The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot

by Russell Kirk

"It is inconceivable even to imagine, let alone hope for, a dominant conservative movement in America without Kirk's labor." — WILLIAM F BUCKLEY  "A profound critique of contemporary mass society, and a vivid and poetic image - not a program, an image - of how that society might better itself. [ The Conservative Mind ] is, in important respects, the twentieth century's own version of the Reflections on the Revolution in France... [Kirk] was an artist, a vsionary, almost a prophet."  - DAVID FRUM, author of Dead Right "I have been one of your fans since the time many years ago when I read The Conservative Mind." - RICHARD NIXON "Dr. Russell Kirk's impact on conservative thought and policy in America has been decisive. It was his writings, and in particular his seminal work, The Conservative Mind, that laid the foundation for many of the ideas that continue to shape public discourse and debate to this day." - JOHN ENGLER, former Governer of Michigan  "Kirk is assured a place of prominence in the intellectual histories for helping to define the ethical basis of conservatism. He has tried to pull conservatism away from the utilitarian premises of libertarianism, toward which conservatism often veers, toward a philosophy rooted in ethics and culture." - THE WALL STREET JOURNAL  Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind is one of the greatest contributions to twentieth-century American conservatism. Brilliant in every respect, from its conception to its choice of significant figures representing the history of intellectual conservatism, The Conservative Mind launched the modern American Conservative Movement when it was first published in 1953 and has become an enduring classic of political thought. The seventh revised edition features the complete text and an introduction by publisher Henry Regnery. A must-read.

Genres: Politics, Philosophy, History, Nonfiction, Political Science, Cultural, American History

576 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1953

About the author

For 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

Reviews

[J.A.A. Purves · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is simply astonishing. Voluminous, clear and concise, Kirk traces the history of thought and distinguishes between conservative thought in both Britain and America and other radical and progressive ideas. The result is a rich literary tradition and foundation that I fear most modern conservatives remain ignorant of.

The result has also convinced me (in a manner that I have never been able to understand as clearly before) that one of the primary intellectual characteristics of traditional conservatism is a complete rejection of ideology in all of its forms (Marxist, socialist, Christian, fundamentalist, utopian). The conservative does not reject reform, in and of itself, but understands those things in civilization that ought to be protected during the process of any reform.

Conservative political philosophy is rooted in the permanent things of man. If you look closely at the creative thinking of men like Edmund Burke, John Adams, Sir Walter Scott, Samuel Taylor Colerdige, James Fenimore Cooper, Alexis de Tocqueville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Russell Lowell, John Henry Newman, Lord Robert Salisbury, Henry Adams, Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More, Hilaire Belloc, G.K. Chesterton, George Santayana and T.S. Eliot (among many others) you will find a foundation that transcends partisan politics and focuses on how politics is a mere reflection of culture and not the other way round.

Russell Kirk here masterfully delivers a blow for the wisdom and lessons of the history of thought, and anyone serious about the modern day public square is lacking in education until he or she has read this book. I can't believe that I've been stupid enough to avoid reading it until just now.

[Joseph Stieb · Rating 3 out of 5]

I decided to read this book because of the recent election to try to get a sharper sense of one strand of . Whatever ideology Trump and his ilk are promulgating (white nationalism? reaction? populism) it is a far cry from Kirk's highly traditional, religiously orthodox, and stuffy conservatism. And before I jump into the book's ideas, let me just issue a warning: this is the stuffiest book I have ever read. If you want to read it, you should have a better reason than I did. This book is not fun in any regard. It drags. You will learn a lot about conservatism, especially how some conservatives read/invent their own philosophical tradition, but you will be subjected to Kirk's relentlessly dense writing, obscure references, editorializing, and sheer priggishness. At times it seems like he is trying to make things more boring (and to be honest, there are only a few ideas in this book. He just traces them through historical time and numerous figures). He doesn't give much biographical info, so you will be lost for a good deal of the book. You will slough through pages of exposition about conservative British poets and editors and their stupid feuds, which for Kirk seems as exciting as an overtime basketball game. Or whatever stuffy sport he watched. You can kind of get the whole message of the book from the conclusion, and unless you are a. someone who never doesn't finish a book (me) or b. have a major interest in conservatism in general (kind of me).

Kirk's objective in this book is to stitch together a bunch of Anglo-American philosophers and statesmen whose thought and action covers a loose tradition that is somewhat outside of the mainstream of American thought (whatever that is at the time). This isn't really a history book; it is more of an historical rallying cry to the conservatives of his day, as well as an "up-yours" to liberals who denigrate conservatives as "the stupid party," or one lacking in a philosophical/intellectual tradition at all.

One of the main themes in the book is the conservative skepticism of democracy. Obviously this really separates intellectual conservatism from political conservatism, especially in the US. Kirk's heroes, especially Burke, are profoundly distrustful of the common man. They find him vulgar, uneducated, appetitive, and violent. It is property, breeding, and education that makes a man into a citizen, a defender of the order of things who can be trusted with a hand in government. Kirk pushes this even further though. He and his heroes believe that society needs gentlemen: exemplary men of high class and experience who set an example for the rest and fight valiantly against challengers to the order. There is no greater threat to society for Kirk than the populist, who seeks to convince the common man he is better than he is and that his vulgar ways should be the standard of all behavior (Hello Trump). His section on de Tocqueville, who warned of a dangerous, suffocating cultural mediocrity in democracies, is thought-provoking in this respect. Lastly, Kirk seems to nearly regret the extension of the franchise to common men and eventually women despite living and writing in the mid-20th century.

Another key idea in the book is the Burkean conception of order in a society and the corresponding skepticism about change. Burke is the cornerstone of Kirk's conservative tradition. Burke saw society as an organic, sacred order in which people played out divinely preordained functions. People should have awe and reverence for the fact that this order functions at all and for their place in it. Reasoning from abstractions and universalistic ideas like human rights or the social contract is not only morally wrong, it is dangerous. It unmoors people from the webs of social relation and tradition that give them meaning and confine their more base instincts. As in the French Revolution, they are likely to grow violent, egoistic, but ultimately to despair at losing their place in the world, making them easy prey for the tyrant. Change in the Burkean universe should be slow and cautious, more of a fine tuning of the order of things rather than a dramatic new scheme. Of course, Burke's conception of the social order requires Christian religious belief (or at least belief in belief), which makes it somewhat less useful for governing a more diverse or secular society.

One more theme: detestation of materialism and industry. Kirk himself is clearly repulsed by the focus on material prosperity in his age, which he thinks is a poor substitute for religion and tradition. He sees this common repulsion at the factory, the city, the entrepreneur, etc. in his heroes throughout history. This makes a lot of sense given how the Industrial Revolution destabilized and transformed the communal living praised by Burke. It's amazing how Kirk, even with the advantage of hindsight, doesn't get how the Industrial Revolution formed the basis of a radical transformation in human prosperity and the standard of living, and his discounting of the importance of material comfort and financial security for a generation that just endured the Depression and WWII is sheer blindness and a stunning lack of empathy.

My frustration with this book and Kirk personally was a nice illustration of why I'm a liberal. 2 things that drive me nuts about Kirk's heroes and Kirk himself (often it is hard to tell when he's just giving his own opinion) are 1. how much injustice they are willing to tolerate in order to maintain the status quo and avoid the potential pitfalls of reform and 2. How blithely and uncritically he/they will assume that some current social structure or ideology is natural and unalterable. Kirk either doesn't seem aware of injustices or he simply waves them away as a part of the natural, tragic way of the mortal world. He seems morally blind to many of these problems. For example, his laudatory discussion of John Calhoun almost doesn't mention slavery at all. His afterworld, written in 1970's mentions the civil rights movement only with derision as a radical movement. That is simply not good enough for me. Kirk doesn't seem to even want to try to redress wrongs other than by returning things to a patriarchal, class-based order. The idea that human beings might be suffering under that order, or unsatisfied, or that we might be losing human talent and genius by not cultivating women and minorities, either doesn't matter or doesn't occur to Burke. As you might expect, this book is insufferably color and gender blind (I know that's slightly anachronistic, but I literally think the word woman doesn't appear in the book). There may be risks to reform, but not trying and allowing those tensions to bubble under a lid of repression and tradition is a recipe for even greater problems.

