SOURCE: Zoll, Donald Atwell. “The Social Thought of Russell Kirk.” Political Science Reviewer 2 (fall 1972): 112-36.

[In the following essay, Zoll presents an overview of Kirk's conservative writings, concluding that Kirk is a neo-Platonist who balances his Roman Catholic faith with conservative social beliefs.]

It is not merely an obvious affection for Edmund Burke that links Russell Kirk with the eighteenth century. His emergence in the arena of contemporary letters reveals the transmigration of an eighteenth century spirit, the revival of the literary grace and versatility of the century of the high baroque. He personifies the still lively arete of a more leisurely age, the urbane versatility of the literati of the era of Addison and Steel, Swift, Pope, Chesterfield, Johnson and Burke.

Such diverse interests and talents are manifest in the character and range of Kirk's works. These volumes exhibit Kirk in three major roles: (a) the historian of ideas; (b) the essayist and social critic; (c) the practitioner of belles lettres. Indeed, his imposing shelf of book-length works can be rather neatly divided in accordance with the above categories. In the first group should be placed biographical and analytical studies of Burke, Randolph of Roanoke, Robert Taft and T. S. Eliot, along with The Conservative Mind.

In the second category are such works as Enemies of the Permanent Things, A Program for Conservatives, The American Cause, Academic Freedom, Confessions of a Bohemian Tory, Beyond the Dreams of Avarice and The Intemperate Professor.

In the last category is a history of St. Andrews and three works of fiction: Old House of Fear, The Surly Sullen Bell and A Creature of the Twilight (described, by the way, as a “baroque romance”).¹

This otherwise commendable versatility does not, at all times, comport to the prevailing customs in matters academic. The very versatility of a writer like Kirk—or George Santayana or Joseph Wood Krutch or Peter Viereck—has the paradoxical effect of diminishing his repute among more pedantic academic circles. Moreover, Dr. Kirk writes well, in addition to operating in widely varying genres. His prose is often tinged with a certain baroque elegance, a romantic fondness for the euphonious phrase, a relish for irony, all features more admired in Dr. Johnson's century than in John Dewey's. Yet for all his rhetorical skill and his no mean flair for dialectical argument, a certain almost cavalierish sense of gallantry pervades his work, an intense sense of the civilized protocols. Even Kirk in high dudgeon—as in some essays in Enemies of the Permanent Things, for example—is invariably under a refined restraint; he is a devotee of the verbal rapier in contrast to the polemical cudgel.

It is not irrelevant to comment on Kirk's unusual range of literary interests or his stylistic preference, since the heart of his social philosophy is ultimately aesthetic. His historical commentary, quite apart from his literary criticism, shows that his elemental judgemental criterion is an aesthetic one; those whom he admires most in the history of social thought are those imbued with an intense aesthetic orientation and a corresponding artistic talent. His earliest work is a rich-hued biography of John Randolph of Roanoke whom he reveres principally for the eccentric Virginian's extraordinary mastery of the language, aside from his vivid, almost rococo, flamboyance and Tory opinions. His least satisfactory excursion into analytic biography is his study of the late Robert A. Taft, which is a somewhat labored work, traceable to the fact that the subject cannot finally be wrenched into Mr. Kirk's hagiography of gifted rhetoricians, such as Burke and Eliot. Indeed, one suspects that the genesis of Kirk's book on Taft is to be found in his attempt to avoid the identification of being a mere Romantic engaged in the elaboration of historical nostalgia. A part of his political metamorphosis has been a search, not always satisfactory, for more contemporary heroes, an effort to merge his eighteenth century political romanticism into the more immediate configurations of the American political Right. He avoids, happily, in so doing, an outright “fusionism,” but such a motivation did lead him, I think, into a brief liaison dangereuse with such personalities as Barry Goldwater, with whom he has actually little philosophical congeniality. In any case, Kirk's cultivated aesthetic sensitivities rebel and while he holds back from the almost bellicose nonconformity of Peter Viereck or the ultramontane rigidity of certain of his Catholic coreligionists, he nonetheless cannot make common cause with philistinism, however attractive such a union might be in terms of political expediency. His neo-Aristotelian habits forbid any admiration for the aesthetically obtuse.

Russell Kirk is, in fact, a premier figure in the twentieth century revival of aesthetic conservatism, a repudiation of vulgarity in terms of both life-style and the procedures of politics. He is allied, essentially, as he would agree, with the Harvard “New Humanists”—Babbitt, More, Santayana and Eliot. His is a visceral response—however expressed in genteel phraseology—to the demolition of gracefulness. His ethical and theological convictions are rooted in the Weltanschauung of a poet, reacting to his world with a profound sense of the tragic and a conviction that truth is purveyed via a symbolic veil. Such an existential vision can produce a Rilke or an Unamuno, but Kirk's poetic psyche is under the restraint of a more disciplined ego, as if his Scottish ancestry imposed a well-proportioned check upon the errant phantasmagorias of the tragic poet, reconstituting the poetic insight in the paler, if more discursive, medium of the social critic.

II

Kirk is best known as an exponent of “conservatism” and, indeed, it is his concept of this philosophical and political stance and his relation to its contemporary evolution in American social thought that understandably dominate any discussion of his contribution to current social scholarship. In his early rejection of the prevailing thrust of popular democracy, he can be thought of as a “cradle conservative”; the Tory temperament clearly shows in his John Randolph of Roanoke (which he revised and enlarged in 1964). It was, however, upon the publication of The Conservative Mind in 1953 that he consolidates his position and assumes the mantle of a major spokesman for conservative social thought.

The Conservative Mind is a substantial piece of historical exposition, notable because of its range and his ability to trace the complex threads of historical conservatism. It is a very Burkean work or, perhaps more accurately, it is a very Anglo-Saxon work: it deals with the history of conservative ideas in English language philosophy (with the exception of a brief discussion of Tocqueville, principally vis-a-vis Democracy in America). The book represents an understandable division of labor, although one might be inclined to the view that the viability of contemporary conservative thought may well rest upon the counteractive effects of continental philosophy as against English language philosophy.

