicated newspaper column. Over the years he contributed to more than a hundred serious periodicals in the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, Austria, Germany, Italy, Spain, Bulgaria, and Poland, among them Sewanee Review, Yale Review, Fortune, Humanitas, The Contemporary Review, The Journal of the History of Ideas, World Review, Crisis, History Today, Policy Review, Commonweal, Kenyon Review, The Review of Politics, and The World and I.
He is the only American to hold the highest arts degree (earned) of the senior Scottish university—doctor of letters of St. Andrews. He received his bachelor’s degree from Michigan State University and his master’s degree from Duke University. He received honorary doctorates from twelve American universities and colleges.
He was a Guggenheim Fellow, a senior fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, a Constitutional Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a Fulbright Lecturer in Scotland. The Christopher Award was conferred upon him for his book Eliot and His Age, and he received the Ann Radcliffe Award of the Count Dracula Society for his Gothic Fiction. The Third World Fantasy Convention gave him its award for best short fiction for his short story, “There’s a Long, Long Trail a-Winding.” In 1984 he received the Weaver Award of the Ingersoll Prizes for his scholarly writing. For several years he was a Distinguished Scholar of the Heritage Foundation. In 1989, President Reagan conferred on him the Presidential Citizens Medal. In 1991, he was awarded the Salvatori Prize for historical writing.
More than a million copies of Kirk’s books have been sold, and several have been translated in German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Korean, and other languages. His second book, The Conservative Mind (1953), is one of the most widely reviewed and discussed studies of political ideas in this century and has gone through seven editions. Seventeen of his books are in print at present, and he has written prefaces to many other books, contributed essays to them, or edited them.
Dr. Kirk debated with such well-known speakers as Norman Thomas, Frank Mankiewicz, Carey McWilliams, John Roche, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Michael Harrington, Max Lerner, Michael Novak, Sidney Lens, William Kunstler, Hubert Humphrey, F. A. Hayek, Karl Hess, Clifford Case, Ayn Rand, Eugene McCarthy, Leonard Weinglass, Louis Lomax, Harold Taylor, Clark Kerr, Saul Alinsky, Staughton Lynd, Malcolm X, Dick Gregory, and Tom Hayden. Several of his public lectures have been broadcast nationally on C-SPAN.
Among Kirk’s literary and scholarly friends were T. S. Eliot, Roy Campbell, Wyndham Lewis, Donald Davidson, George Scott-Moncrieff, Richard Weaver, Max Picard, Ray Bradbury, Bernard Iddings Bell, Paul Roche, James McAuley, Thomas Howard, Wilhem Roepke, Robert Speaight
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
May 30, 2012
An exceptional collection of political and social criticism, from a highly nuanced and intelligent thinker and wonderful prose stylist.
But yet, let me not mislead you--Kirk is less of a thinker, and more of a curator of others' thinking, though this is not, to be sure, a bad thing. From these varied essays, he draws on the thought of a wide group of other writers and thinkers who might be called "conservative," though we see this term to be itself incredibly mutable and imprecise. And that's what this book is, in some ways: a survey of conservative thought, post-Burke, in a nutshell. I would say that Kirk's life goal was to survey conservatism, and from that survey, systematize it, a move that seems pronounced and obvious across these 650 or so pages. Yet, as Kirk presents it, conservatism is the absence of the systematic, and rather a nebulous means of thinking, or way of approaching the world, that resists the systematic precisely because it recognizes the near-infinite variety of human experiences and problems, each of which requires suppleness in its evaluations, diagnoses, and solutions.
Yet, while conservatism resists the systematic, in these essays Kirk nevertheless shows conservatism to stand on certain "first principles": a belief in human flaws, a disbelief in human perfectibility, an insistence upon order, a preference for tradition as things tried and proven, and an avoidance of abstraction--"justice" and "equality" and "freedom" are especially problematic when seen merely in the abstract, and not bound by specificity and peculiarity and context, Kirk shows.
