Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism | Kirk, Russell - Gordon Keith Chalmers (review date 17 May 1953)

Gordon Keith Chalmers (review date 17 May 1953)

SOURCE: Chalmers, Gordon Keith. “Goodwill Is Not Enough.” New York Times Book Review (17 May 1953): 7, 28.

[In the following review, Chalmers attests Kirk's The Conservative Mind as an effective aid to understanding and countering Soviet intentions during the Cold War.]

The author of The Conservative Mind is as relentless as his enemies, Karl Marx and Harold Laski, considerably more temperate and scholarly, and in passages of this very readable book, brilliant and even eloquent. All American thought, whether religious, political, literary, or ethical, should now be preoccupied with the recent intellectual blunder of this learned nation: the mistake in judging the nature and intentions of the present Russian Government. This mistake was made so consistently for two decades that when our politicians in the Nineteen Forties had to decide whether and how to deal with the...

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