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Russell Kirk (1918, Plymouth, Michigan – 29 April 1994, Mecosta, Michigan), was an American political theorist, historian, moralist, social critic, and man of letters, best known as the "father of modern conservatism." His landmark book, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot (1953), gave shape to the amorphous post-war conservative movement by tracing the development of conservative thought in the Anglo-American tradition. It is still considered one of the most important, if not the most important, texts in twentieth-century conservative thought.
Kirk is the only American to obtain the degree of doctor of letters from University of St. Andrews in Scotland; The Conservative Mind grew out of his dissertation. This book contributed materially to the 20th century Burke revival, still ongoing, and drew attention to:
- Conservative statesmen such as John Adams, George Canning, John C. Calhoun, Benjamin Disraeli, and Arthur Balfour;
- The conservative implications of writings by relatively well-known authors such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Russell Lowell, George Gissing, George Santayana, and T. S. Eliot;
- Relatively obscure British and American authors such as Fisher Ames, John Randolph of Roanoke, Orestes Brownson, Henry James Sumner Maine, William Edward Hartpole Lecky, Edwin Lawrence Godkin, William Hurrell Mallock, Leslie Stephen (Virginia Woolf's father), Albert Venn Dicey, Paul Elmer More, and Irving Babbitt.
The Viking Portable Conservative Reader (1983), which Kirk edited, contains sample writings by the above.
Upon completing his degree, Kirk took up an academic position at his alma mater Michigan State, but resigned in 1959 after becoming disenchanted with the school's declining 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 then retired to his family's house in his ancestral village of Mecosta, Michigan, where he exerted great influence on the American political and intellectual scene through his numerous books, academic articles, lectures, and a syndicated newspaper column that ran for 13 years. Kirk was a founder of the National Review and a frequent lecturer at the Heritage Foundation. Many of his later lectures were published in The Politics of Prudence (1993) and Redeeming the Time (1998).
His most 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).
Kirk grounded his Burkean conservatism in political philosophy, belles lettres, and his belated but strong religious faith, rather than in free market libertarianism and economic reasoning, whose anti-conservative implications he appreciated all too well. The Conservative Mind hardly mentions economics at all, and his anti-libertarian essay "Chirping Sectaries" is famous in some circles for its invective. No dry intellectual, he once referred to academic political scientists as "dull dogs, as a rule." Late in life, he grew disenchanted with American neoconservatives as well.
As was his mentor Edmund Burke before him, Russell Kirk was an excellent prose stylist in his intellectual and polemical writings. He was also an accomplished teller and writer of ghost stories, some of which are collected in Ancestral Shadows (2004). According to *, the science fiction writer and polymath Jerry Pournelle is a protege of Kirk's.
In 1963, Kirk married Annette Courtemanche, by whom he had four daughters. She and Kirk were known for their hospitality, welcoming many political, philosophical, and literary figures in their house (known as "Piety Hill"), and giving shelter to -- among others -- political refugees and hobos. They also ran a sort of seminar in conservative thought out of Piety Hill, intended for students of university age. Kirk was something of a modern-day Luddite: Piety Hill had no electricity until 1974, and he foresook cars (calling them "mechanical Jacobins"), televisions, and computers. Piety Hill is now the site of the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal.
External links
- "From The Academy"
- Biography, at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal. With links to a very incomplete bibliography.
"Russell Kirk"