[In the following essay, originally published in 1953, Ransom categorizes Kirk as a religious humanist before finding that Kirk's and other conservatives' attitudes are impractical for the second half of the twentieth century.]

About thirty political theorists figure in Mr. Kirk's big book [The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Santayana]. He picked them as the most distinguished examples of the conservative mind, and it was to be expected that they would be very unequal in the degrees of their distinction. Mr. Kirk himself is no common conservative, but a religious humanist, and it seems that he would like to recover to conservatism the whole body of doctrine as Burke delivered it to the moderns. Perhaps half of these figures are equipped almost as he would have them; the number is surprising. Practically all are British or American. For the fact must be as Mr. Kirk states it: among all the nations the English-speaking ones have conserved their polities the best, and it is their statesmen who should know how this is done. Exceptional in the series are only Tocqueville the Frenchman, who made himself conversant with both these polities, and was of a congenial temperament; and Spanish Santayana, who lived many years at Cambridge, Massachusetts, without coming any nearer to liking our heretical American mores. Mr. Kirk presents his figures by a good method, letting them speak for themselves in part, then resuming them and rounding them off; his own language may seem a little too resonant sometimes, but perhaps is not more so than that of the originals.

The difference between a total conservatism, like that of Burke and Kirk, and the campaigning conservatism that we are more familiar with, is that the one has a pragmatic doctrine and a theological doctrine, and the other has only a pragmatic doctrine. There should be a good deal of interest in Mr. Kirk's theologism and humanism, but the only practical attitude he expresses toward the Leviathan of modern business is a dull hatred. This is not statesmanlike, and in fact it is simply not possible as the attitude of a political party that means to take part in public affairs. There is no grappling, so far as he is concerned, with the economic responsibilities which a government has to undertake nowadays even if it is a conservative government. For instance, John Maynard Keynes figures in this book only as the name of a man who wrote Two Memoirs and said that the Benthamite calculus had been obstructive to the advancement of political theory. I can imagine many of Mr. Kirk's readers saying to themselves: Exactly; the conservatives have no taste for the modern economy, and the only role that is open to them is to let their enemies make the laws, and to hope that at some time they may take over the government themselves in order to administer them.

Burke lived before the age of mass production; he was an able economist, complimented by Adam Smith himself; but he could not know of either the difficulty or the necessity of securing by legislation a precisely adequate mass consumption, at whatever cost to conservative principles. We are familiar with the simple practical argument of Burke's on behalf of sticking to an existing order of society when its economy was simpler: it is an old order, which has come to represent the accrued wisdom of the ages, and so is necessarily superior to the opposed wisdom of our own single age; and it is the one among all possible orders under which its members may know by actual experience that they can support life and happiness.

But it was a point of doctrine with Burke also to defend it theologically; as the order which came into being in the inscrutable and divinely ordained historic process, and must be so acknowledged by religious persons. Unfortunately, the conservatives do not always win their case against the innovators, and then the question rises of whether they have properly understood the divine laws of history. Indeed, since Burke, history would seem to have brought the conservatives to defeat in a long succession of engagements. They cannot but count these occasions as defeats, and setbacks for mankind; but on the other hand they usually accept the result. We may see in our country in this year of 1953 how conservatives when they return to power do not proceed heroically to undo the innovations of their enemies, as they may have threatened they would; but acquiesce in them, almost without a word of explanation, as if another chapter of history had been written irrevocably. The consequence is, to be sure, that history has been written, and the given chapter finished and laid by, since the conservatives are not going to challenge it. But a conservative historian cannot then treat of certain epochal events without some embarrassment. Suppose Mr. Kirk is dealing with the famous Reform Bills of 1832, 1867, and 1884, which extended the franchise and made the whole English people at least potentially the sovereign. His imagination cannot be restrained from playing on the issue as if it were still undecided, and he takes a sweet savor from the speeches and writings of his recalcitrant old Tories; but he recovers as a matter of course his sense of the Reform immediately afterward as an accomplished and sanctified historic event, which must be swallowed with whatever savor and without making too many faces. Reflecting upon the Reform of 1832, Mr. Kirk gives the theory of the conservative reconcilement with history, in language quite Burkean, yet touching all the same for its circumspectness:

Burke, and the better men among his disciples, knew that change in society is natural, inevitable, and beneficial; the statesman should not struggle vainly to dam the whole stream of alteration, because that would be opposing Providence; instead, his duty is to reconcile innovation and prescriptive truth, to lead the waters of novelty into the canals of custom. This accomplished, even though he may seem to himself to have failed, the conservative has executed his destined work in the great mysterious incorporation of the human race [which is Burke's own term for the concrete conservative state]; and if he has not preserved intact the old ways he loved, still he has moderated greatly the ugly aspect of new ways.

