To understand the historic import of this book, which began life as a doctoral dissertation, it is perhaps helpful to note that a year after it came out, Lionel Trilling, in his book The Liberal Imagination, would maintain that :

    [I]n the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition.... It is
    the plain fact [that] there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation...[only]...irritable mental gestures
    which seem to resemble ideas.

Though the sentiment is obviously inane, Mr. Trilling's hubris, and that of liberals in general, was perhaps understandable in light of the fact that he wrote at the precise midpoint of the long liberal interregnum that prevailed from the presidency of Herbert Hoover (1928) until the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.  The position of Left intellectuals of that day seems somehow reminiscent of the famed little old lady who told a physics lecturer that all he had said about the heliocentric universe was rubbish because :

    'The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.'

    The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, 'What is the tortoise standing on?'

    'You're very clever, young man, very clever,' said the old lady. 'But it's turtles all the way down.'

Trilling and company, perched on the middle tortoise, assumed it must be tortoises all the way up and down.  As Russell Kirk amply demonstrated, they were as wrong as she.

Mr. Kirk begins his survey of Anglo-American conservative thought (he is even credited with bestowing upon this philosophy the term conservative) by defining what it generally consists of :

    Any informed conservative is reluctant to condense profound and intricate intellectual systems to a few portentous phrases;
    he prefers to leave that technique to the enthusiasm of radicals.  Conservatism is not a fixed and immutable body of dogma,
    and conservatives inherit from Burke a talent for re-expressing their convictions to fit the time.  As a working premise,
    nevertheless, one can observe here that the essence of social conservatism is preservation of the ancient moral traditions.
    Conservatives respect the wisdom of their ancestors...; they are dubious of wholesale alteration.  They think society is a
    spiritual reality, possessing an eternal life but a delicate constitution: it cannot be scrapped and recast as if it were a machine.
    [...]   I think there are 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. [...]

    (2)    Affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of traditional life, as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity,
            egalitarianism, 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. [...]

    (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.

He contrasts these core beliefs with those of conservatism's opponents on the Left, the radicals of all stripes, who believe in :

    (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 collectivist radicals hack at the institution of private property root and branch.

Thus, the playing field.  He then goes on to an erudite, idiosyncratic and altogether beguiling discussion of the chain of men who have defended conservative ideas and resisted radical impulses from Edmund Burke, the sine qua non of the Right, to T.S. Eliot, the great poet and critic.  Among the others whose thought he surveys are : John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Sir Walter Scott, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Randolph, John Calhoun, James Fenimore Cooper, Alexis de Tocqueville, Orsestes Brownson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Benjamin Disraeli, Cardinal Newman, Henry Adams, Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More, and George Santayana.  Their styles, their particular concerns, their errors, their failures, their successes all vary widely, but the core principles that they seek to vindicate remain, unchanging.  Pluck Edmund Burke from the mists of time and plop him down on Meet the Press this Sunday and he'd voice the same concerns about our society as he voiced about his own in the 18th Century.  On the other hand, put Karl Marx on the Today Show and even Katie Couric would tear him apart.  The enemies and the fetid ideologies that the conservative mind had to contend with were ever changing, a vast array of utopian daydreams discarded one after another by a Left that never admits the error of its ways, but merely moves on to the next destructive iteration of radicalism, secure in the delusion that this next attempt will achieve a "perfect" society, right here on Earth, while instead leaving piles of corpses in its blood-soaked wake.

It seems certain that the Left will never bring itself to reckon with the conservative critique of the whole liberal impulse, but after Russell Kirk's book, no one can honestly argue that such a critique does not exist.  The very endurance and continuing relevance of conservative ideas suggests that, in fact, when the intellectual history of the West is written, it will be conservatism that is found to have been the most powerful philosophical tradition that our culture created.  Whether that history is written by a free and decent human being may well depend though on the ultimate success of the conservative mind.

(Reviewed:05-Feb-02)

Grade: (A+) Orrin C. Judd

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