Kirk, Russell - Peter Gay (review date December 1953)

Peter Gay (review date December 1953)

SOURCE: Gay, Peter. Review of The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Santayana, by Russell Kirk. Political Science Quarterly 68, no. 4 (December 1953): 586-88.

[In the following review, Gay defends liberal politics as humane while attacking Kirk's brand of conservatism as flawed ideology.]

When Lionel Trilling published The Liberal Imagination in 1950 he argued that American conservatism had no philosophy. “The conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse,” he wrote, “do not … express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” In this comprehensive survey of the Anglo-American conservative tradition since the French Revolution Mr. Kirk enters a vigorous dissent and attempts to show, instead, that “conservative ideas are struggling toward ascendancy in the United States” (p. 428).

Mr. Kirk appropriately...

[The entire page is 940 words long]

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