The roots of conservatism, as seen in The Conservative Mind, are to be found in high humanism, a release of what Burke called the “moral imagination.” The bridge with the Harvard “New Humanists” is evident. The work is resolutely anti-philistine, cosmopolitan in tone, unabashedly aristocratic and imbued with a neo-Aristotelian world-view. Kirk's “six canons of conservative thought” reflect this Aristotelian-Burkean teleological attitude:

“(1) Belief that a divine intent rules society as well as conscience forging an eternal chain of right and duty which links great and obscure, living and dead …

“(2) Affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of traditional life …

“(3) Conviction that civilized society requires orders and classes. The only true equality is moral equality; all other attempts at leveling lead to despair, if enforced by positive legislation …

“(4) Persuasion that property and freedom are inseparably connected …

“(5) Faith in prescription and distrust of ‘sophisters and calculators.’ Man must put a control upon his will and his appetite, for conservatives know man to be governed more by emotion than by reason. Tradition and sound prejudice provide checks upon man's anarchic impulse.

“(6) Recognition that change and reform are not identical and that innovation is a devouring conflagration more often than it is a torch of progress …”²

Such a position is a clear restatement of the mind of the Burke of the Reflections. The Conservative Mind unfolds as an exploration of these Burkean principles in the Anglo-American tradition. His estimable chapter on Burke may be said to be an “orthodox” analysis of the great Whig, if only for the reason that it literally provoked into being a torrent of Burkean scholarship, much of it notably contentious. Burke emerges in Kirk's hands (as he does later in 1967 in Edmund Burke: A Genius Reconsidered) as the generative figure in modern conservatism and, hence, those inclined to a conservative attitude have been prone, in some instances, to graft upon the thought of Burke their own subjective convictions, making of Burke a somewhat bewildering historical personage. His rather basic interpretation of Burke has the very real merit of placing Burke within a recognizable historical setting. Certainly Kirk's appraisal of Burke had the effect of setting out the crucial problems in Burke's social philosophy for further illumination.

At base, the central thrust of The Conservative Mind, once more comparable to the conclusions of Burke, is the collapse of a viable conception of community. “Conservatism's most conspicuous difficulty in our time,” Kirk writes toward the end of the work, “is that it confronts a people who have come to look at society, vaguely, as a homogeneous mass of identical individuals, with indistinguishable abilities and needs, whose happiness may be secured by direction from above, through legislation or some manner of public instruction. Conservatives must teach humanity once more that the germ of public affections (in Burke's words) is ‘to love the little platoon we belong to in society.’ Somehow our conservative leaders must contrive to reconcile individualism (which sustained nineteenth-century life at the same time it starved the soul of the nineteenth-century) with the sense of community that inspired Burke and Adams.”³

In saying this, Kirk not only reemphasizes the Burkean tradition that constitutes the positive impact of The Conservative Mind, but he also separates off historical conservatism, as he sees it, from the American political Right as definitely, if less stridently, as did his contemporary, Peter Viereck.⁴ Such a schism proved immensely exciting to a fair legion of aesthetic, literary and philosophical conservatives who had sought haven in the salon or the academy, but had eschewed political interests, deciding that American political life represented a contest between popular liberalism and an ongoing Nineteenth Century version of the same. How could these people generate much enthusiasm for choosing between Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt or between Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson?

Kirk's efforts, particularly in The Conservative Mind, resulted in luring these assorted conservatives into a more politically self-conscious phalanx, into an intellectual movement sharply divorced from the conventional strictures of the Republican Party or the “dollar conservatives” (in Elise Vivas' phrase) that would follow. Under Kirk's neo-Burkean aegis, a basically philosophical consort developed from as presumably disparate currents as religious neoorthodoxy, literary agrarianism, moral realism and anti-egalitarianism; they found a center in the “prescriptive” social thought of the Burkean tradition.

He followed The Conservative Mind with his A Program for Conservatives in 1954. This work reiterated and expanded the defense of the Burkean thesis, with especial emphasis upon the dominant motif of community and the primacy of historical continuity. There are entire chapters on “Community,” “Order” and “Loyalty.” If The Conservative Mind was not in a strict sense a philosophical work, A Program for Conservatives contains passages of more rigorous argumentation, albeit from the orientation of a social critic.

In this work, there is a provocative chapter on “Order” (which includes, by the way, an interesting refutation of the views of David Reisman). The chapter is well-argued and calls forth, in typical Kirkian style, the likes of Cicero, Hooker, Gibbon, Coleridge, Marcel, Tocqueville, Eliot, Johnson, Burke and Ecclesiasticus in its cause. Yet it also curiously eludes the problem of order in terms of primary philosophical precepts. The chapter is prudent, even wise, but it never quite reaches the profound. The argument for the viability of the idea of the hierarchical society, as the basic shape of order, is argued by Kirk on normative grounds. He says, in substance, that the hierarchical society is desirable, but he makes no case that it is either natural or inevitable. But the point might be advanced that the prime reason for its desirability as an incorporated feature of social arrangement might be its natural mandate.

I use this chapter and its argument only as illustration. In A Program for Conservatives, perhaps his most problematic work, he reveals his preferences for the role of moralist and social critic as against that of the philosopher. I do not disparage the preference, but from what stance, one might ask, does this moral perspective arise, for he does not appear to provide us with a technical description of his ethics?

Yet, there are two major themes in his ethical convictions, and they have remained relatively constant from his first works to his latest, Eliot and His Age. The first is a preference for a natural law orientation, but with Kirk the deontological features of such a persuasion are not precisely stated. He devotes little time to the ontological character of value, with its obligatory aspects, but, rather, provides a historicistic defense; like Burke, he is a teleologist who assumes that moral models emerge as representative of the underlying valuational character of existence. There are, in fact, for Kirk, “heroes of the spirit,” to use Bergson's phrase. The revelation of the ethical mandate emerges from moral actions of notable men in which a certain consistency and continuity can be witnessed. Perhaps the word “decorum” fits this conception, as, indeed, manners are for Kirk, as they were for Burke, indicative of moral cultivation. No writer in our age is more comprehensively aware of this “moral tradition,” this historical “decorum,” than is Russell Kirk. To a reception of this pattern in the civilized experience, he also brings a poet's grasp of nuance and particularity.

