Russell Kirk

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Russell Kirk
Russell Kirk

Russell Kirk (19 October 1918 – 29 April 1994) was an American political theorist, historian, social critic, literary critic, and fiction author known for his influence on 20th century American conservatism. His 1953 book, The Conservative Mind, gave shape to the amorphous post-World War II conservative movement. It traced the development of conservative thought in the Anglo-American tradition, giving special importance to the ideas of Edmund Burke.

Contents

[edit] Life

Russell Kirk was born in Plymouth, Michigan. He was the son of Russell Andrew Kirk, a railroad engineer, and Marjorie Pierce Kirk.

Kirk obtained his B.A. at Michigan State University and a M.A. at Duke University. During World War II, he served in the American armed forces and corresponded with libertarian writer Isabel Paterson, who help shape his early political thought. After the war, he attended the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. In 1953, he became the first American to be awarded the degree of doctor of letters by that university.[citation needed]

Upon completing his studies, Kirk took up an academic position at his alma mater, Michigan State. He resigned in 1959, after having become disenchanted with that university's academic standards, rapid growth in student numbers, and emphasis on intercollegiate athletics and technical training at the expense of the traditional liberal arts. Thereafter he referred to Michigan State as "Cow College" or "Behemoth University." He later wrote that academic political scientists and sociologists were "as a breed--dull dogs."[1] Late in life, he taught one semester a year at Hillsdale College, where he was Distinguished Visiting Professor of Humanities.

Kirk frequently published in two American conservative journals he helped found, National Review in 1955 and Modern Age in 1957. He was the founding editor of the latter, 1957-59. Later he was made a Distinguished Fellow of the Heritage Foundation, where he gave a number of lectures.[2]

After leaving Michigan State, Kirk returned to his ancestral home in Mecosta, Michigan, where he wrote the many books, academic articles, lectures, and the syndicated newspaper column (which ran for 13 years) by which he exerted his influence on American politics and intellectual life. In 1963, Kirk married Annette Courtemanche; they had four daughters. She and Kirk became known for their hospitality, welcoming many political, philosophical, and literary figures in their Mecosta house (known as "Piety Hill"), and giving shelter to political refugees, hoboes, and others. Their home became the site of a sort of seminar on conservative thought for university students. Piety Hill now houses the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal.

Kirk declined to drive, calling cars "mechanical Jacobins", and would have nothing to do with television and what he called "electronic computers."

Russel Kirk converted to Catholicism in 1963.

[edit] Ideas

[edit] The Conservative Mind

The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Santayana[3], the published version of Kirk's doctoral dissertation, contributed materially to the 20th century Burke revival. It also drew attention to:

The Portable Conservative Reader (1982), which Kirk edited, contains sample writings by most of the above.

Not everyone agreed with Kirk's reading of the conservative heritage and tradition. For example, Harry Jaffa (a student of Leo Strauss) wrote: "Kirk was a poor Burke scholar. Burke's attack on metaphysical reasoning related only to modern philosophy's attempt to eliminate skeptical doubt from its premises and hence from its conclusions."[4]

Russello (2004) argues that Kirk adapted what 19th century American Catholic thinker Orestes Brownson called "territorial democracy" to articulate a version of federalism that was based on premises that differ in part from those of the Founders and other conservatives. Kirk further believed that territorial democracy could reconcile the tension between treating the states as mere provinces of the central government, and as autonomous political units independent of Washington. Finally, territorial democracy allowed Kirk to set out a theory of individual rights grounded in the particular historical circumstances of the United States, while rejecting a universal conception of such rights.

[edit] Principles

Kirk developed six "canons" of conservatism, which Russello (2004) described as follows:

  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.