Liberals can and should heed the Burkean warning that tinkering with complex social structures and relations based on abstract thinking can be dangerous. If Burke and his ilk help liberals understand the limits of reform and get a better grasp on human nature, then this book and this intellectual tradition are valuable. Still, Kirk seems to tolerate injustice far more readily than Burke did, a man who opposed British treatment of the Irish and supported the colonial bid for independence based on the tradition of English rights. This Burkean way of thinking is also a valuable antidote to universalistic thinking about spreading the American way of life around the world. It would be nice to say that everyone wants freedom and democracy (Iraq, for instance), but Burke and his modern followers (George Will for instance) would say this is a dangerous fantasy. Show me Iraq or Afghanistan's traditions of democracy, freedom of speech, religious pluralism, a free press, the loyal opposition, etc. Oh wait, they don't exist (or exist in exceedingly weak forms). So a good Burkean would say let's not trick ourselves into thinking that other countries have the same history as ours and can accept the exporting of our basic institutions and ideas. However, the true value of Burkean/Kirkean thinking should not be to help the privileged and powerful protect the status quo and all of its injustices but to offer wisdom and humility to our attempts to fight injustice and drastic inequity. This is my yin and yang of conservatism and liberalism.

So I'm left with one last question, still somewhat uncertain to me: Is there really a conservative intellectual tradition? Or are all of these thinkers just intellectualizing their instinct towards defending the status quo at all costs and protecting their privileged position in the world? I am leaning about 70-30 in favor of the first view, although I'd like to hear other informed viewpoints on this question.

[Simon Stegall · Rating 5 out of 5]

This may be the most personally impactful book I've ever read. I have never been so challenged by a book, and have never grown so much as a result. By the last page, my understanding of Kirk's topic had increased so much that I wanted to flip the book over and start again, because I knew I would comprehend it so much more. Kirk's encyclopedic knowledge of his topic is incredible.

The Conservative Mind is a chronicle of the great conservative thinkers of history, starting with Edmund Burke and John Adams of the 17th century and ending with Santayana and Eliot of the 20th. Kirk connects the dots between these thinkers, but does not attempt the futile task of aligning their political views. Conservatism, Kirk emphatically states, is not ideology, like so much libertarianism or liberalism. In fact, it cannot be summarized in a pithy phrase, for conservatives must have "a talent for re-expressing their convictions to fit the time." But generally, conservatism is manifest positively as a desire to preserve the ancient wisdom present in our institutions, culture, and government; and it is manifest negatively as a distrust of "progress" that seeks to dismantle these repositories of the permanent things. This book is a history of how that intuition has been worked out in the politics of England and America in the last 300 years.

Conservatism is a philosophy rather than a policy. Though not neutral to politics, it does not assert a specific political dogma, but rather attempts to preserve, in a changing political world, the aspects of life that make it worth living. In the words of George Santayana:

"I should not be afraid of the future domination, whatever it may be... I have found, in different times and places, the liberal, the Catholic, and the German air quite possible to breathe; nor, I am sure, would communism be without its advantages to a free mind, and its splendid emotions."

This universality is what makes the conservative impulse so compelling as a philosophy, and what makes this book so complex. The conservatives discussed here do not fit in one political vein; both John Adams, the advocate of freedom, and John Randolph, the great southern orator, are represented here. Kirk does not attempt to alleviate these tensions, knowing that they are indicative not of conservatism's contradictions, but of its humanity. A political system can be condemned for contradictions, but a history of striving men cannot.

I may reread this book, but it has introduced me to so many new thinkers and writings that I'm afraid it will be a while before I make it back around to The Conservative Mind. But it is an absolutely essential book for anyone not enamored with the progressivism of our time, who feels that there must be a deeper understanding of politics. This book is an introduction to that understanding.

[Stephen · Rating 3 out of 5]

For most of human history, change has been a glacier -- slow to move, retreating as much as it advances. Since the scientific and industrial revolutions, however, change is less a glacier and more a snowball, moving with rapidity, becoming ever more drastic, and picking up speed. Russell Kirk would remind modern readers that snowball modernity is moving, like other snowballs, downhill. In The Conservative Mind, he collects and comments on the thoughts of those who, since the Pandora's box of revolutions was opened, have tried to clap it shut again. It is a large, thought-provoking work, often melancholy considering its authors are ever lamenting the loss of order, privilege, and the 'permanent things' against the advance of equality, democracy, and ideology. It attempts to demonstrate an intellectual conservativism, one based on more than an instinctual aversion to change. It succeeds in part, but its ideal audience is the half-converted, for modern readers who do not share its views are unlikely to be convinced by, or even warm appreciably to, authors who spend so much time attacking concepts like democracy, individual judgment, and equality which we hold dear.

The Conservative Mind begins with Edmund Burke, writing against the French Revolution, and continues to leapfrog between Britain and the United States for a century and a half thereafter, as the world continue to change beneath the feet of those who yearned for stability. Such changes were first material, then cultural, and finally political: as industry and commerce eroded the base of the old agricultural economy, farmers displaced by mechanization streamed into the cities, becoming 'proletarians' in the process -- landless, resourceless men whose skills, along with those of artisans, were no longer needed, and whose only strength was in their numbers. Converting those numbers into political power, they pressed on the reigning powers and pressed for changes that might relief their burden -- for if they had been denied the ability to provide for themselves, the state could be turned to do it for them; and if the new economic powers wanted to oppress them, they would turn the tables and put into force laws that checked the excesses. As the great tug of war pulled the national fabric hither and on, the men featured here fretted that said fabric was coming apart at the scenes.

Though I have scorned conservatism in the past for being bereft of its own ideas, incapable of doing anything other than resisting any kind of change at all, what I take for weakness, Kirk posits is a strength, and one of the themes uniting his authors' work. Conservatism is not an ideology, he writes; it is an exercise in pragmatism, of recognizing that rapid changes in anything as complex as society or the economy will have unexpected consequences, and if experience is any guide, most of those consequences will be unfortunate. His ideal conservatism is or should be the voice of rational prudence, keeping passion from doing anything too silly. But while some of his featured authors' complaints can be appreciated as being sensible (not necessarily correct, but a perfectly rational view given the facts at hand), others are firmly in the camp of irrational reaction. One English author protests the 1832 Reform Bill for eliminating a handful of 'rotten boroughs', or election districts which no longer held populations worthy of seats in Parliament, or populations at all: these granted certain M.P.s a say in the nation's doings without their having any person at all to be responsible to. The writers' protest was that one such seat had been the home of many a distinguished M.P, and to abolish their seat to fulfill some ideal of efficiency was outrageous. The starting point of the French Revolution is an ideal example of the value and limits of this conservative approach: while the Revolution was in many respects a catastrophe for France and Europe's stability, it did unleash positive forces. It gave lie to the fact that the people of Europe had to remain subjects to self-serving lords and priests; it gave them a reason to believe they could take command of their own fortunes, and better them in the process. As lamentable as the fire of revolution that destroys everything in its path is, so to is a conservatism that squelches all flames before they cause any kind of disruption. Superior would a flame of change that puts a fire under the seat of reactionary forces and prompts them to get out of the way of 'progress'.