Secondly, his ethical reactions, in some respects like those of Santayana or Ortega, are aesthetic at root. Not merely ugliness, but vulgarity loom as the personifications of moral corruption. Kirk's frequently luxuriant sense of beauty often enjoys a somewhat tense relationship with a sterner code of decorum, a tension revealed, as well, in the work of his friend, T. S. Eliot. The personal reconciliation of these inclinations is effected by both Kirk and Eliot in their Catholic convictions, Roman and Anglican. Viewed from another angle, Kirk's “bohemian Toryism,” his “sportive” and aesthetic predilections, often rub against the presumed necessity to admire the more stolid virtues of Middle America, the somewhat less than aristocratic genesis of American moral conservatism.

A Program for Conservatives, like most of Kirk's other expository works, is a series of essays in social criticism proceeding from these ethical dispositions. This social criticism usually has as its data the literary out-put of the culture. He is more a critic of ideas than an analyst of institutions or an empirically-oriented social pathologist. This is not surprising, since he is an intellectual historian of exceptional capabilities. Digressions from the forum of ideas have not always been altogether happy for Kirk. His contributions as a syndicated newspaper columnist have been most edifying when they have focused upon critiques of ideas, less penetrating when devoted to overt political commentary.

From the period of A Program for Conservatives and Beyond the Dreams of Avarice (1956) to Enemies of the Permanent Things in 1969, his animadiversions appeared to follow three main courses: (1) an attempt to relate his conception of intellectual conservatism to the American political and social milieu; (2) an exploration of the possibility of a rapport between Burkean conservatism and the native American Right; and (3) a response to the evident crisis in American higher education.

The latter undertaking goes on, especially in his National Review column, “From the Academy.” His 1955 work, Academic Freedom: An Essay in Definition, was, in my view, perceptive and well-reasoned. But his educational viewpoints perhaps do not fall within the spectrum of this essay. In the case of the other two currents, one can detect, I think, an eventual turning back to the earlier foundations of his thought. His exploratory ventures into the realm of rightwing consolidations, always highly tentative, were not productive of a new conservative synthesis.⁵ On the issue of the sanctity of private property, for example, presumably a common axiom of traditional conservatism and the indigenous American Right, he never departs from Burke's defense of private property in normative and prescriptive terms in contrast to the view that there is an abstract, pre-societal right of property. In sum, Kirk's skirmishes with “practical politics” and experimental accommodations with neoliberalism, more conjecture than stated opinion, were disappointing to him. Ultimately, admirable as they might be, Messrs. Taft and Goldwater could not fit into the paladium with Burke, Disraeli, Newman or Chesterton. Moreover, his pervasive cosmopolitanism, which deepened through the years, even an affinity for the finesse of European intellectuality, made it difficult for him to expostulate on the “American political tradition” with the uncritical verve of many of his contemporaries, such as Willmoore Kendall. His Anglophilic penchant for political and social eccentricity would not harness well with the more prosaic preoccupations and habits of the conventional Right. His disdain for plutocratic adventurers, for crass egocentrism, made alliance awkward, particularly in view of the fact that as the years progressed “conservatism” became increasingly penetrated by the “libertarians” espousing the revival of Nineteenth Century liberalism. Once the “voice” of the New Conservatism, Kirk was now viewed in some quarters as the spokesman only for the “traditionalists.” “Order,” “community” and “loyalty” were unfamiliar virtues to much of the American Right.⁶

Consequently, far from abandoning the cause of humanism in the interests of anti-revolutionary solidarity, Kirk drew increased stimulation from his historical Weltanschauung. He turned to a vivid reassertion of the primacy of ethical standards in his most notable work since The Conservative Mind: Enemies of the Permanent Things: Observations of Abnormity in Literature and Politics in 1969, a summary of his intellectual maturation, dating from his Dancy Lectures in 1958. This is not to say that there were not significant works in between—surely, Confessions of a Bohemian Tory is the most charming—but one sees the paradigm of his thought brought to a logical shape in the 1969 effort. While Enemies of the Permanent Things is a collection of essays, many of them published in a variety of places, the book is, in fact, not only a highly organized work, but it comes closest, I think, to presenting a synthetic account of his social theory.

The foundational premise of the work is the validity of enduring normative standards in art and politics. With a nod to Hume, he declines a philosophic explication of the metaphysical status of norms, but observes:

One cannot draw up a catalogue of norms as if it were an inventory of goods. Normality inheres in some sensible object, and norms depend one upon the other, like the stones of a cathedral. But it is possible to say that there is a norm of charity; a norm of justice; a norm of freedom; a norm of duty; a norm of fortitude. Most of us perceive these norms clearly only when they are part and parcel of the life of a human being. Aristotle made norms recognizable by describing his ‘magnanimous man’, the upright person and citizen. For the Christian, the norm is made flesh in the person of Christ. Normality is not what the average sensual man ordinarily possesses; it is what he ought to try to possess.⁷

His labors, hence, are directed toward the “restoration of normality” through an increased perception of the attributes of Aristotle's “magnanimous man” and the insights of Christian conviction. The problem of perception, indeed, is crucial to the viability of the doctrine of the objectivity of standards. Kirk does not offer an epistemology, as such, but, rather, sketches what he considers to be the grounds of ethical perception, which, in a heuristic or didactic sense, arises out of religious revelation and custom, the latter category equated, by Kirk, to a kind of accumulated experiential prudence—“common sense and custom, then, are the practical expressions of what mankind has learnt in the school of hard knocks.”⁸ But, he further speculates, these customs of the race may have been, initially, the product of exceptional individuals, wise men, as it were. Consequently, there appears in the historical stream the notion of a normative authority, the proclamations of the “seers” of the culture.⁹

This recognition of the normative authority of cultural wise men and their instructional significance supports the literary humanism that constitutes more than half of the book. Part II is a blend of aesthetic, literary and social criticism of high quality, commencing with a defense of the moral purport of “humane letters.” Literature appears to Kirk as the primary touchstone to the recognitions of vital societal norms; indeed, granting religious tradition, literature is the principal means of transmitting the essential continuities of ethical awareness. The teacher of literature, he observes, must maintain the “contract of eternal society.”

