Reflections on Russell Kirk.

• Author: Trepanier, Lee
• Position: Russell Kirk: A Centennial Symposium

A century has passed since the birth of Russell Kirk (1918-94), one of the principal founders of the post-World War II conservative revival in the United States. (1) This symposium examines Kirk's legacy with a view to his understanding of constitutional law and the American Founding. But before we examine these essays, it is worth a moment to review Kirk's life, thought, and place in American conservatism.

Russell Kirk was born and raised in Michigan and obtained his B.A. in history at Michigan State University and his M.A. at Duke University, where he studied John Randolph of Roanoke and discovered the writings of Edmund Burke. (2) His book Randolph of Roanoke: A Study in Conservative Thought (1951) would endure as one of his most important contributions to conservatism. (3) Kirk completed his master's degree at Duke in 1941, worked at the Rouge plant of the Ford Motor Company, and later entered the U.S. Army where he was stationed with the Chemical Warfare Service in the Great Salt Lake Desert. After his discharge, he became an instructor at Michigan State. In 1946, he took a leave of absence to research English and American conservative thinkers at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

The resulting manuscript, "The Conservatives' Rout," earned him his doctorate in 1952. It was published in 1953 as The Conservative Mind. (4) The book received national attention and launched Kirk's career as a public intellectual. In The Conservative Mind, Kirk uncovered a conservative tradition in Anglo-American civilization that had begun with Edmund Burke's defense of liberty and rights and was continued by a group of varied thinkers such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Adams, Alexis de Tocqueville, Orestes Brownson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Irving Babbitt, and T. S. Eliot. This view of conservatism would later be loosely referred to as "paleoconservatism," although that term has often been made to encompass biologistic and naturalistic elements alien to Kirk, and combined with libertarianism and anti-communism to become the conservative movement in post-World War II America.

With the critical and financial success of The Conservative Mind, Kirk resigned from Michigan State and moved permanently to his ancestral home in Mecosta, Michigan. Although he would lecture on college campuses and accept teaching posts for short durations, he became an independent man of letters, writing twenty-six nonfiction works, three novels, three books of collected stories, approximately 2,000 articles, essays, and reviews, 2,687 short articles for his nationally syndicated newspaper column, "To the Point" (1962-75), and a monthly National Review column, "From the Academy" (1955-81). (5) Kirk also founded the conservative journals Modern Age and The University Bookman, and he even entered into politics, campaigning for Barry Goldwater in 1964 and serving as the Michigan state chair of Pat Buchanan's presidential campaign in 1992. For his contributions to American intellectual, cultural, and political life, he was awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal in 1989 by President Reagan.

According to Russell Kirk, conservatism does not offer a universal pattern of politics for adoption everywhere. It is "not a political system and certainly not an ideology." Rather, it is "a way of looking at civil social order" while applying general principles in a variety of ways depending upon the country and historical period. (6) These principles are (1) a transcendent or enduring moral order, (2) social continuity, (3) prescription (i.e., "the wisdom of one's ancestors"), (4) prudence, (5) variety, (6) imperfectability, (7) freedom and property closely linked together, (8) voluntary community, (9) prudent restraints upon power and human passion, and (10) the recognition that permanence and change must be reconciled in society. (7)

What for Kirk holds these principles together to form a conservative disposition is the "moral imagination," a faculty of moral knowledge that enables humans intuitively to perceive "the right order in the soul and the right order in the commonwealth." (8) Imagination, not calculative reason, is what fundamentally defines human beings and society according to Kirk. The battle, therefore, is not among competing programs of material betterment but between differing imaginations: Rousseau's "noble savage" and Bentham's utilitarianism versus Burke's defense of tradition and Eliot's Christianity. For Kirk, the conservative moral imagination is the correct one in its acknowledgement of a transcendent moral order that is reflected in nature, human nature, and society. The moral imagination draws from important aspects of tradition and civil associations (e.g., piety, prudence, the family) and integrates them into a working moral knowledge that includes reason, sentiment, habit, and intuition. (9) Although these values were universal for Kirk, they were manifested in a variety of ways dependent upon the age, place, and culture. (10)

The two most important influences on Kirk's conception of the "moral imagination" were Edmund Burke and Irving Babbitt. (11) The phrase itself, the "moral imagination," was taken from Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, which describes how the moral imagination gives dignity to human beings and allows them to see the highest qualities of human nature. (12) Burke influenced Kirk's view that humans are necessarily embedded within a web of tradition, continuity, and social institutions and therefore should follow their "moral imagination" instead of relying solely on individual reason. Kirk also agreed with Burke's defense of tradition as providing meaning and stability to people and with Burke's dictum that society is a contract between the dead, the living, and the yet to be born. (13)

Irving Babbitt also was instrumental in developing...