At the same time, a criticism of conservatism as being nothing but a break or a nay-voice is not quite right, for Kirk maintains that his impaneled authors do believe in certain things, in protecting or restoring them. They believe, for instance, in the principle of prescriptivism, that people by and large ought to defer to the received wisdom of their elders and institutions, for the great reservoir of experience passed down from generation to generation is a far better guide to truth than any one individual, regardless of their belief in the power of objective Reason. It's an argument one can find sense in -- collected knowledge will surely outweigh any individual knowledge, and reason without evidence can fall into debates over how many angels can dance on the head of an Ideal Form of a pin -- but an individual may be in possession of facts that collected knowledge simply does not know. If an astronomer identifies a source of light in the sky and posits that it is is approaching the Earth rapidly, the fact that the collected wisdom of the ancestors contains no accounts of astronomical bodies flying into the Earth does not negate the possibility. Collected beliefs are no more removed from the prospect of error than any new thought formed of reason. This is why science is such a valuable tool, for it combines free reason with the experience of evidence. But scientists obtain their knowledge through trial and error, by performing experiments that rule out certain ideas and support others. The conservatives in this work, so keenly engrossed by the idea of man as a fallen creature who had to be kept from chaos and barbarity by stern rules and moral authority, would doubtless oppose experimenting with anything as volatile as human society, especially given that they consider some of the values of humankind to be valuable in their own rights, apart from us. Religion is at the heart of Kirk's conservatism, and he maintains that those who see it as simply a convenient curative to fix moral failings of people are doing it wrong. Religion is a dedication to Higher Things, and if people do not acknowledge the supremacy of God over the world, if they do not submit entirely to Divine Will, they will err time and again.

This is not a happy book. It is a work of reproach and lamentation, of distress, argument, and grievance. I think it valuable in terms of the history of political philosophy, for it offers the perspective of those who fought against changes like universal suffrage that we take for granted. Barring the collapse of civilization, it is unlikely that universal suffrage will reversed; at the same time, I find it useful to ponder the consequences of said acts, and to wonder: did they live up to the expectations of progress, or did they diminish the body-politic by putting power into the hands of people who have neither the time nor the inclination to gather facts, reflect upon them, and decide on the wisest course of action. What has expanding the power of central governments done to the effectiveness of those governments, and to the engagement of citizens? Do we live up the the ideal of the self-empowered Citizen, contributing to the well-being of our nations while pursuing our own individual interests, or are we simply consumer-citizens, our only act of participation being which product we choose to buy in the election booth: Blue or Red? The conservative mind is too damning of the species, too quick to defer to the tyranny of tradition and authority, but all the time...perhaps it is a mind that ought to be considered, if only to ward off the possibility of modern hubris with a little humility.

[Stephen Hicks · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is no wonder why this work is considered to be one of the cornerstones of conservative literature. Kirk's survey of conservative thought beginning with Edmund Burke and ending with George Santayana is the unfurling of a historical tapestry. Do not be fooled for the conservatism put forth by Kirk is not the colloquial conservatism touted by many politicians today. In fact, few people out there in the public square wave the banner of Burke & Kirk.

The profundity of this book, and its subject matter, does not stem from groundbreaking ideologies or revolutionary sentiments. It rises from the soil of generation upon generation of aggregate wisdom. It was curious to listen to the likes of John C. Calhoun, Alexis de Tocqueville, John Adams, Benjamin Disraeli, John Henry Newman, etc. etc. and see just how variegated and amorphous conservatism can be. Kirk reveals that to be a conservative is not to be a dogmatist or ideologue. It is to be a sensible human being with a grounded understanding of human nature and finite limits; to know that one of the greatest sources of wisdom is among those that came before you and your greatest responsibility is to those that come after you.

This book is truly the gateway into the world of traditional conservatism and will be a source of reference that I visit again and again for many years to come. My amazon wish list ballooned with authors unheard of before now, and Kirk's ability to reference person after person hints toward the legions of brilliant and wise men that have helped form our political society. The Conservative Mind will forever occupy a hallowed place on my bookshelf.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having read a fair deal of Russell Kirk before finally turning to The Conservative Mind, this first and best-known of his works didn't hold many surprises. In fact, for me it tended most to reveal the foundations of Kirk's conservative mind, as the reader familiar with his later writings can see how the figures he covers in this book influenced his own perspectives. In all, a great book well worth reading, though I would probably recommend that readers new to Kirk start with another book, such as Prospects for Conservatives or Russell Kirk's Concise Guide to Conservatism, where Kirk is more "freelance" and less constrained by other thinkers. But, undoubtedly, every thinking conservative should read The Conservative Mind at least once, as should reflective types of other persuasions.

[Drew Norwood · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a monumental book. Russell Kirk has done yeoman’s work in reading, analyzing, and distilling centuries of conservative thought, and he has compiled it in an well-written, accessible manner. You will not find here a systematic treatise on conservativism. Instead, Kirk focuses on several individuals—“conservators of the permanent things”—scattered throughout English and American history. These men carried the conservative cause forward in the midst of different social and political contexts. The list of people Kirk identifies and discusses is as follows:

1. Edmund Burke
2. John Adams
3. Walter Scott, George Canning, Samuel Taylor Coleridge
4. John Randolph and John Calhoun
5. Thomas Macaulay, James Fenimoore Cooper, Alexis de Tocqueville
6. John Quincey Adams, Orestes Brownson, Nathaniel Hawthorne
7. Benjamin Disraeli and John Henry Newman
8. J.F. Stephen, Henry Maine, W.E.H. Lecky
9. James Russell Lowell, E.L. Godkin, Henry Adams, Brooks Adams
10. George Grissing, Arthur Balfour, W.H. Mallock
11. Irving Babbit, Paul Elmer More, George Santayana
12. T.S. Eliot

After finishing this book, a Will Percy quote comes to mind: “Levelling down’s the fashion now, but I remember the bright spires—they caught the light first and held it longest.” Kirk draws our attention to the bright spires. For, in his words, “[i]n every period, some will endeavor to pull down the permanent things, and others will defend them manfully.”

Kirk’s method, of highlighting different historical figures, their life and times, is arguably more effective than simply reciting his view of conservative dogma. That said, he still formulates what he sees as the bedrock principles of the conservative mind. He defines these as six “canons of conservative thought”:

(1) “Belief in transcendent order, or body of natural law, which rules society as well as conscience.”
(2) “Affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence, as opposed to the narrowing uniformity, egalitarianism, and utilitarian aims of most radical systems...”
(3) “Conviction that civilized society requires order and classes, as against the notion of a ‘classless society.’”
(4) “Persuasion that freedom and property are closely linked...Economic levelling, they maintain, is not economic progress.”
(5) “Faith in prescription and distrust of ‘sophisters, calcualtors, and economists’ who would reconstruct society upon abstract designs.”
(6) “Recognition that change may not be salutary reform: hasty innovation may be a devouring conflagration, rather than a torch of progress.”

Many of these canons have fallen out of favor even amongst conservatives, and a few are downright depsised in our modern culture. Nonetheless, Kirk’s system at its core is one that seeks harmony with God’s eternal order, rather than setting up an order based on “abstract designs.” It is for this reason that Kirk can say honestly that “conservatism is not an ideology, but instead a mode of looking at human nature and society.” The foundation of Kirk’s conservatism is God’s revelation, which sets it apart from other political philosophies. Following Burke, he maintains that the temporal order of the state “is only part of a transcendent order”; that after the “order of God” comes “an order of spiritual and intellectual values”, and we must draw our societal norms and moral standards from these spiritual ones. Social contract theory left in the abstract is a gross injustice; the only social contract that can be spoken of is the “moral contract that unites the dead, the living, and those yet unborn, the bond between God and man. Order in this world is contingent upon the order above.”

Building on these principles, the conservative seeks to recover and preserve the eternal and unchangeable truths. This applies to ourselves first, for “[t]here exists always two aspects of order: the outer order of the commonwealth and the inner order of the soul.” And next for our families and our community associations. True community must come from family, church, guild, and local associations.

The conservative also opposes collectivism and standardization in all its forms. He opposes egalitarianism and the levelling tendencies of democracy. The conservative sets himself against the “industrial liberalism” and “utilitarian collectivism.” Our culture struggles most with this point: we hate any distinctions and hierarchy. We hate inequality of all sorts. So when we hear John Randolph say, “I love liberty. I hate equality”, we are nonplussed. But it’s worth at least considering whether our zeal for equality is misplaced. There is a need for distinction here: we must recognize and affirm one sort of equality but not all. A “universal equality among men exists; but it is the equality of Christianity, moral equality, or, more precisely, equality in the ultimate judgment of God; equality of any other sort we are foolish, even impious, to covet.”  Seeking our good in political equality will result in a “brutalizing democracy” that is at odds with true liberty and fruitful diversity. This is what Tocqueville called “democratic despotism”, a “tyranny of mediocrity, a standardization of mind and spirit and condition.”