Kirk proceeds to weigh, therefore, the standards and abnormalities of twentieth century literature against the background of social change. There are provocative appraisals of Ilya Ehrenberg, Max Picard, Ray Bradbury and George Orwell and a sprightly attack on anti-humanistic “futurists” who covertly seek to dominate men by the destruction of literature.

It is in the closing half of this work that he turns to political abnormality. He generally describes political aberration as the substitution of ideology¹⁰ for ethical authority. For Kirk, the resuscitation of doctrinaire ideology, as the antithesis of moral circumspection and humility, assumes a number of visages, from the more blatant examples of ideological fervor to the “ideologues” of science and social engineering. The grave danger is ideological fixation, in his opinion, is the replacement of the normative verities, as revealed in literature and religion, by the false standards or absence of standards produced by ephemeral ideology. He writes:

Ideology is intellectual servitude. And emancipation from ideology can be achieved only by belief in an enduring order of which the sanction, and the end, are more than objective, more than scientistic, more than human, and more than natural.¹¹

The ideological bias to be encountered in the United States is liberalism, he concludes, albeit now a declining force. Indeed, it is not the true American tradition (as certain liberal writers darkly perceive, he argues); Kirk conceives this tradition to be Judeo-Christian faith and “that legacy of institutions which we all know.” He adds: “Were our political traditions merely the liberal doctrine of yesteryear which Hofstadter and Hartz describe, I would agree with them that it ought to be transcended.”¹²

His commentaries on liberalism continue with an essay on the thought and general predicament of Woodrow Wilson—whom Richard Hofstadter had called “the Conservative as Liberal.” Kirk's general verdict is that Wilson, in facing the trials of his era, was conservative enough, his dispositions were Burkean, but his vision was clouded by “liberal abstractions” and he disowned the crucial virtue of prudence. Comments Kirk:

The germ of what liberalism affirms today was present in the theories of Bentham, and even in the orations of Charles James Fox. The augmented role of positive law, the sweeping away of prescriptive institutions, an egalitarianism progressing from equality of franchises to equality of condition: these doctrines the liberals have extended logically. And the triumph of their doctrine has left them feeble before the totalists, who claim the right to inherit the liberal hegemony; there is nothing surprising in the canonization of Tom Paine by the Soviets.¹³

Passing Wilson by, Kirk returns to an old adversary, David Reisman, whom he describes as “the most influential liberal thinker in this century.” Reisman's influence stems, in Kirk's judgment, from his essentially anti-doctrinaire cast of mind, what Kirk calls “a reformed and chastened liberalism—not ideology.” In his analysis of Reisman's “utopian” ideas, he makes the charge that Reisman embraces an oblique hedonism that extolls “difference for the sake of differing.” Such a position finally ends in an abject denial of norms.

Far more aberrational than the more-or-less non-ideological liberals of the Reisman-Hartz-Hofstadter type are the self-confessed ideologists, most of whom, Kirk suggests, find haven in institutions of higher learning. He pursues a trahison des clercs line of argument by elucidating a distinction between “scholars” and “ideologues.” Even beyond this contrast, he observes: “For better or worse, the scholar turned politician must give up pure scholarship. If one has a taste for the hustings, one ought to abandon the pose of speaking authoritatively from a chaste, impartial love of pure learning.”¹⁴

Another breed of ideologists to warrant his attention are the young and those he terms “perpetual adolescents.” He pithily writes: “I do not intend to entrust my dearest interests to persons suffering from senility, but I do not mean, either, to entrust them to persons still afflicted by the psychological disturbances of adolescence.”¹⁵

Two principal targets yet remain for Kirk's humanistic criticism: the neo-positivism of American social science and governmental centrism. He attacks each in clustered essays. He goes to no trouble to obscure his disdain for sociology, as presently practiced, and his contempt reflects his moral absolutism—and he has rare sport, predictably, with sociological neologisms and cases of obviously muddle-headed pseudo-empiricism. As one might suppose, the philosophical premises of the behavioral sciences are unacceptable to his theomorphic concept of human nature. Undoubtedly, he makes a point when he observes that cultural disintegration demands, in fact, a reinvigorated effort at social analysis and he is content to suppose that this analysis can be adequately mounted by “observation through the employment of reason and the recognition of poets' and philosophers' genius.”

“Behaviorism” in politics is even more to be regretted, a posture which he describes as relegating the study of politics “to a quasiscientific hypothesis of recent psychology.” Once again, we are asked to confront the immutable character of human nature which defies behavioral conditioning except on a crude level and such a project negates the positive values of moral recognition. How can the dignity of man be maintained, asks Kirk, on the basis of assuming the reductionistic contentions of behaviorism?

As others have suggested, he depicts the final result of the social implementation of behavioral theory as an oppressive autocracy, the antithesis of the freedom the behaviorists profess to espouse. He cites the totalitarian implications in the theories of Harold Lasswell.

Kirk's trilogy of essays on “The Unthinking Centralizer” are particularly interesting as they reflect a tension in conservative thought on the subject of the scope and authority of government. He emerges as a defender of federalism, but he does so on the basis of a belief in the efficacy of local governmental initiative, not on the grounds of an acceptance of the idea of the sacrosanct character of theoretical federalism. “The American ‘federal’ system,” he writes, “was adopted to perpetuate and protect and improve the institutions of territorial democracy that already existed in America.” (emphasis mine)¹⁶

The enthusiasm for governmental centralization is related to a zeal for “plebiscitary” or Jacobin democracy, defined by Kirk as “the doctrine that somehow the People may act as a whole, through a central government, in an abstract, infallible Democracy.” His argument does not quite recall Calhoun's, but it emphasizes the need to control the power of the central government when that power is employed on behalf of doctrinaire social ideology.