And when a party is prepared to accommodate itself to the stream of alteration even after resisting it, that would seem much to the public advantage. Evidently the badge which the conservative wears must have two faces. One is resistance to the new event; this is the fighting face, the one that ordinarily we choose to know him by. The other is acceptance after the event, permitting the expectation that when once the new ways are shaken down and become old ways they too will be loved. And that would argue a saving ultimate good sense. This party is of course not a revolutionary one; but we should see that it is not even, exactly, a counter-revolutionary one. It is—in the English-speaking countries—a civil party.

But still it looks like a mechanical service, or at least a rather menial one, if the party is to offer itself simply as a brake against alteration; it is hard to discover in that role enough of specific intelligence to qualify it as a religiosity of high grade. And when the alteration comes to pass nevertheless, is there a piety humanly capable of the enthusiastic reversal that is in order? For example, is it pious of Mr. Kirk to testify that change is beneficial though its aspect is ugly? Perhaps he means that change as change is mere becoming, therefore hideous, but change accomplished passes into true being and is fit for the contemplation of the blessed. But I think not. And to what benefit does he refer? It would seem as if the conservatives had declined on principle, even after the event, to identify the precise benefit, which would be as if they were confessing an error in their precedent piety. Or is the divine process so inscrutable that the best of men cannot be sure of understanding it? In that case they might have presented their views with greater moderation. But there are naughty possibilities in Mr. Kirk's statement. He does not sufficiently deter godless men from the inference that Providence may have been compromising with evil, and using the decent conservatives as His agents in getting the best terms possible. On the whole, it would seem risky to invoke theological sanctions for one's politics; it is a game that two can play at; better still, it is a game that does not have to be played at all.

It may be that my representations do not do full justice to Mr. Kirk's argument (though I think they nearly do), but at any rate they have not considered the most interesting part of Burke's argument, which is something very special, or perhaps it is unique. Burke was a poor Irishman by birth, a citizen of one of the most wretched countries of the period; but he had no sooner got his schooling than he hurried off to be an Englishman, by adoption. He had exactly the perspective for appreciating the excellence of English institutions, and the fresh style of the new convert for defending them, amidst the rancor and strife of old-line politicians. The English state must have been superior then to anything on earth in its peculiar kind: it was old, and had grown consistently along its own lines, and in latter times so peacefully that even the Revolution of 1688 could be just barely regarded as an event without violence enough really to break the continuity. It was easy for the pious Burke to regard it with a religious passion. This nation was a “great mysterious incorporation of the human race” under God's hand. (It has not been easy for Americans to have such feelings about their own nation, whose constitution was so obviously a human artifact; though Mr. Kirk would have us attempt it in our degree.) The English nation in one way and another, whether quite independently of human contrivance or through the tender nurture of the wise rulers, had come down through the ages to what it was for Burke then; with its crown, church, aristocracy, property, and happy though unequal subjects. As for venerating it, that was quite according to another understanding, a broader one, which religious persons at that time were well acquainted with. Man does not know God immediately, and will understand His mind and plan only by studying the order of nature which He has instituted for man's instruction and happiness. (Many persons in the eighteenth century appear to have said that; it was a poet who said it most handsomely, under the eighteenth-century title of “An Essay on Man.”) But one of the institutions in the universal order, perhaps even the most notable one, was that natural and orderly institution, the English state. Its rate of alteration had been so slow! A little alteration at a time, so that it had never broken the pattern; that was hardly the history of a human production. And the statesman had only to preserve the constitution of this state as he had received it. By no means was he to reason freshly about it; he had his own natural and proper prejudice, a far better guide, to go by. It was the reasoning of the philosophes in England's neighbor state which produced the horrors of the French Revolution. The impact of that upon Burke was almost excessive at sixty years of age. He reacted with a grand rage, and wrote the incomparable Reflections, a book which is required reading for students of politics, and which most of us know anyhow as the place where the conception of the English state is aired with wonderful spirit, and documented prodigiously.

Burke trusted his own experience of the English state, which was in plain view and entirely accessible. His is an empirical faith, the religious counterpart of falling in love with what is nearest to you and most domesticated yet most wonderful. We are moved to ask about Burke's relation to John Locke, the father of English philosophical empiricism. It is held by political theorists that he owed a great deal to Locke; and for example, the idea of the social contract, which may be only tacit and virtual, or may be written, but in which at any rate the rulers undertake to protect the interest of the ruled, and the ruled undertake to obey their rulers. But Burke departed from Locke in maintaining that, at least in the politics of this ancient and happy England, it was better to consult prejudice than reason. Locke believed in knowing the natural order, and adapting to it in general, but also in reasoning from it boldly if one knows how. The productive arts and sciences, for instance, are empirical because, characteristically, they reason from artificial dispositions of nature, or contrived experiments; but they come back if not to original nature then to re-formed nature, which is supposed to be even better. It is unfortunate that the Greek root from which a whole family of terms is taken means, indifferently, either experience or experiment. So there are two faces to empiricism. One is the process of fresh experiment, atomizing nature and re-combining it; the other is the appeal to the routine of ordinary experience because there is already a fixation upon some familiar object so good that it must never be let go. Burke in his politics came under the second. In a “Letter to a Member of the National Assembly” he has a fantastic image of the French leaders being advised to keep their Revolution going even after there have been some bad disappointments:

But the charlatan tells them that what is passed cannot be helped;—they have taken the draught, and they must wait its operation with patience;—that the first effects indeed are unpleasant, but that the very sickness is a proof that the dose is of no sluggish operation;—that sickness is inevitable in all constitutional revolutions;—that the prescriber is not an empiric who proceeds by vulgar experience, but one who grounds his practice on the sure rules of art, which cannot possibly fail.

The charlatan here is an experimental empiric, but Burke accepts for himself the scornful designation of “an empiric who proceeds by vulgar experience.” He meant to be just that. Burke in politics goes by the large commonplaces of experience.

So, Mr. Kirk's book teaches, do many other conservative statesmen. And if the statesman's experience is with an ancient polity which God Himself has ordained, there is a fair presumption that he is an English statesman. We seem to have here a special historic conformation of Mr. Kirk's title-subject, the conservative mind. Once I had my chance to make this observation at first hand. The Oxford college which accepted me as a Rhodes Scholar undergraduate just before the first World War was one that liked to take its Americans from the Southern states, on the supposition that they were the more “English.” And before long I was glad to accept an invitation to join the most conservative of those college clubs which were given to debating the questions of the day after the fashion of a Parliament. But I came to have a function in the debates which I had not counted on. The questions proposed were often such that only one side was fit for a decent conservative to support, and the Honorable Secretary would have trouble finding a spokesman for the bad or liberal side. Now an American was scarcely expected to be solemnly committed in his views by hereditary convictions. Soon I was doing much more than my share of the debating, and always on the losing side, which was only in part because I was not equal to the passion or the style of the young statesmen. I can recall almost verbatim the following passage in one debate.

Mover of the Question:—I may as well say, Sir, that I am a Tory, and I take that to mean that I am dedicated with all my being to the defense first of my Sovereign, and then of my Church.

Interruption from the Floor:—Shame, Sir! Do you not think a Tory is obligated to defend the Empire?

Mover:—I accept the gentleman's rebuke and thank him for reminding me. I am dedicated to the defense, thirdly, of the Empire.

I felt that this was the conservative mind in its flower. But it brought me a sudden great relief to reflect that I was not dedicated to any such defenses, but was free, and in the nature of the case was excused. I had not been born to it, and could not possibly repair the omission.

We must be tempted to find this same conservative quality (empiric in the second or vulgar sense) in the English feeling for many other of the inherited patterns of English life besides politics; for the English manners, cookery, houses, landscaping, sports, fashions, clubs; where we may say at least that there is a prejudice in favor of old ways in preference to reasoned and strange ways; even though the sentiment may not be of a dignity to acquire a felt religious sanction. (The difference sometimes looks very slight.) And how English! the foreigner has sometimes said; often, How charming! when the faith was surely founded; or, for that matter, when it was founded sufficiently, and professed spontaneously and without guile. That the English life has been happily conducted on this basis may be attributed, if one is not too strict to make compliments, to a special grace vouchsafed to this people by Providence; it may be said that the English are a highly favored people, and have taken good care to deserve it.

Very well. But one cannot quite think that this temper prevails in England now. For various reasons; but surely one reason is both cogent and of great honor: because it has proved too hard to maintain a lyrical and empirical eighteenth-century euphoria against a certain importunate modern ghost. I mean the guilt-feeling, or harsh Categorical Imperative, or voice of God itself, or whatever you may call the impalpable thing, which compels the nations to make their peace with their constitutions as best they can and repair the bleak situations and minds of their unpropertied citizens. Has there been since early Christianity a moral impulse so unqualified and unequivocal? It has a way of penetrating all the systems of politics, and where it is not accommodated (as it appears to be “by Providence” in the English-speaking countries) it shatters them.

Burke's total conservatism is scarcely recoverable now. There is nothing climactic in Mr. Kirk's concluding chapter, “The Recrudescence of Conservatism,” but only a confusion of ringing ambitious passages. He is still saying Burke, but actually he wants the conservatives to appropriate the very reforms against which they have fought and advance them under the party colors. The idea is startling at first. But we ought to say gladly: Let them do it. It must often have happened that conservatives, whose acceptance comes after the event, have confiscated their enemies' political estate and administered it very well. And this brings me back to the point where I started. The conservative mind is not unable, as has been charged, to learn any lesson from the changes of history. It is only unable to recite the lesson faithfully.