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Russell Kirk
Russell Kirk Russell Kirk (19 October 1918 – 29 April1994) 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.
LifeRussell 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. 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. IdeasThe Conservative MindThe 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. PrinciplesKirk developed six "canons" of conservatism, which Russello (2004) described as follows:
Kirk said that Christianity and Western Civilization are "unimaginable apart from one another." http://theoccidentalquarterly.com/vol5no2/52-griffin.html 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." http://www.thomasaquinas.edu/news/pressroom/inthenews/other/books_faith.html Kirk and LibertarianismKirk 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] Kirk and NeoconservatismLate 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.http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/Chronicles/July2004/0704Richert.html 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."http://www.cofcc.org/foundation/neoconservatism.htm Samuel Francis called Kirk's "Tel Aviv" remark "a wisecrack about the slavishly pro-Israel sympathies among neoconservatives.[12] Man of lettersKirk'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] FictionBeyond his scholarly achievements, Kirk was skilled and talented both as an oral storyteller and as an author of genre fiction, most notably in his telling of consummate ghost stories in the classic tradition of Sheridan Le Fanu, M. R. James, Oliver Onions, and H. Russell Wakefield. He also wrote other admired and much-anthologized works that are variously classified as horror, fantasy, science fiction, and political satire. These earned him plaudits from fellow creative writers as distinguished and varied as T. S. Eliot, Robert Aickman, Madeleine L?Engle, and Ray Bradbury. Though modest in quantity?Kirk?s body of fiction consists of three novels and 22 short stories?it was accomplished amid a busy career as prolific nonfiction writer, editor, and speaker. As with certain other speculative fiction authors as G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, and J. R. R. Tolkien (all of whom likewise wrote only nonfiction for their "day jobs") there are conservative undercurrents?social, cultural, religious and political?to Kirk's fiction. His first novel, Old House of Fear (1961, 1965), as with so many of his short stories, was written in a self-consciously gothic vein, here concerning an American who is work-assigned to a remote and disturbing Scottish locale. This was Kirk's best-selling and most critically acclaimed work of fiction and did much to sustain him financially for the years ahead. Other novels were A Creature of the Twilight (1966), a caustic black comedy delving into the politics of postcolonial Africa, and Lord of the Hollow Dark (1979, 1989), an ominous portrayal of a haunted house in England. Kirk also oversaw the publication of three collections of all his short stories during his lifetime. (Three additional collections have been posthumously published, but those only repeat stories already in the earlier three.) Among Kirk's novels and stories, certain characters tend to recur in more than one work, enriching the already considerable unity and resonance of his fictional canon. An interesting facet of his work is that, though the themes and prose style of Kirk?s fiction and nonfiction are complementary, many avid readers of the one have not known of his work in the other. Having begun to write fiction fairly early in his career, Kirk appears to have stopped after the early ?80s, while continuing his nonfiction writing and research throughout his last decade of life. See List of fiction by Russell Kirk for a bibliography of this material. Notes
Further readingModern Age articles available online via Ebsco.
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