Kirk's primary thesis—the presence of ethical authority in the corpus of the literature produced by the “great men” of the race—gets its most explicit treatment in an essay entitled, “Philosophers and Philodoxers” (the latter term referring to “lovers of opinion” as against “lovers of wisdom”). In minor part, he rests his explication on the neo-classicism of Paul Elmer More, although Kirk is not, I think, a Platonist within the general meaning of the term as was Mr. More. More explicitly, he advances the Platonic interpretation of Eric Voegelin. He accepts Voegelin's assessment “that Plato's intention and accomplishment is to teach obedience to the incarnate Truth.” By extension, this seems to be Kirk's view of the philosophical function, as he argues:

From the age of Moses onward, there have been men—prophets or philosophers—who sought for the transcendent meaning in history: who groped for knowledge of the soul, and glimpsed in the record of history a divine meaning, a revelation of the way of God with man, and the reality of the soul.¹⁷

Philodoxers, in contrast, are guilty of hubris in failing to acknowledge the transcendental truth that emerges from history and revelation, a “transcendence of the existential order” to a grasp of the imperative order necessary to be incorporated into human social arrangements. Thus, he concludes, along with Voegelin, that “it is history which teaches us the principles of order,” a history which is largely embodied in letters, a history that essentially commences with Socrates-Plato. Kirk's admiration for Plato is for a Plato strictly conceived in Voegelin's terms. He affirmatively quotes Voegelin's summary of Plato's achievement: “Truth is not a body of propositions about the world-immanent object; it is the world-transcendent summum bonum, experienced as an orienting force in the soul, about which we can speak only in analogical symbols.” In like fashion, somewhat curiously perhaps, he accepts, too, Voegelin's evaluation of Aristotle as an “intellectual thinning-out,” an adulteration of the Platonic transcendentalism by the incursion of naturalism.

These contentions provide a basis for Kirk's doctrine of social authority. But this reasonably straight-forward account of the origin of authority is joined, presumably on equal status, one infers, with another category, with “respected prescription” as a basis for social order. Presumably this latter mandate approximates the outlook of Burke, but it must be assumed that “prescription” is a teleologically originated, culturally actualized surfacing of some objective paradigm of value and order, thus authority and prescription must be thought to be related, but how? Immemorial custom and the insights of philosopher-religionists are clearly different.

Authority, for Kirk, is also broadened in definition to include that to which men are legitimately obliged and he concedes the evident conflicts between rival authorities, but the resolution of these competing claims hinges upon “conscience” as itself an authority; men faced with such dilemma must not reject authority altogether, he dare not, as an individual, rebel against the principle of authority.

He asks: “If authority, then—however unfashionable in recent years—remains ineluctable for civilization and for any truly human existence, how do men find such authority?”¹⁸

His answer is that reliance must be made of “tradition and prescription” if men are to act. Men cannot exist, in an operational sense, independent of the accumulated learning of the past. From this tenet, he assumes that men cannot act without reliance on the “habitual acceptance of just and sound authority, by conformity to norms.” Presumably, this assent, individually and collectively, leads to “knowledge of the permanent things.” He uses justice as an illustration:

We may take the idea of justice, to illustrate my meaning here. There exists a norm of justice, best expressed by Plato and Cicero. This norm has its origin in the experience of men in community over many centuries, and also in the insights of men of genius. The great classical philosophers of politics argued that justice amounts to this: ‘to each his own.’ Every man, ideally, ought to obtain the things which best suit his own nature; he ought to do the work for which he is fitted, and to receive the rewards of that work. Men's talents and desires vary conspicuously from individual to individual; therefore a society is unjust which treats all men as if they were uniform beings, or which allots to one sort of nature the rights and duties which properly belong to other sorts of human beings.¹⁹

Norms—like that of justice—must provide theoretical models, Kirk contends, the attainment of which must be undertaken by political prudence. All of these norms, ideal and prosaic, are finally bound up with the maintenance of order and, thus, order becomes the first principle of politics. The objective of attaining a “decent political order” provides a means of determining what government can and cannot do; it can insure the recognition of just authority, but it cannot do more than provide the tranquil base from which human aspiration and accomplishment can spring. He recognizes two “norms” of government: “good government allows the more energetic natures among a people to fulfill their promise while ensuring that these people shall not tyrannize over the masses of men” and “the best possible—or least baneful—form of government is one in accord with the traditions and prescriptive ways of its people.”

The first “norm” runs squarely into the issue of equality and he endorses an anti-egalitarianism that he claims is derived from “Christian morals” and the “Christian doctrine of the person.” Political equality leads, he argues, to debilitating uniformity, denying human differences and varieties of requirement; the men of talent are frustrated and the quality of leadership deteriorates. “A government,” he writes, “which converts into a secular dogma the Christian mystery of moral equality must be hostile toward civilization.”

After commenting on the regrettable effects of “doctrinaire egalitarianism”, Kirk defends the idea of a political order based upon class balances in which there would exist a “tolerable balance between the rights of ability and the rights of ordinariness.” Such a viewpoint, he argues, underlies the American Republic.

“A prudent government,” he explains, “is no artificial contrivance, no invention of coffee-house intellectuals, got up abstractly to suit the intellectual whim of the hour.”²⁰ Conversely, good government grows out of the social experience, it is the expression of the profits of historical buffeting, of slowly evolved tradition. Kirk calls up the precepts of Montesquieu and Burke. Governments are explicit manifestations, he contends, of national cultures, they are unique responses to specific traditions. He concludes:

True, a natural law for mankind exists—although man cannot know or obey that law until he is civilized; true, there are certain general norms of order and justice toward which all well-intentioned dominations strive; true, there may be discerned at least two general principles common to all tolerable governments, that I have already suggested. Yet beyond this, the particular institutions of any people must be of their own slow creation, over generations or centuries. The norms of order and justice and freedom are attained in an interesting variety of ways.²¹

Such a viewpoint weighs against the feasibility of a world state, a single “best form of government” or the imperialistic imposition of governmental forces on alien cultures. It introduces the idea of an older form of cosmopolitanism: a recognition of the integrity of cultural diversity, the antithesis of the presumptuous announcement: “Submit yourself to me, and I will improve your condition by relieving you from the burden of your peculiar identity and reconstituting your substance in my image.”