Kirk is an excellent writer, and while his ideas may be frustrating and even infuriating to some--both Left and Right, as, in Kirk's presentation, many things we think of as Right, like (post)industrialist Free Market-ism, are perversions of the truly conservative--his arguments and his presentation of the arguments of others are incredibly valuable, perhaps especially in our time. Ours in now quite heavily a politics of emotion, and not of contemplation (perhaps this has always been the case); the conservatism posited here in these essays is worth wrestling with in our time, whether we be Left or Right, as it demands a reinstatement of nuanced, contemplative political thought (something, perhaps, that was necessarily always in the minority--Kirk says as much in places).
But yet, let me not mislead you--Kirk is less of a thinker, and more of a curator of others' thinking, though this is not, to be sure, a bad thing. From these varied essays, he draws on the thought of a wide group of other writers and thinkers who might be called "conservative," though we see this term to be itself incredibly mutable and imprecise. And that's what this book is, in some ways: a survey of conservative thought, post-Burke, in a nutshell. I would say that Kirk's life goal was to survey conservatism, and from that survey, systematize it, a move that seems pronounced and obvious across these 650 or so pages. Yet, as Kirk presents it, conservatism is the absence of the systematic, and rather a nebulous means of thinking, or way of approaching the world, that resists the systematic precisely because it recognizes the near-infinite variety of human experiences and problems, each of which requires suppleness in its evaluations, diagnoses, and solutions.
Yet, while conservatism resists the systematic, in these essays Kirk nevertheless shows conservatism to stand on certain "first principles": a belief in human flaws, a disbelief in human perfectibility, an insistence upon order, a preference for tradition as things tried and proven, and an avoidance of abstraction--"justice" and "equality" and "freedom" are especially problematic when seen merely in the abstract, and not bound by specificity and peculiarity and context, Kirk shows.
Kirk is an excellent writer, and while his ideas may be frustrating and even infuriating to some--both Left and Right, as, in Kirk's presentation, many things we think of as Right, like (post)industrialist Free Market-ism, are perversions of the truly conservative--his arguments and his presentation of the arguments of others are incredibly valuable, perhaps especially in our time. Ours in now quite heavily a politics of emotion, and not of contemplation (perhaps this has always been the case); the conservatism posited here in these essays is worth wrestling with in our time, whether we be Left or Right, as it demands a reinstatement of nuanced, contemplative political thought (something, perhaps, that was necessarily always in the minority--Kirk says as much in places).
March 21, 2021
O conjunto de ensaios escrito por Russell Kirk mostra um eixo condutor sobre seus pensamentos, a importância das coisas permanentes. Kirk viveu no século XX, onde no ensaio sobre Max Picard restam evidente seus males: descontinuidade, fragmentação, negação. A ilusão que pode-se destruir as coisas permanentes é um constante motivo de sofrimento para o homem e Kirk procura sempre trazê-las à tona, para que tenhamos neste reconhecimento uma razão para estabilidade e uma felicidade possível.
August 21, 2013
This book, divided into nine different sections, is a selection of some of Kirk’s best essays. Topics of these essays cover political theory, social criticism, history and education; I especially enjoyed his essay on “Teaching Humane Literature in High Schools” and his essay “George Santayana Buries Liberalism.” Kirk’s prose is mostly clear, though a couple of the essays were unnecessarily dense, in my opinion. The common thread throughout all of these essays is Kirk’s defense of the Permanent Things, which make them extremely relevant today, when considering our social and political decline. Kirk was a champion of individuality, which modern day Liberalism seeks to extinguish, and Kirk sounded numerous warnings on the dangers of ideology, whether left or right. His admiration for Edmund Burke is clearly and unabashedly on display, and I think it is well placed. His points are closely argued, and none of the essays are in any way polemical, and his marshaling of sources extends to the Greek philosophers. Every essay is logically argued, out of respect for the opposing view, a courtesy which is rarely extended by the Left to the Right. This was a fascinating book and was hard to put down.
Currently reading
August 5, 2010Just finished the essay on the "Moral Imagination". Enjoying it.
November 20, 2012
Making my way through it. Wonderful. One the leading intellectuals of the last 100 years.
May 29, 2014
Conservative in the manner of Edmund Burke--my kind of conservative.
January 23, 2015
Brilliant.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews