Russell Kirk

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Russell Kirk
Enlarge
Russell Kirk

Russell Kirk (1918, Plymouth, Michigan – 29 April 1994, Mecosta, Michigan), was an American political theorist, historian, social critic, and man of letters, best known for his influence on 20th century American conservatism. His 1953 book, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Santayana,[1] gave shape to the amorphous post-war conservative movement. It traced the development of conservative thought in the Anglo-American tradition, especially the ideas of Edmund Burke. It is still considered one of the most important texts in twentieth-century conservative thought.[citation needed]

Contents

[edit] Life

Russell Kirk was born in a house his grandfather had built. He was the son of Russell Andrew Kirk, a railroad engineer, and Marjorie Rachel Kirk (née Pierce).

Kirk attended Michigan State University on a scholarship, then did graduate studies at Duke University. After serving in the American Armed Forces during WWII, he attended the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, and in 1953 became the only American to be awarded the degree of doctor of letters from that university.

Upon completing his degree, Kirk took up an academic position at his alma mater Michigan State, but resigned in 1959 after becoming disenchanted with the school's declining academic standards, rapid growth in student numbers, and emphasis on intercollegiate sports and technical training at the expense of the traditional liberal arts. Thereafter he referred to Michigan State as "Cow College" or "Behemoth University." In the Viking Portable Conservative Reader which he edited, he referred to academic political scientists as "dull dogs, as a rule." He later became a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Humanities at Hillsdale College in Michigan, where he would teach one semester a year. Dr. KIrk was also a Distinguished Fellow at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C.

Kirk was the founding editor of the conservative journal Modern Age from 1957-1959.

Kirk then returned to his ancestral home in the village of Mecosta, Michigan, where he exerted great influence on the American political and intellectual scene through his numerous books, academic articles, lectures, and a syndicated newspaper column that ran for 13 years. Kirk was a founder of, and frequent contributor to, National Review magazine. Later he became a frequent lecturer at the Heritage Foundation, publishing many of these lectures in his The Politics of Prudence (1993) and Redeeming the Time (1998).

In 1963, Kirk married Annette Courtemanche, by whom he had four daughters. She and Kirk were known for their hospitality, welcoming many political, philosophical, and literary figures in their house (known as "Piety Hill"), and giving shelter to -- among others -- political refugees and hobos. They also ran a sort of seminar on conservative thought for university students, out of Piety Hill, now the site of the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal. Kirk declined to drive (calling cars "mechanical Jacobins"), and refused television and what he called "electronic computers."

[edit] Ideas

[edit] The Conservative Mind

The Conservative Mind, the published version of Kirk's doctoral dissertation, contributed materially to the 20th century Burke revival.[2] It drew attention to:

The Viking Portable Conservative Reader (1983), which Kirk edited, contains sample writings by most of the above.

[edit] Principles

Kirk developed six "canons" of conservatism. Gerald J. Russello described them thus:

  1. A belief in a transcendent order, which Kirk described variously as based in tradition, divine revelation, or natural law;
  2. An affection for the "variety and mystery" of human existence;
  3. A conviction that society requires orders and classes that emphasize "natural" distinctions;
  4. A belief that property and freedom are closely linked;
  5. A faith in custom, convention and prescription, and
  6. A recognition that innovation must be tied to existing traditions and customs, which entails a respect for the political value of prudence.[3]

Kirk said Christianity and Western Civilization are "unimaginable apart from one another."[7] He said that "all culture arises out of religion. When religious faith decays, culture must decline, though often seeming to flourish for a space after the religion which has nourished it has sunk into disbelief." [8]

[edit] Kirk and libertarianism

Kirk grounded his Burkean conservatism in tradition, political philosophy, belles lettres, and the strong religious faith of his later years; rather than libertarianism and free market economic reasoning. The Conservative Mind hardly mentions economics at all.

In a polemic essay[4], Kirk (quoting T. S. Eliot) called libertarians "chirping sectaries", adding that they and conservatives have nothing in common. He called the libertarian movement "an ideological clique forever splitting into sects still smaller and odder, but rarely conjugating." He said a line of division exists between believers in "some sort of transcendent moral order" and "utilitarians admitting no transcendent sanctions for conduct."[5]

[edit] Kirk and neoconservatism

Late in life, he grew disenchanted with American neoconservatives as well. On December 15, 1988, Russell Kirk gave a lecture at the Heritage Foundation, titled "The Neoconservatives: An Endangered Species." As Chronicles editor Scott Richert describes it,

[One line] helped define the emerging struggle between neoconservatives and paleoconservatives. "Not seldom has it seemed," Kirk declared, "as if some eminent Neoconservatives mistook Tel Aviv for the capital of the United States." A few years later, in another Heritage Foundation speech, Kirk repeated that line verbatim. In the wake of the Gulf War, which he had opposed, he clearly understood that those words carried even greater meaning.[9]

Midge Decter, director of the Committee for the Free World, called Kirk's line "a bloody outrage, a piece of anti-Semitism by Kirk that impugns the loyalty of neoconservatives." [6] She told The New Republic, "It's this notion of a Christian civilization. You have to be part of it or you're not really fit to conserve anything. That's an old line and it's very ignorant."[10]

Samuel Francis called Kirk's "Tel Aviv" remark "a wisecrack about the slavishly pro-Israel sympathies among neoconservatives.[7]

[edit] Conservative man of letters

Kirk's more important books include Eliot and his Age: T. S. Eliot's Moral Imagination in the Twentieth Century (1972), The Roots of American Order (1974), and the autobiographical Sword of the Imagination: Memoirs of a Half Century of Literary Conflict (1995).

As was the case with Edmund Burke, Kirk become renowned for the excellent prose style of his intellectual and polemical writings.[citation needed] He was also an accomplished teller and writer of ghost stories, some of which are collected in Ancestral Shadows (2004), and contributed a horror story to Dark Forces (book) in 1980. According to Reference.com, the science fiction writer and polymath Jerry Pournelle is a protege of Kirk's.[11]

[edit] References

  • Russello, Gerald J.,

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Later The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot
  2. ^ Harry Jaffa wrote[1]: Kirk was a poor Burke scholar. Burke's attack on metaphysical reasoning related only to modern philosophy, that attempted to eliminate skeptical doubt from its premises, and hence from its conclusions.
  3. ^ quoted in Russell Kirk and territorial democracy. Publius September 22, 2004
  4. ^ Chirping Sectaries
  5. ^ He put libertarians in the latter category.[2] Despite Kirk's view of libertarianism, many paleolibertarians are fans of his cultural conservatism.
  6. ^ She claimed that Kirk "said people like my husband and me put the interest of Israel before the interest of the United States, that we have a dual loyalty."[3] Decter is married to Norman Podhoretz
  7. ^ "[4] He called Decter's response untrue, [5] "reckless" and "vitriolic." Furthermore, he argued that such a denunciation "always plays into the hands of the left, which is then able to repeat the charges and claim conservative endorsement of them." [6]

[edit] External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../r/u/s/Russell_Kirk_004b.html"
In other languages