The most recent of Kirk's books is Eliot and His Age, released in 1972. In many ways it is his best work to date, Eliot being a most sympathetic subject. The work is intriguing in its penetration of Eliot's social thought and the general climate of opinion that surrounded him. The writing and scholarship is tight and careful and illumines a side of the poet not seen in earlier critical works. The book reveals Kirk's skill as a critic of ideas when he operates in a congenial climate, aesthetically and sociologically. There is a feeling of refreshment in Eliot and His Age, as if Kirk was enjoying a liberation from past confinements, was permitted to emerge, unabashedly, as what he most eminently is: a man of letters. His concluding paragraph is striking, since, in a sense, it could apply to Kirk himself:

Lifelong, Eliot had contended against the spirit of his age. He made the poet's voice heard again, and thereby triumphed; knowing the community of souls, he freed others from captivity to time and lonely ego; in the teeth of winds of doctrine, he attested the permanent things. And his communication is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.²²

III

Four characteristics of Russell Kirk's thought are bound to annoy certain of his critics: (1) a lack of philosophical precision; (2) a predominantly literary orientation; (3) his unabashed theism; and (4) what might be termed a nostalgic, antiquarian romanticism. Perhaps Kirk can take comfort in the fact that similar allegations were leveled against his mentor, Edmund Burke.

(1) It must first be recognized that in a very considerable area, Kirk is an immensely sophisticated writer, a fact he is occasionally quite ready to exhibit. His learning is wide-ranging and comports in every way to his own humanistic ideals. This learning is predominantly literary and historical, priorities he himself would defend, but it is not, in a more concrete sense, philosophical. He is a philosopher in the older, “lover of wisdom” sense, but not, I infer, in terms of rudimentary intellectual perspectives. In one sense, it is simply unfair to ask him to be what he has elected not to be. He is not a scientist, either, but this cannot place him beyond the range of intellectual pertinence—or deny him judgment on the social influences of science—unless one is prepared to say that only scientists—or philosophers—have access to truth or significant reflection.

On the other hand, he is often thrust into speculations which, like those of Burke once more, would benefit from an amplified philosophical rigor. Often I find myself agreeing with Kirk's judgments, but often feeling that he was supporting them with second-best evidence. This is not to say, of course, that his social and ethical viewpoint has no metaphysical or epistemological base, only that it is not, at times, adequately explicit. One can clearly deduce (as again one can with Burke) a corpus of theological orthodoxy as a philosophical foundation. But this approach seems to me to be inadequate in Burke's case, as I have argued elsewhere (for example, that Burke is not an advocate of an orthodox conception of natural law).²³ The same holds, I think, for Kirk. His social and political views strike me as being only in part the logical offspring of his Catholic or neo-Thomist metaphysics.

Kirk's invocation of the authority of the philosophical tradition is not without its problems. The history of philosophy, as a discrete part of the “social accumulation,” cannot be adequately conceived, in my view, as a compendium of “eternal truths.” If that were the case, the philosophical enterprise could be largely restricted to a continuous reassimilation of past philosophical reflection. I think it is fair to say that the vast proportion of devoted philosophers are not especially interested, to be candid, in extended scrutiny of the philosophic exegesis of earlier eras. This is not to say that they are immune from the influences of the philosophical heritage or contemptuous of it, indeed, this philosophical discourse is intimately involved in the maturation of the philosopher.

But it is simplistic to assume that the aim of philosophy is the discovery of “answers” or, if you will, demonstrable truths. The more adequate justification for the activity of the philosopher are the rewards, individual and social, that accrue from the business of inquiry itself. Aside from the well-substantiated critical function of philosophy, its search for understanding is invariably predicated upon an understanding of that which is phenomenally available. Even our re-creations of the ideas of Plato or Descartes—or, for that matter, Newton or Darwin—are framed within the limitations and configurations of immediacy; the philosophic and scientific classics are themselves objects of perception which are in part constituted by the act of perception and the perspective and nature by the perceiver. It is not so much that the mechanics of Newton are “wrong,” only that they are not, contemporaneously, the most satisfactory means of conceiving of cosmic relationships. The burden of the philosopher or the speculative scientist thus becomes the effort to attain intelligibility, to develop a cognitive order out of the chaos of immediate experience. This enterprise cannot rest solely upon the transliteration of the content of an artifactual historical continuity. In this sense, it is the philosopher himself who is the product of the philosophical tradition, rather than the philosophy he creates. It is simply fanciful to suppose that a philosopher undertakes his tasks by initially saying to himself: “This is where Moore or Wittgenstein—or, for that matter, Blandshard or Strawson—left off and where I begin!” In a manner of speaking, all philosophies begin, as activities of intellect, at point zero; the “tradition” asserts itself in the subjective composition of the philosopher, which tradition he can, only in a very nebulous way, consciously articulate as a variable in his mental processes. While the philosopher may acknowledge his more-or-less immediate lineage—he may be aware that his main directions may have been suggested by Husserl or Whitehead—but his craft is not one of the progressive accumulation of discoveries in the manner of the applied scientist. For the philosopher (to use a metaphor suggested by Nietzsche), truth cannot be envisioned in terms of a partially filled bucket to which he adds a soupcon of precious fluid. Rather, the bucket, perhaps regrettably, is a woefully leaky vessel in which the contents flow out at about the same rate that they are poured in.

Kirk has, I think, a somewhat extravagant estimation of the kerygma of philosophy, and this leads him, as well, to a likely overmodest conception of the more immediate potentialities of the philosophic method. The risk in Kirk's historicism consists, it seems to me, in being insufficiently daring in conjecturing about the ramifications of his teleological commitment. If purpose is emergent in process, one cannot assume a rigid formalism regarding the ways in which purpose is clothed in actuality. History is instructive in the sense that it prepares us for that very variety of teleologic expression, but a certain form of historical determinism induces a contraction of viewpoint that suggests a sort of modal repetition as the primary manifestation of the telos. In this sense, philosophy, as an activity, is independent of explicit historical direction; it profits from the historical consciousness without being contingent upon it.

