Russell Kirk: American Conservative.

• Author: Trepanier, Lee
• Position: Book review

* Russell Kirk: American Conservative

By Bradley J. Birzer

Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2015.

Pp. v, 574. $34.95 hardcover.

In the past decade and a half, a slew of biographies have been written about Russell Kirk: James E. Person Jr., Russell Kirk: A Critical Biography of a Conservative Mind (Lanham, Md.: Madison Books, 1999; reissued by Rowman and Littlefield in 2015); W. Wesley McDonald, Russell Kirk and the Age of Ideology (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004); Gerald J. Russello, The Postmodern Imagination of Russell Kirk (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2007); John M. Pafford, Russell Kirk (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013); as well as Charles C. Brown, Russell Kirk: A Bibliography (Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2011). What is one to make of another book about Kirk? What does Bradley J. Birzer's new book, Russell Kirk: American Conservative, contribute to what we already know about the life and thought of Russell Kirk? And why this recent return to the study of the man who was one of the founders of post-World War II American conservatism?

Russell Kirk (1918-94) was born and raised in Michigan, served in the U.S. Army in World War II, and obtained his B.A. at Michigan State University, M.A. at Duke University, and Ph.D. at the University of St. Andrews. His thesis for the latter eventually became published as The Conservative Mind (Chicago: Regnery) in 1953. The book received national attention and launched Kirk's career as a public intellectual. In The Conservative Mind, Kirk uncovers a conservative tradition in Anglo-American civilization that begins with Edmund Burke's defense of liberty and rights and is 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, later referred to as "paleoconservatism," would subsequently be joined with libertarianism and anticommunism to establish modern conservatism in post-World War II America.

With the critical and financial success of The Conservative Mind, Kirk resigned from the faculty of Michigan State University, where he had been employed after he was discharged from the army, and moved permanently to his family 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, publishing some twenty-five books, numerous...