Kirk’s conservatism is quite different from the modern variety. The Conservative Mind is a great resource for showing the current generation of conservatives their true heritage and rallying them to the permanent things.

[Douglas Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent.

[Ben Batchelder · Rating 4 out of 5]

When published by Russell Kirk in 1953, “Conservative Mind” was an oxymoron to morons, such were the stultifying orthodoxies of liberal thought. While it still may appear so to some, Russell’s grounding of the conservative American tradition “From Burke to Eliot” in fact gave a significant push to a movement on the cusp of intellectual renewal. What a pleasure to read a book which so easily swept away the remaining pieties of my liberal upbringing in the ‘60s and ‘70's. It helped me to re-learn the age-old wisdom of tradition and incremental improvement, instead of the radical transformation that reigned in the ‘60s and is triumphant once again.

As Kirk writes, “the essence of social conservatism is preservation of the ancient moral traditions of humanity.” How repugnant this phrase would have appeared to the little tyrant and conformist I was throughout university and briefly after! He continues: "For the conservative, custom, convention, constitution, and prescription are the sources of tolerable civil social order. Men not being angels, a terrestrial paradise cannot be contrived by metaphysical enthusiasts; yet an earthly hell can be arranged readily enough by ideologues of one stamp or another."

Many of Kirk’s words 60 years on are prescient. “Recognition that change may not be salutary reform: hasty innovation may be a devouring conflagration, rather than a torch of progress” could have been written about Obamacare, the first major entitlement to be enacted without opposition support and while fraudulently using budget conciliation measures.

How refreshing to learn the importance of the Irish statesman, Edmund Burke (1729-1797), to not only conservative Anglo-Saxon thought but to America’s Founding Fathers. He detested the nihilism of the French Revolution, instead placing religious belief as foundational to any successful order as characterized by Kirk this way: “Religious faith makes existence tolerable; ambition without pious restraint must end in failure, often involving in its ruin that beautiful reverence which solaces common men...” At its core, Kirk explains, this is because: “Man’s rights are linked with man’s duties, and when they are distorted into extravagant claims for a species of freedom and equality and worldly aggrandizement which human character cannot sustain, they degenerate from rights into vices.” (The searing brilliance of the American Declaration, of course, was to assert that natural rights are God-given, not dependent on the tender mercies of government.)

Kirk elevates John Adams (1735-1826) among the Founding Fathers for his insistence on the separation of powers – which we now take for granted, to our peril. In arguing for federalism and a democratic republic, as opposed to pure democracy, Adams wrote, “Where people have a voice, and there is no balance, there will be everlasting fluctuations, revolutions, and horrors, until a standing army, with a general at its head, commands the peace...” Will the ever-greater concentration of power in Washington, and the dismantling of our former federalist system, end as Adams predicted?

As Kirk elaborates when he re-crosses the Atlantic to discuss Samuel Coleridge (1772-1834), “The pure democrat is the practical atheist; ignoring the divine nature of law and the divine establishment of spiritual hierarchy, he is the unconscious instrument of diabolical powers for the undoing of mankind. Reduce the solemn mystery and infinite variety of human life to the pseudo-mathematical principle of the greatest happiness for the greatest number [utilitarianism], and you establish a tyranny of prigs in the world, a hell of loneliness in the world of spirit.” (When hearing “tyranny of prigs” am I the only one who thinks of New York’s Bloomberg?”)

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) remains, of course, one of the wisest observers of democratic political systems and, in particular, of the vulnerabilities of the American one. Per Kirk, “He foresaw the coming of the ‘social welfare state,’ which agrees to provide all for its subjects, and in turn exacts rigid conformity. [Political correctness, anyone?] The name democracy remains; but government is exerted from top downward, as in the Old Régime, not from the masses. This is a planners’ society, dominated by bureaucratic elites...” (Is anyone surprised that the counties around D.C. have became the country’s per-capita richest since 2009?) Such is the progressive dystopia upon us.

By relieving citizens of responsibilities, Tocqueville wrote that such a government “renders the exercise of free agency less useful and less frequent [think of the glorious American tradition of local association]; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all uses of himself. The principal of equality has prepared men for these things; it has predisposed them to endure them and often to look on them as benefits.” (FDR’s new “freedoms” declared in his 1941 State of the Union, including “freedom from want” and “freedom from fear,” fit the bill precisely.)

Tocqueville also insisted on the crucial need for faith to ground any democratic form. As Kirk explains, “Moral decay first hampers and then strangles honest government, regular commerce, and even the ability to take genuine pleasure in the goods of this world. Compulsion [think of Obamacare or Bloomberg] is applied from above as self-discipline relaxes below, and the last liberties expire under the weight of the unitary state. Once a society has slipped so far, almost no barrier remains to withstand absolutism.”

Kirk is not sanguine about our future, in which “Even the Constitution of the United States is not sufficiently venerable to restrain the appetites of ambitious men and classes; and the potentialities for increase of power which lie hid in some of its clauses are ominous for the future liberties of America. In the last resort, once men have got into the vice of legislating indiscriminately for immediate purposes and special interests, only force can withstand the masked arbitrary force of ‘laws’ that are no better than exactions.” While Kirk was elucidating the fears of John Randolfe of Roanoke (1773-1833), what better symptomatic description exists for the contemporary diseases of Obamacare and Dodd-Frank and the repeated emasculation of the Constitution by the Obama Administration?

Kirk’s outlook even during the recuperative ‘80s (when he last revised his work) was not optimistic: “we ought to understand conservative ideas so that we may rake from the ashes of what scorched fragments of civilization escape the conflagration of unchecked will and appetite.”

Welcome, nowadays, to the Triumph of the Will masquerading as concern for the downtrodden on the path to the unitary state. Kirk’s seminal work is a devastating treatise on the perils of anti-conservative thought, and makes one realize Reagan’s unique ability to combine optimism with clear-sightedness of the human condition.

[Tony · Rating 4 out of 5]

We are yanking free the anchors, worrying loose the cables, and where once this was effected with radical fervor, it's now a consequence of indolence, of decay, of corruption. Our politics are dominated by preeners who speak as utopians and govern as apparatchiks. Our news is brought to us by people who understand little of what they attempt to relate. Our children are instructed by dullards. Our churches continue to splinter, our civil bonds disintegrate, and a near-majority of adults choose either to murder their children in the womb or abandon them at birth.

Russell Kirk can help us understand why the institutions we no longer value are important. He does little to explain how they might be regained when they are shattered, and when a majority of the populace neither understands, values, nor even longs for them. Perhaps this is because when he wrote, there still seemed hope of restoring reason and order to the U.S., perhaps even England. What he didn't anticipate is that the political and business leaders who rushed to the banner of conservatism in his time would be unworthy, and ultimately prove themselves venal, ignorant, and self-seeking.

"In every period," Kirk writes, "some will endeavor to pull down the permanent things, and others will defend them manfully." Even without the pulling of our nation's cold-souled bureaucrats and administrators, the permanent things have begun to collapse under their own weight. Who will build them again? That's the question now.

[Cameron · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not only is this book an education in itself but it is a pathway to much other learning. It will be a constant reference for me.

I don't think I can add much to the reviews given by my friends Stephen Hicks and Simon Stegall. So please see their Goodreads reviews.