Additionally, a defense of “the permanent things” may entail more than the reiteration of a literary-ethical tradition; it may require an exploration of the ontological order upon which Kirk's “norms” appear to rest. The absence of this investigation, the presentation of a rigorous ethic, for example, in Kirk's work is not by itself a crucial omission, if one recognizes a division of labor in which Kirk's role as a social critic is acknowledged. By the same token, his work might well be strengthened in its cogency by a more forthright survey of the interconnections between his social viewpoint and its philosophical antecedents. What occasionally appears as too facile in his analysis would take on greater impact.

It may be, too, that Kirk's frequent hostility to science and empiricism in general may be misplaced. He too easily assumes that science and its methods are identical to the parody of them presented by his positivistically-oriented foes. His social criticism and corresponding recommendations, resting as they do upon theological, historical and literary insights, would be more formidable if buttressed by the empirically-derived evidences of contemporary science. He is not fully aware, perhaps, to what extent such evidential reflection would be conducive to the defense of the “permanent things” or the revival of the “moral imagination.” He is distrustful, with some reason of course, of the sterile reductionistic tendencies of naturalism, but he does not fully appreciate, I believe, the enormous philosophical implications inherent in investigations of the natural order that have been undertaken within the decade.

(2) One can be highly sympathetic to Kirk's literary humanism and still be disquieted by the implicit idealism (or “ideationalism”) of his treatment of it. No doubt, ideas and symbols are intensely relevant to human behavior, but the groundwork of human nature is far more elemental, as Burke understood, by the way. Kirk tends to over-stress the cognitive variables, to engage in an intellectualistic account of the transmission of knowledge. In part, this problem arises from his Christian metaphysic that insists upon a downward course of knowledge through the ontological hierarchy, an excessively static, perhaps neo-Platonic, account of universal order. Kirk is certainly, at heart, a teleologist, but his approach to the process implications of teleology are prone to be too cognitivistic. He assumes that the social accumulations, the “inheritances,” are predominantly conveyed in discursive channels, especially the literary or ideational. This I tend to doubt and I am dubious about his implicitly diadactic philosophy of art in general.

Kirk, as much as any man among us, is aware of the richness of human culture. No one, certainly not I, could argue against the thesis that any valid normative evaluation of that culture rests largely upon ethical and aesthetic determinants. He has every right to assert the significance, even the authority, of these attainments as necessary to civilization. Indeed, Kirk is, among other things, a defender of civilization in a most meaningful fashion. Thus, his far from superficial pertinence is to vividly remind us of the standards of our culture and to alert us to the dangers of mediocrity and ethical compromise. His own “authority” arises from his undeniable familiarity with these standards—even if they do not comprise either all of the “permanent things” or are only symbolic constructs of them. His eminent value lies not in philosophic speculation, but in a stewardship of some, perhaps the major part, of the civilized heritage.

(3) There is a good deal of evidence that Kirk's theistic convictions deepened and expanded over the course of his career. There is a much more overt appeal to theological justifications in Enemies of the Permanent Things than in A Program for Conservatives, for illustration. Indeed, the transition may be even more profound, suggesting a direct theological rather than a philosophical reinforcement for his social criticism. In the late works, there is more than a nuance of the hermeneutic (as, of course, there is explicitly in the work of Voegelin whom Kirk admires and quotes); Kirk is often content to defend a premise by reference to its compatibility with Christian principles or concepts. I am not prepared to dispute his theology, some of which I construe I would be in agreement with, but I am troubled by the adequacy of supporting what I take to be essentially secular concepts with theological justifications. Now, it should be made clear that Kirk is not a “Catholic philosopher” (in the sense I would characterize Jacques Maritain or Etienne Gilson). He does not really belong, either, to the contemporary “Catholic Right” (along with Brent Bozell and others). The reason for this is that he is unwilling to sacredotalize the entirety of the secular realm—Burkean notions of “prescription” or the espousal of the primacy of sub-rational knowledge, for example, hardly fit neatly with Catholic dogma. To be at once, in actuality, a Catholic theist and yet not a full-blown Catholic apologist is not an easy position at all times, as is evidenced with other Catholic conservatives, such as Voegelin himself. The distinction arises between those who employ a philosophic defense of their viewpoint that is, if not secular in belief, secular in the recognized requirements of validity and those whose concepts of truth rest more simply upon an identification with religious dogma. Paul Elmer More is a useful example of the first category, a classification into which should be placed, also, Russell Kirk. The transition from the social thinker who is a religionist to a religionistic critic is sometimes hard to resist, although it can be avoided even by the most committed of theologians, as was the case with the late Reinhold Niebuhr.

Twentieth century American conservatives have very frequently contented themselves with writing for those of like minds rather than for the unconvinced. Kirk enjoys the distinction, not only of foregoing this temptation, but also for possessing a meritorious flexibility of mind. While he abhors the doctrinaire, he refuses to become ensnared by it. However, it must be apparent that if one seeks to defend social recommendations by appeals to religious hypotheses, not only the social recommendations but also the religious hypotheses themselves require rational defense, unless one is again content to traffic intellectually only within the community of believers. A large part of Kirk's indictment of contemporary social life lies in its retreat from rationality, its emotionalistic disdain for prudence and circumspection. That is certainly a very customary conservative counsel, but it may be remembered that this conservative cast of mind is not only the product of piety, but also the result of skepticism, a skepticism that not only holds back from the ideological illusions, but also from the more simplistic ramifications of religion itself. The urbanity which Kirk both admires and personifies acts as a brake upon religious enthusiasm, especially in its mystical manifestations. I do not think it is possible to reconcile the Anglo-Saxon conservative ethical and political tradition that he celebrates (from John Randolph of Roanoke onward) with a palpable religious mysticism, but I equally believe that this is a growing tension in his thought.

(4) If Kirk is a “nostalgic romantic” then so must be all who revere anything else than the immediate utilitarian conveniences. Such an accusation hits me as being essentially silly, although I conclude that Kirk himself has, at one time or another, taken it to heart to the extent that he has made efforts to be more “relevant” to the immediate Zeitgeist, whatever it is. Any civilized man lives in the twentieth century with a deep sense of loss—whether that loss involves a decline of manners, an inability to purchase decent tasting bread or the disappearance of the Peregrine Falcon. To describe this attachment to things past and lost as a quaint antiquarianism is disingenuous. One is not being either perverse or irrational in preferring Bach and Handel to John Cage or even Stravinsky. The judgment may be contentious, but it does not merely represent a clash of irrational fancies and prejudices.