Kirk said that Christianity and Western Civilization are "unimaginable apart from one another." [5] and 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." [6]

[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, 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." He included libertarians in the latter category.[5][6] Kirk, therefore, questioned the "fusionism" between libertarians and traditional conservatives that marked much of post World War II conservatism in the United States.[7]

Kirk's view of "classical liberals" is positive though; he agrees with them on "ordered liberty" as they make "common cause with regular conservatives against the menace of democratic despotism and economic collectivism."[8]

Tibor R. Machan defended libertarianism in response to Kirk's original Heritage Lecture. Machan argued that the right of individual sovereignty is perhaps most worthy of conserving from the American political heritage, and that when conservatives themselves talk about preserving some tradition, they cannot at the same time claim a disrespectful distrust of the individual human mind, of rationalism itself.[9]

Jacob G. Hornberger of the Future of Freedom Foundation also responded to Kirk.[10]

[edit] Kirk and Neoconservatism

Late in life, Kirk grew disenchanted with American neoconservatives as well. On December 15, 1988, he 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.[7]

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." [11] 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."[8]

Samuel Francis called Kirk's "Tel Aviv" remark "a wisecrack about the slavishly pro-Israel sympathies among neoconservatives.[12]

[edit] 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 his hero Edmund Burke, Kirk became renowned for the prose style of his intellectual and polemical writings.[13]

[edit] Fiction

Kirk was also an accomplished teller and writer of fiction, most notably consummate ghost stories in the tradition of Sheridan Le Fanu, M. R. James, and H. Russell Wakefield. His first novel, Old House of Fear (1961; revised, 1965), was a gothic. He followed that up with A Creature of the Twilight (1966)—a story of revolution and political intrigue in Africa featuring Manfred Arcane, a recurrent character in many of Kirk's stories—and later a haunted house novel, Lord of the Hollow Dark (1979; revised, 1989), again featuring Arcane.

During his lifetime, Kirk's supernatural tales were collected in three volumes, The Surly Sullen Bell (1962), The Princess of All Lands (1979), and Watchers at the Strait Gate (1984), the latter two from Arkham House, a distinguished small publisher of speculative fiction. All these 21 stories—plus another, previously uncollected one—were posthumously gathered in two volumes published by Ash-Tree Press, a similarly distinguished small publisher, but one specializing in classic ghost stories: Off the Sand Road (2002) and What Shadows We Pursue (2003). A newer selection of his stories, Ancestral Shadows (2004), was put out by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, which specializes in Christian subjects. As with such authors as G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, and J. R. R. Tolkien, there are conservative Christian undercurrents to Kirk's fiction.

His story, "There's a Long, Long Trail A-Winding" (1976)—later included in The Princess of All Lands, Off the Sand Road, and Ancestral Shadows—won the 1977 World Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction.

An essay by Kirk, "A Cautionary Note on the Ghostly Tale", originally published in the April/May, 1962, issue of the then-extant journal The Critic, was reprinted in most of Kirk's story collections: as a preface to Watchers at the Strait Gate, and as respective afterwords to The Surly Sullen Bell, Off the Sand Road, and Ancestral Shadows. Additionally, a short, specially written, different preface, under the dubious heading "Prologue", was written for The Princess of All Lands.

[edit] Individual Works

Kirk's complete stories and novels, listed alphabetically with first publication years in parentheses:

  • "Balgrummo's Hell" (1967; incorporated as prologue to Lord of the Hollow Dark, 1989)
  • "Behind the Stumps" (1950)
  • "The Cellar of Little Egypt" (1962)
  • A Creature of the Twilight (1966)
  • "An Encounter by Mortstone Pond" (1984)
  • "Ex Tenebris" (1957)
  • "Fate's Purse" (1979)
  • "The Invasion of the Church of the Holy Ghost" (1983)
  • "The Last God's Dream" (1979)
  • "Lex Talionis" (1979)
  • Lord of the Hollow Dark (1979; revised by 1967 story "Balgrummo's Hell" being incorporated as prologue, 1989)
  • "Lost Lake" (1957)
  • "Off the Sand Road" (1952)
  • Old House of Fear (1961; revised by titles newly being supplied to chapter headings, 1965)
  • "Old Place of Sorworth" (1952; reprinted as "Sorworth Place", 1962 and thereafter)
  • "The Peculiar Demesne of Archvicar Gerontion" (1980)
  • "The Princess of All Lands" (1979)
  • "The Reflex-Man in Whinnymuir Close" (1983)
  • "Saviourgate" (1976)
  • "Skyberia" (1952)
  • "Sorworth Place" (reprint title substituted for 1952 story "Old Place of Sorworth", 1962 and thereafter)
  • "The Surly Sullen Bell" (1950)
  • "There's a Long, Long Trail A-Winding" (1976)
  • "Uncle Isaiah" (1951)
  • "Watchers at the Strait Gate" (1980)
  • "What Shadows We Pursue" (1953)