[Pinkyivan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Suprisingly uninformative, erratic, primarily rethorical instead of philosophical.
Some may like it more and I think the most interesting thing about it (aside pieces on Newman and Tocqueville) is to look at this as a history of falilures of conservatism in both theory and practice, as it was, just like this book, mainly rethorical, rejecting any who examine it (and not necessarily the conclusions, but the path by which they are reached).
While they often championed Plato and Aristotle, all protestant thinkers essentially rejected all of their important premises, such as Burke's rejection of metaphysics, or everyone's (aside Newman) rejection of the basic principle of Aristotelian-Thomistic political thought, the idea that we do not choose our own ends and that society should lead people exactly to that final telos (God or virtue). Reading this right after MacIntyre it is easy to see how incompatible liberalism is with the ideals of tradition (as their own tradition is not a continuation, but a rejection of the scholasticism).
To end with a few of his quotes, which really changed my outlook on this book in particular and conservative thought in general-
“Modern systematic politics, whether liberal, conservative, radical or socialist, simply has to be rejected from a standpoint that owes genuine allegiance to the tradition of the virtues; for modern politics itself expresses in its institutional forms a systematic rejection of that tradition.”
“Modern conservatives are for the most part engaged in conserving only older rather than later versions of liberal individualism. Their own core doctrine is as liberal and as individualist as that of self-avowed liberals.”

[Daniel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked the book on the whole. In the beginning, it lays out some great general principles regarding what constitutes conservatism. The treatment of Edmund Burke's thought, in particular, is very strong. And it ends with some excellent warnings against totalitarianism. My main issue with the book is that some of the figures under consideration were more reactionaries than conservatives. The author also has a tendency to conflate those contending against genuine abuses with mindless radicals. Still, it is a useful read.

[Jeremy]

Mentioned positively here.

[Alexa K. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kirk writes with stunning clarity and deep historical, philosophical, and literary roots to compose a broad picture of the meaning of conservatism and its founders. With an eye on the future and a hand in the past, Kirk is able to construct a premise for which students, professors, and the everyday working man can identify. Conservatism, according to Kirk, is not dying, but has a chance to rise once more if morality becomes the end and not the means to political life.

[Jacob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just fantastic. Kirk’s six canons of conservative thought are extremely helpful and masterfully illustrated throughout the volume.

[Kent · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most important books I have ever read. There are probably ten books in that category right now. Either I have extraordinary good fortune in the books I select, or I am too easily impressed. Hmm.

Although I had gathered before now that a gigantic chasm exists between the old world of Christendom and the new world of Modernity, the realization is refreshed and sharpened with almost every book I read now. This particular book helped that realization coalesce into concrete principles and events. The Great Books programs I had been through in the past somehow did not make clear the nature of the chasm between the two worlds; through both high school and two years of a college Great Books program I assumed that Locke, Rousseau, Montesquieu, and the rest of the Enlightenment political theorists were in reasonable continuity with pre-Enlightenment Christian understandings of government. If I was not entirely unacquainted with Burke, Hooker, de Tocqueville, and the Southern conservatives, at least I did not understand how great an antithesis existed between those men as defenders of a Christian society, and the Enlightenment theorists as the harbingers of all that makes Modernity dull. And somehow none of those men made it into the Great Books reading lists.

Anyhow, The Conservative Mind boils down to the predicate that, by the 18th century, radical theories of society were arising in direct competition with the traditions of Christendom. The chapters in the book trace the intellectual defense of Christendom mounted since the time of Edmund Burke up to Russell Kirk's contemporaries. Though the emphasis is on the defenders of conservatism, their foils must inevitably make an appearance, and so Kirk's book amounts to a generation-by-generation history of the attacks of radicalism and the counterattacks (and slow, inexorable retreat) of conservatism.

Reading the older statesmen, who breathed a different air than our own, is a startling and illuminating exercise that throws into blinding relief just how great that chasm is, and provides a glimmer of lighting toward the pathway out of our modern cave.

That aside, I wish to note my appreciation of Russell Kirk as a writer and historian. His writing is clear, powerful, and elegant, and I deeply approve of his sensitivity toward his subjects. Like Philip Schaff, he had a "catholic" spirit that allowed him to sympathize with each figure individually and appreciate their peculiar merits in their particular circumstances, never lumping men together or making general judgements without first considering the details--a highly Burkean attitude, I might add. I am thinking particularly of his discussion of American conservatism, northern and Southern. Rather than treating the different sections at an ideological level, Kirk allowed a few important figures, in all of their idiosyncrasies, to stand for their respective sections. This freed him from the procrustean mistake of dealing with ideologies instead of personalities (more fatal in American history than in any other, I believe). Suffice it to say, his estimate of the South's character, good and bad, and her role in American history, was more careful and judicious than any other historian I have read, and once again reminded me of Schaff.

Of complaints, I have only two. First, he consistently presents the conservative aristocracy as having come unfairly under attack, and that (seemingly) out of nowhere. Of course history doesn't work that way. The aristocrats were truly the leaders and bastions of the Christian society of the West, and if revolution and infidelity sprang up on their watch, by definition they bear the responsibility, and almost as certainly some of the guilt, in the matter.

Second, I was disappointed that C S Lewis and G K Chesterton did not figure in his discussion of contemporary conservatism, while lesser figures such as Santayana or Babbit, did.

[Leslie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kirk tells us at the outset that this book is a long essay in definition. Many may wonder why he takes 500 pages to answer the question: what is a conservative? It takes that long because conservatism, at its core, is opposed to ideas that seek to level and shrink the broad and various questions of human existence into a few simplistic solutions.

It is the political idealists, the social planners, who can narrow all of the questions of policy into a tidy grid. But true conservatives have always been broad thinkers. They have understood that different situations call for varied policies.

Kirk tells us on page 8 that conservatives have always had: "Affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence, as opposed to the narrowing uniformity, egalitarianism, and utilitarian aims of most radical systems; conservatives resist what Robert Graves calls "Logicalism" in society. This prejudice has been called "the conservatism of enjoyment"--a sense that life is worth living."

The above quote is a neat summary of the book. Conservatives have adopted different types of damage control in response to differing situations. This book shows the problems that the conservatives faced and how they sought to preserve freedom and security, to be faithful to the time-tested methods of securing property rights and individual freedoms, and how they warded off the seductive calls for utopianism. "Men not being angels, a terrestrial paradise cannot be contrived by metaphysical enthusiasts; yet an earthly hell can be arranged readily enough by ideologues of one stamp or another."

The book chronicles what it looks like for conservatives to ward off ideologues of one stamp or another as they seek to impose their tyranny for everyone's good in pursuit of their utopia. Conservatives' strategies vary depending on the unique philosophical assault. The book is long because we live in a fallen world and humanity has an enemy. Satan's nefarious schemes morph and progress from one degree of evil to another.

Wisdom is not content with one 3 X 5 card of principles but wisdom patiently learns from other brave souls in the past, about how they faced the giants of their day with courage and how they gained victories. The patient reader will find ample conservative courageous examples applicable to modern-day encounters with idealism.

One last thought. The fact that 8 out of the Bible's 10 commandments are prohibitive, "Thou shalt not...", means that we're allowed to do anything else. (Honor your parents and keep the Sabbath are the only 2 that are prescriptive.) This gives us great freedom in life. We can have the occupation that we choose, we can marry whom we choose (in the Lord), we can live where we choose, the world is our oyster, provided we don't worship other gods, lie, kill, steal, commit adultery, and covet.

The left has the very opposite agenda. They are "liberal" (meaning freedom-loving) in the few areas where God is prohibitive. They are liberal when it comes to murder (abortion), adultery (free love movement), stealing (socialism), and have built an entire economic system based solely on coveting. But they want to control every last area of your life (for your good, they say) while encouraging you to celebrate how free you are from the few things that God requires you not to do.

The way to combat the enemies of freedom will vary and this book will arm any thoughtful person with a lifetime of sound principles, examples, and inspiration on how to approach the problems in this complicated and beautiful world we inhabit.

[Jeff Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am no much for reading political philosophy, but I am very glad to have read this. One of those books I knew of and wanted to get around to eventually.

This history of conservative thought and those who advanced it is such a good read and so informative. I am rather embarrassed by how little I knew of this history. This book is such a balm considering what passes for conservatism now. We have lost or ignored first principles and think policy decisions is a replacement for it. I was especially glad to learn of Burke and his life.