Kirk's critics assume a doctrine of cultural inevitability, melioristic or otherwise, which he, quite validly, elects to reject. His main purpose is conservation, hardly a reactionary point of view. It may not be quite realistic to argue for the return of the horse and the abolishment of automobiles, aesthetic preferences aside, but it is surely rational and realistic to insist that automobiles be prevented from poisoning us to death. The continuity and preservation of artifacts are not quite the same as the conservation of values.

To be relevant and to be fashionable are not at all the same. Fashion pervades social scholarship far more than we would like to admit. To some degree, Kirk has made a career out of being intellectually unfashionable, but he has, by 1972, demonstrated that in his sense of normative alarm he has been more relevant than his detractors. He seems on the verge of enjoying a certain fashion at last. It is a curious testimonial that some of the New Left, Kirk's ideological opponents, have chosen to call themselves “humanists.”

IV

In a broad view, Kirk, in the 1950s, reintroduced the broken web of historical social conservatism by the deceptively simple device of describing it and declaring it to be yet lively. This feat, no less of courage than of intellect, may have historic implications for the principal reason that it may yet be influential in channeling the resentment against the ideological drift of liberalism into forms both humane and restorative. Moreover, Kirk's brand of social conservation provides an arresting contrast to the social Darwinistic tendencies of much contemporary Rightwing thought.

The final problem in such a social conservatism is its resolution of the issue of the relationship of the individual and the community, that particular version of the “One and the Many” problem that has been with us since the Enlightenment. The problem for Kirk, expressly, is how to preserve diversity in uniformity—how to insure the prerogatives of the individual without denying the preeminence of the community. From another perspective, if order, as Kirk maintains, is the first concern and responsibility of government, it is difficult to construe governments as having the limited discretion attributed to them by the nineteenth century liberals. Kirk's response, at base, is the assertion of individual difference and creativity within the perimeters of an objective, theocentric order. For him, individual freedom is not egocentric, but consists of possibilities for transcendence dependent upon a primal obedience to the ethical substance of universal order.

The tenability of this conception of freedom aside, its evocation creates a wholesome leaven against the primacy of egocentrism and the methodical adulation of selfishness that has shattered the homonoia of our age.

Russell Kirk's writings underscore the eradicable significance, not only of the continuity of moral wisdom as contained in the majestic works of literature, but also of the most rudimentary forms of social inter-action. Like Santayana, their stylistic urbanities aside, Kirk's social philosophy is ultimately a defense of simplicity, an ability to see the moral import in common experience, the final dignity, the joys of the elemental experiences that loom behind the “winds of doctrine.” The strength, finally, of Kirk's humanism lies in its ability to connect in ethical, aesthetic and spiritual terms the glories of racial attainment with the prosaic obligations and satisfactions that are the universal lot of men. The defense of standards is thus blended with the indispensable elements of compassion, of mutuality, of sensitivity to the tragic predicament.

Notes

1. A complete listing of Russell Kirk's published books will be found at the end of this essay.

2. The Conservative Mind, pp. 7-8.

3. The Conservative Mind, p. 401.

4. Cf. Viereck's Conservatism Revisited, revised ed. (New York, 1962), and The Unadjusted Man: A New Hero for Americans (Boston, 1956).

5. Kirk has been highly critical of the tenability of the “fusionism” advocated by such contemporary writers as Frank Meyer and Stephen Tonsor.

6. For a fuller discussion of this matter, see my “Philosophical Foundations of the American Political Right,” Modern Age (Spring, 1971).

7. Enemies of the Permanent Things, pp. 20-21.

8. Loc. cit., p. 36.

9. Kirk's “seers” in the “Christian community” that he explicitly lists are St. Paul, St. Augustine, St. Thomas, Dante and Pascal.

10. He defines ideology as “political fanaticism—and, more precisely, the belief that this world of ours may be converted into the Terrestrial Paradise through the operation of positive law and positive planning.” Loc. cit., p. 154.

11. Loc. cit, p. 165.

12. Loc. cit., p. 178.

13. Loc. cit., p. 190.

14. Loc. cit., p. 201.

15. Loc. cit., p. 210.

16. Loc. cit., p. 239.

17. Loc. cit., pp. 272-273.

18. Loc. cit., 285.

19. Loc. cit., 287.

20. Loc. cit., p. 292.

21. Loc. cit., p. 294

22. Eliot and His Age, p. 419.

23. Cf., my “Burke and the Vitalistic Tradition”, Modern Age (Spring, 1970).

The Works of Russell Kirk

John Randolph of Roanoke, revised and enlarged edition, Henry Regnery, 1964.

The Conservative Mind, from Burke to Santayana, Henry Regnery, 1953. There are also later editions.

A Program for Conservatives, Henry Regnery, 1954.

St. Andrews, B. T. Batsford, London, 1954.

Academic Freedom: An Essay in Definition, Henry Regnery, 1955.

Beyond the Dreams of Avarice: Essays of a Social Critic, Henry Regnery, 1956.

The American Cause, Henry Regnery, 1957.

The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Conservatism, The Devin-Adair Company, 1957.

Old House of Fear, Fleet Press Corporation, 1961.

The Surly Sullen Bell, Fleet Press Corporation, 1962.

Confession of a Bohemian Tory, Fleet Press Corporation, 1963.

The Intemperate Professor, and other Cultural Splenetics, Louisiana State University Press, 1965.

A Creature of the Twilight, Fleet Press Corporation, 1966.

The Political Principles of Robert A. Taft, with James McClellan, Fleet Press Corporation, 1967.

Edmund Burke: A Genius Reconsidered, Arlington House, 1967.

Enemies of the Permanent Things: Observations of Abnormity in Literature and Politics, Arlington House, 1969.

Eliot and His Age: T. S. Eliot's Moral Imagination in the Twentieth Century, Random House, 1971.