[edit] Short Story Collections

Listed chronologically, with first publication years in parentheses:

  • The Surly Sullen Bell (1962)
  • The Princess of All Lands (1979)
  • Watchers at the Strait Gate (1984)
  • Off the Sand Road (2002; selected and introduced by John Pelan)
  • What Shadows We Pursue (2003; selected and introduced by John Pelan)
  • Ancestral Shadows (2004; selected and introduced by Vigen Guorian)

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Kirk, Russell, ed., 1982. The Portable Conservative Reader. Viking: xxxviii.
  2. ^ Many published in his The Politics of Prudence (1993) and Redeeming the Time (1998).
  3. ^ Which went into 7 editions, the later ones with the title The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot. Regnery Publishing. 7th edition (2001). ISBN 0-89526-171-5
  4. ^ Harry V. Jaffa (2006-04-13). Harry V. Jaffa Responds to Claes Ryn. The Claremont Institute. Retrieved on 2007-05-10.
  5. ^ A copy of Kirk's Libertarians: Chirping Sectaries can be found here
  6. ^ Nevertheless, many paleolibertarians respect Kirk's cultural conservatism.
  7. ^ The Volokh Conspiracy - Russell Kirk, Libertarianism, and Fusionism:
  8. ^ "A Dispassionate Assessment of Libertarians" in The Politics of Prudence (1993)
  9. ^ A Passionate Defense of Libertarianism
  10. ^ An Open Letter to Russell Kirk
  11. ^ 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."[1] Decter is the spouse of Norman Podhoretz.
  12. ^ "[2] He called Decter's response untrue, [3] "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." [4]
  13. ^ Nash (1998).

[edit] Further reading

Modern Age articles available online via Ebsco.

  • Attarian, John, 1998, "Russell Kirk's Political Economy," Modern Age 40: 87-97. Issn: 0026-7457.
  • Brown, Charles (1981). Russell Kirk: A Bibliography. Central Michigan University: Clarke Historical Library. 
  • John P. East, 1984, "Russell Kirk as a Political Theorist: Perceiving the Need for Order in the Soul and in Society," Modern Age 28: 33-44. Issn: 0026-7457 .
  • Kirk, Russell, 1995. The Sword of Imagination: Memoirs of a Half-Century of Literary Conflict. Kirk's memoirs.
  • McDonald, W. Wesley, 1982. The Conservative Mind of Russell Kirk: `The Permanent Things' in an Age of Ideology. Ph.D. dissertation, The Catholic University of America. Citation: DAI 1982 43(1): 255-A. DA8213740. Online at ProQuest Dissertations & Theses.
  • --------, 1983, "Reason, Natural Law, and Moral Imagination in the Thought of Russell Kirk," Modern Age 27: 15-24. Issn: 0026-7457.
  • --------, 2004. "Russell Kirk and The Age of Ideology." University of Missouri Press.
  • --------, 1999. "Russell Kirk and the Prospects for Conservatism," Humanitas XII: 56-76.
  • --------, 2006. "Kirk, Russell (1918-94)," in "American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia". ISI Books: 471-474. Biographical entry.
  • Nash, George H., 1998. The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America.
  • Person, Jr., James E., 1999. "Russell Kirk: A Critical Biography of a Conservative Mind". Madison Books.
  • Russello, Gerald J., 1996, "The Jurisprudence of Russell Kirk," Modern Age 38: 354-63. Issn: 0026-7457. Reviews Kirk's writings on law, 1976-93, exploring his notion of natural law, his emphasis on the importance of the English common law tradition, and his theories of change and continuity in legal history.
  • --------, 2007. "The Postmodern Imagination of Russell Kirk". University of Missouri Press.
  • --------, 1999, "Time and Timeless: the Historical Imagination of Russell Kirk," Modern Age 41: 209-19. Issn: 0026-7457.
  • --------, 2004, "Russell Kirk and Territorial Democracy," Publius 34: 109-24. Issn: 0048-5950.
  • Whitney, Gleaves, 2001, "The Swords of Imagination: Russell Kirk's Battle with Modernity," Modern Age 43: 311-20. Issn: 0026-7457. Argues that Kirk used five "swords of imagination": historical, political, moral, poetic, and prophetic.

[edit] External links