[Tim Michiemo · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.8 Stars - Top Read of 2021

Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind is an intellectual history of conservative ideas in American and Britain. Although Kirk's book focuses primarily on tracing conservative ideas it accomplishes something far greater than that. By offering an alternative narrative to the post-war liberal mindset, Kirk has written a book that is a rallying call for all conservative thinkers. His book primarily succeeds because it shows that conservative ideas have a tradition that extends far back to the likes of Burke, Adams, Calhoun, Tocqueville, Disraeli, Chesterton, Santayana, and Eliot.

Kirk's definition of conservatism is remarkable, far different than what we would think of political conservatism is today. Conservatism recognizes the reality of revelation or "natural law", believes human existence is mysterious, that there is a natural aristocracy within society, that freedom and property are inseparably linked, and that all reform must be linked to some sort of custom or tradition.

The great maxim of conservatism is "the individual is foolish, but the species is wise." Tradition holds truth so we should be slow to "renovate" or "remake" society, for that is often the very means to destroy society and give power to dictators and despots. Conservatism is skeptical of ideologies that centralize all society under one idea, one government, or one personality. For government is built upon society, and not the other way around.

Much can be said about the conservative ideas and thinking of the men that Kirk covers. The bulk of Kirk's book covers the contributions to conservative thinking from Burke to Santayana. The number of thinkers that Kirk surveys are voluminous, and it offers the reader a rich treasure trove to pull conservative ideas from. Kirk's strongest point of his book is how well he surveys and summarizes the views of so many men and offers a coherent narrative, in America and Britain, of their ideas.

For Christian readers, this book is extremely valuable. Kirk's writing shows that government and society are rooted in transcendent truths. We cannot remake society in our image, we can only live as creatures dependent upon the structures that God has designed for us to take part in. As well this book will challenge Christians in their views on politics. With Christian conservativism often associated with leaders like Fallwell, Robertson, and Trump, it is illuminating to see that there is a better way. Politics is not about power, society is a gift from God, and we find joy in rightly taking part in the society that God has ordained. Centralizing authority and power in one position can only bring about the death of liberty. So, I cannot recommend this book more highly, read it, and be challenged to think more deeply about the world that God has created and how the government is designed to be built upon the gift of society.

[Fearless Leader · Rating 3 out of 5]

The conservative believes in the natural process of evolution to sort out what practices that are useful and create a stable and just society. However true this may be in a stable environment and in a long run sense this cannot be viable in an environment with dynamic change; as has been he case since the beginning of the Colombian Exchange and doubly so since the Industrial Revolution. Governments must change as the power centers change and so, for example, as power shifted from the landed elite to a burgeoning merchant class the old ways of doing things would necessarily come to an end; as lamentable this as the change may be. Conservatism is a tragic political orientation, almost by design, always retreating to the old power nodes just as new ones take center stage, always one step behind the time, but at once never able to provide a vision of what might be and act on it. This book’s original title “The Conservative Rout” is apt in describing this decrepit political movement; let it rest in peace and make way for a reactionary revival.

That asside the book outlines the cautionary tale of what happens to a civilization (that being Anglo civilization) when there is insufficient reactionary elements to redirect society in a sustainable direction. It also outlines the tenants of traditional values well but the reader of this review has likely run into all of them before.

[Chris J · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a tome - 500+ pages of conservative history. I really enjoyed this book and would recommend it to anyone who had a sincere interest in conservative thought. Certainly, it's not for the uncommitted reader. It's a labor, but I found it to be a labor of love. Aww, isn't that nice? I espeically enjoyed the sections on Tocqueville and John Henry Newman, as I did gaining a greater understanding of the conservative reaction towards Positivism, Materialism, etc. I was force fed this theory in grad school but never knew the conservative reaction in its context. Kirk is obviously a gifted thinker and writer and does a nice job synthesizing eras of thought into digestable portions. The Conservative Mind is one of the chief works in the conservative cannon and deservedly so.

[Adam Carman · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent overview of conservative thought. In an age when most associate conservatism with the selfish libertarianism of Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, Kirk reminds us that true conservatives seek to protect the "permanent things", the traditions of society, and to recognize that the wisdom of humanity is in the aggregate, not the individual. Kirk's unwillingness to confront the issue of slavery weakens him a bit when he includes John Randolph and John Calhoun because of their support for local authority. Kirk claims they stood for the rights of minorities in a democratic age, apparently not noting the irony. Still this book is a welcome antidote to the unintellectual conservatism of the modern day.

[Jan Rice]

I stopped because of the repeated impression from the first 100+ pages that this book is exhibiting the characteristics and quirks of conservatism rather than explaining it and that the author's main aim is to convert, not teach.

Reading Jerry Z. Muller's introduction in Conservatism: An Anthology of Social and Political Thought from David Hume to the Present clarified my perceptions.

[Logan Grant · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have grown frustrated over the past decade or so by hearing so many contradictory definitions, theories, ideologies, platforms, etc. of what conservatism is supposed to be about. I almost want to use the analogy of how challenging it would be to articulate Christianity without the Bible, but I think a better analogy is trying to argue who’s an actual scientist without the scientific method. This book, published in 1953, is one conservative academic’s attempt to identify and trace the intellectual history of conservatism. Russell Kirk is an extremely well-educated man, and a skilled writer. An introduction to the book points out that it was almost not published, because the two publishers who were interested wanted him to cut the length of the book in half. I must sympathize with their inclination (if not their judgment) because I’d say about half the book went over my head. This because I am not very familiar with many of the British politicians and literary figures he discusses. Still, I am glad that they did not prevail because although my ignorance made a tough slog of the read in places, there are gems that I would have loathed to miss.

When I began the book, I was expecting what I usually get from political philosophy, which is an ideology based upon theoretical system of thought. Instead, Kirk presented conservatism as almost an anti-ideology. Instead of being based upon rational theory, Kirk argues, conservatism is more of a set of principles with a special veneration for the lessons of history. What is the difference between an ideology and a set of principles? (I would have asked before having read the book) There are different ways to answer that, but I think the simplest and most relevant is to think of a set of political conditions and questions as the input and the political policy position as the output. An ideology dictates both the input and the output. It frames the context and conflicts that must be resolved and ordains the solution(s). Principles, however, are eternal considerations or values that one applies to a given set of political questions in their own context to form an independent conclusion about the appropriate public policy positions. This at once makes sense of why there are so many different “conservative” positions. With this book, Kirk was not trying to put conservatism in an intellectual box so that we can properly discriminate between “real” or “fake” or “good” or “bad” conservatives (although in some cases it can be warranted). He traces the life of the application of a set of principles from Edmund Burke to T.S. Eliot. Conservatism was alive and influential before anyone had noticed the pattern and given it a name.

So what are these principles? There is variety, but Kirk identifies six primary canons of conservative thought:

1) “Belief in a transcendent order or order of natural law which rules society as well as conscience. Political problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems.” Getting into first principles, where is the source of justice in the world? If it is a human construct or individualized, then justice has no inherent nature of its own and therefore could be correctly invoked by anyone for any reason. Without an external order imbuing it with an objective quality, it is reduced to a rhetorical tool.

2) “Affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence, as opposed to the narrowing uniformity, egalitarianism, and utilitarian aims of most radical systems”. There is something very important and very human which is lost when uniformity is pursued. What that is depends on the context and construction of the public policy itself. It is, however, inevitable that there is a serious cost, whether in human individuality, purpose, motivation, creativity, fulfillment, or relationships.

3) “Conviction that civilized society requires orders and classes, as against the notion of a ‘classless society’… If natural distinctions are effaced among men, oligarchs fill the vacuum.” This is essentially the historically-informed principle that whenever attempts are made to neutralize the natural inequality of mankind, a worse form of tyranny results than that experienced under what Jefferson and others called the “natural aristocracy”. This is one precept which Kirk failed to sell to me in its totality. I agree that a ruling class is inescapable. History has also made it clear that if you give someone the supreme political power necessary to attempt to correct human nature, human devastation will ensue in short order. However, I don’t think that within the gap between the highest functioning people and the lowest that there need to be separate classes. I suspect that the nuances of Kirk’s use of the term “classes” simply flew over my head due to my contemporary conception of it.

4) “Persuasion that freedom and property are closely linked: separate property from private possession, and Leviathan becomes master of all.” Following from the principle that there cannot fail to be a ruling class, there must also be someone who ultimately commands the use or nonuse of public property. Ownership of property is not only natural, but inexorable. In the history of mankind there has never been land or object ostensibly owned by the community at-large which was not ultimately controlled by someone when it became scarce. It is true that we do not have bureaus of sunlight or oxygen allocation agencies, but there is not a scarce resource which is not under the command of some entity. The prospect of an unowned world is a mirage, and a dangerous one.

5) “Faith in prescription and distrust of ‘sophisters, calculators, and economists’ who would reconstruct society upon abstract designs. Customs, convention, and old prescription are checks upon man’s anarchic impulse and upon the innovator’s lust for power.” This is an extremely thorough way to say that resistance to change is a virtue because there are people out there who want to destroy the systems we have in place because they conceitedly believe they can build something better. It is also a recognition of the threat of technocrats, who regard the masses as sheep to be managed but also hold the lives and dignity of the masses in the same lack of esteem.

6) “Recognition that change may not be salutary reform: hasty innovation may be a devouring conflagration, rather than a torch of progress.” What is important here is the distinction between change and progress. Conservatism doesn’t inherently oppose progress, but it adopts a keen skepticism toward all innovation to ensure that every step taken is, in fact, a step forward. Conservatives should not oppose a new concept just because it’s a new concept, but should relentlessly question its costs and consequences until it can be harmoniously incorporated into our present system.

Throughout The Conservative Mind, these cannons are explored through their expression in the words and deeds of American and British political leaders, thinkers, and poets. I didn’t read this book so much as study it, so attempting to dive into any additional element of the book would end up requiring a great deal more effort than I am able to provide in a pithy review. Suffice it to say that this book was and is a groundbreaking work that should be consulted (at least in some summary form) by anyone who wants to call themselves a conservative.

[Eric Chevlen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ambrose Bierce mordantly defined a Conservative as "a statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others." Russell Kirk would not fully subscribe to that definition, but I doubt that he would dismiss it entirely.

In his introduction to his masterful magnum opus, Russell Kirk, although reluctant to cage conservatism within a strict definition—that itself would defy conservative principles—outlines what he called six canons of conservative thought:

(1) Belief that a divine intent rules society as well as conscience, forging an eternal chain of right and duty which links great and obscure, living and dead. Political problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems. A narrow rationality, what Coleridge calls the Understanding, cannot of itself satisfy human needs…
(2) Affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of traditional life, as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity and equalitarianism and utilitarian aims of most radical systems…
(3) Conviction that civilized society requires orders and classes. The only true equality is moral equality; all other attempts at levelling lead to despair, if enforced by positive legislation. Society longs for leadership, and if a people destroy natural distinctions among men, presently Buonaparte fills the vacuum.
(4) Persuasion that property and freedom are inseparably connected, and that economic levelling is not economic progress. Separate property from private possession, and liberty is erased.
(5) Faith in prescription and distrust of "sophisters and calculators." Man must put a control upon his will and his appetite, for conservatives know man to be governed more by emotion than by reason. Tradition and sound prejudice provide checks upon man's anarchic impulse.
(6) Recognition that change and reform are not identical, and that innovation is a devouring conflagration more often than it is a torch of progress. Society must alter, for slow change is the means of its conservation, like the human body's perpetual renewal; but Providence is the proper instrument for change, and the test of a statesman is his cognizance of the real tendency of Providential social forces...

Kirk posited that “at least five major schools of radical thought have competed for public favor since Burke entered politics: the rationalism of the philosophies, the romantic emancipation of Rousseau and his allies, the utilitarianism of the Benthamites, the positivism of Comte's school, and the collectivistic materialism of Marx and other socialists.”

Just as conservatism has its general canons, so “one may say that radicalism since 1790 has tended to attack the prescriptive arrangement of society on the following grounds—

(1) The perfectibility of man and the illimitable progress of society: meliorism. Radicals believe that education, positive legislation, and alteration of environment can produce men like gods; they deny that humanity has a natural proclivity toward violence and sin.
(2) Contempt for tradition. Reason, impulse, and materialistic determinism are severally preferred as guides to social welfare, trustier than the wisdom of our ancestors. Formal religion is rejected, and a variety of anti-Christian systems are offered as substitutes.
(3) Political levelling. Order and privilege are condemned; total democracy, as direct as practicable, is the professed radical ideal. Allied with this spirit, generally, is a dislike of old parliamentary arrangements and an eagerness for centralization and consolidation.
(4) Economic levelling. The ancient rights of property, especially property in land, are suspect to almost all radicals; and collectivistic reformers hack at the institution of private property root and branch.
(5) As a fifth point, one might try to define a common radical view of the state's function; but here the chasm of opinion between the chief schools of innovation is too deep for any satisfactory generalization. One can only remark that radicals unite in detesting Burke's description of the state as a divinely ordained moral essence, a spiritual union of the dead, the living, and those yet unborn…”

Kirk traces British and American conservative thought from Edmund Burke to George Santayana. (The 7th Revised Edition was published in 1986). His is a work of breathtaking scholarship. The general historical development of the last two centuries has been an expansion and consolidation of the power of the state, and pari passu an erosion of personal liberty. Kirk and the thinkers he reviews are fearful of expansive democracy untempered by constitutional safeguards of property. Consequently, this book reports a conservative school of thought that has been steadily pushed back, not by superior ideas, but by political force. Nonetheless, Kirk ends on an optimistic, or at least an encouraging note. He favorably quotes T.S. Eliot: “If we take the widest and wisest view of a Cause, there is no such thing as a Lost Cause, because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause. We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors’ victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that anything will triumph.”

The Conservative Mind is one of the intellectual foundational texts of the resurgence of a conservative movement in modern American politics and thought. Sadly, much of what now claims to be conservatism is cartoonish; equally cartoonish is the caricature of conservatism offered by its opponents. This book is must reading for anyone who wants a serious understanding of the historical development and ideological foundation of a serious political and cultural philosophy.

[David McGrogan · Rating 3 out of 5]

The subject is important and interesting. The writing style is pompous, bombastic, and priggish in equal measure. Kirk can turn a phrase, but he is also capable of writing the most turgid purple prose, and his authorial voice is cloying and dislikable. When you consider that this was his PhD thesis, and he was essentially a young fanboy gushing over his 18th and 19th century idols, the tone is entirely understandable, but doesn't make it any more fun to read.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an excellent book. It is a history of conservative thought starting with Burke and continuing up to the 20th century. My purpose was to better understand what I really mean by the word "conservative", and this book provided me not only with a satisfying answer but also with a long list of important philosophers and political writers in the conservative stream of thought whom I can pursue further study with. Perhaps most importantly, I have a clearer understanding than ever how to judge any given piece of writing or idea as "conservative" or not.

Perhaps the most significant insight I gained from this book was that "conservatism" is not a political or philosophical system. "Conservative" is first and before all else an instinct. It is an instinct which gives rise to various political arrangements, theories, and rational arguments, but none of these can claim to have either circumscribed or instituted "conservatism". Thus, the robin which goes about his daily routine as all robins throughout time have always done is just as "conservative" as the brilliant intellect of Burke or de Tocqueville.

The opposite of "conservatism", according to Kirk, is not "liberalism" but "radicalism". Thus, both Fascists and Communists are found sharing the same space on the conservative-radical spectrum. What constitutes the "radical" instinct is the desire for sudden, dramatic, or extreme change. The "conservative" character, on the other hand, seeks change that is gradual, cautious, and limited. Notice crucially that in Kirk's view, conservatives seek, or perhaps one ought to say, "tolerate", change. Total stasis is not Kirk's understanding of conservatism.

Although some change is tolerated within the conservative world view, conservative thinkers have always been characterized by a belief in a certain set of unchangeable, inalienable, ineluctable, and absolute truths that both exist independently of human action and place authoritative demands upon it. Kirk briefly mentions that while oriental philosophers like Confucius are exemplars of this "divine order" which man must obey rather than construct, occidental conservatism has been inextricably affiliated with Christianity.

Kirk's passing reference to Confucius as an example of the conservative mind made me wish for a much more thorough elucidation of conservatism as conceived in oriental philosophy and religion. I also wished for some exploration of conservative ideas in the writings of the Medieval Scholastics, Roman Stoics, and Greek philosophers. Such an undertaking would have doubled or tripled the size of this book, so I appreciate the reasoning for Kirk's circumspection; nevertheless, I hope to eventually lay my hands on the work of an author who fills these gaps for me.

Kirk repeatedly underscores the significance of "natural law" for conservative minds throughout history. However, Kirk is careful to point out that the "noble savage" of that arch-radical Rousseau is essentially opposed to the "natural law" described by Burke and other conservatives. This is because the latter, following Aristotle, perceive civilization as itself natural and inherent in the fabric of human existence. The radical ideal of an isolated, self-actualized, primal human bracing against the raw wilderness is the fantasy of an inflamed and puerile imagination.

"Tradition" is another characteristic feature of the conservative mind. This also Kirk is careful to qualify. The prejudices, rites, and rituals of tradition in society are not to be confused with the immutable laws of natural order. They have grown over time and will continue to evolve, but where the conservative differs from the radical on the question of tradition is at the burden of evidence. The radical mind places tradition on the stand and assumes it is guilty unless proven innocent. The conservative mind opposes this by assuming change is wrong unless proven otherwise.

Kirk's overall description of conservatism reminds me of Alexander Dugin's "liberal conservatism", which he contrasts with the Conservative Revolution and Traditionalists. Dugin's critique of liberal conservatism aligns with that which many liberals level against conservatives, namely: what liberals advocate today will be advocated by conservatives ten years from now. Put another way: the "liberal conservatism" that Kirk describes theoretically allows for unlimited change, so long as the change is gradual.

This critique is unfair, to some degree. The Conservative Mind does seem to affirm the existence some unchangeable boundaries beyond which even the most gradual of changes cannot pass. Nevertheless, no clear list of these unchangeable truths is ever agreed upon. In fact, Kirk's book is filled with examples of conservatives who compromise their principles in order to slow the rate of change. What is "conservative" for one generation (monarchy, for example) is "reactionary" for a later generation of conservatives (the American Founding Fathers, for example).

[David Blynov · Rating 5 out of 5]

I cant believe I somehow managed to get a Bachelor's in Political Science without studying a single political philosopher in this book!! Kirk wrote a beautiful essay on what it has historically meant to be "conservative." A dense and long read, but worth it.

4.8/5


Conservatism & Progress:

"Conservatism is never more admirable than when it accepts changes that is disapproves, with good grace, for the sake of a general conciliation."

"Either order in the cosmos is real, or all is chaos. If we are adrift in chaos, then the fragile egalitarian doctrines and emancipating programs of the revolutionary reformers have no significance; for in a vortex of chaos, only force and appetite signify."

"The basis on which the whole structure of the new [progressive] ethics have been reared is, as we have seen, the assumption that the significant struggle between good and evil is not in the individual but in society. If we wish once more to build securely, we may have to recover in some form the idea of 'the civil war in the cave.' "

"The new American conservative must accomplish something more difficult than chastening Russia: he must chasten himself."

"There exist always two aspects of order: the outer order of the commonwealth and the inner order of the soul... Conservatives confront the tremendous dual task of restoring the harmony of the person and the harmony of the republic."

"The twentieth-century conservative is concerned, first of all, for the regeneration of the spirit and character - with the perennial problem of the inner order of the soul, the restoration of the ethical understanding and the religious sanction upon which any life worth living is founded... Recovery of moral understanding cannot be merely a means to social restoration: it must be its own end, though it will produce social consequences."


Theology:

"A universal equality among men exists; but it is the equality of Christianity, moral equality, or, more precisely, equality in the ultimate judgement of God."

"Sin, in quality and quantity, is virtually constant... Projects of reform must begin and end with the human heart; the real enemy of mankind is not social institution, but the devil within us."

"Liberal education is another matter: this is a use of "liberal" far more ancient and more pure, a true understanding of liberty, which is freedom to live within the compass of God's ordinances, not freedom to doubt and demolish. Liberal education is the intellectual training of free men... The root of education is the study of theology; of virtue, religious faith."

"Men who demand material and measurable evidence of the transcendent ask what is not in nature; they endeavor to solve mysteries simply by denying mysteries exist."

"Knowledge, love, and beauty cannot endure in a world that acknowledges only Nature; they have both their roots and their consummation in God, and people who deny God must lose both the definition and the appreciation of knowledge, love, and beauty."

"When studied with any degree of thoroughness... the economic problem will be found to run into the political problem, the political problem into the philosophical problem, and the philosophical problem itself to be almost indissolubly bound up at last with the religious problem."


Human Nature:

"Even the wisest of mankind cannot live by reason alone; pure arrogant reason, denying the claims of prejudice (which commonly are also the claims of conscience), leads to a wasteland of withered hopes and crying loneliness, empty of God and man; the wilderness in which Satan tempted Christ was not more dreadful than the arid expanse of intellectual vanity deprived of tradition and intuition, where the modern man is tempted to go by his own pride."

"Human appetites, passions, prejudices, and self-love will never be conquered by benevolence and knowledge alone, introduced by human means... The world is growing more enlightened, popular opinion asserts; and there is some truth in the belief that newspapers, magazines, and circulating libraries have made mankind wiser; but with the pride that accompanies a little new learning comes the peril of popular vanity, the hazard that all old opinions might be discarded... We cannot expect formal education radically to alter the common impulses of the heart... There is no necessary connection between knowledge and virtue. Simple intelligence has no association with morality... The profound lessons of life are not to be got in schools, nor can they be evaded by experimenting with earthly elysiums. We are as God made us; the nature of our species changes only slowly, if at all: and philosophers who promise to save us from all pains which the common course of life entails will lead us, instead, into deeper torment."

"Ideas exist without men being able to express them definitely or even being consciously aware of their existence. A few men possess ideas; most men are possessed by them."

"The things which cannot be adequately represented by words are more important than those which can... It seems to me that we are spirits in prison... able only to make to each other, but with a world of things to think and say which our signals cannot describe at all."

"Happiness is more dependent upon tranquil mind and conscience than upon material circumstances."

"The heart has reason which the Reason knows not."

" 'What is specifically human in man and ultimately divine is a certain quality of will, a will that is felt in its relation to his ordinary self as a will to refrain.' This power, peculiar to man, of evoking a check upon the impulses of sense, even upon the impulses of reason, is what makes him human."


Politics:

"What men really are seeking, or ought to seek, is not the right to govern themselves, but the right to be governed well."

"For where there is power, there will be found a disposition to abuse it."

"The state cannot leave religion out of cognizance; for the state is a religious establishment, and law is the instrument of social vengeance, created to enforce morality."

"The realm of politics and the realm of morals do not exist in separate spheres... the state exists to enforce a moral system, to redeem men from impulses of the flesh and their ignorance. And morality, in turn, must be supported by the sanction of religious faith, or it cannot stand. 'The whole management and direction of human life depends upon the question whether or not there is a God and a future state of human existence.' "

"Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces... The conflict is no longer between men, but between the motors that drive the men, and the men tend to succumb to their own motive forces."

"Power without and power within always must remain in ratio; so that every diminution of power on the part of the state, unless it is to result in injury to society, should be accompanied by an increase in self control in individuals."

"If democracy cannot be persuaded, then democracy must be intimidated."

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

According to Kirk, conservatives are skeptical of all big plans to remodel society or reform government based out of some ideology, doctrine, or a priori plan. Conservatives respect a nation's leaders because they are leaders, even if they disagree with them: the honor and authority of the institution is more important than the individual, even as the nation is more important than the party. Conservatives are skeptical of the market, and its socially corrosive tendency to reduce all values to the value of money. In politics, as in medicine, the first rule is 'do no harm'.

Boy, is THIS guy behind the times.....