Russell Kirk of Peity Hill

...By reviving the memory of an Anglo-American conservative moral and political tradition, Kirk has clapped onto what was once just a mere instinctual distaste for the policies and philosophy of New Deal liberalism a profound and abiding set of principles...

...Kirk soon turned his energies to the creation of yet another conservative journal, one that would maintain high scholarly standards and humane values...

...Not only was Burke dead, but More feared that his political thought was about to be interred with him...

...and in every generation the permanent things will be challenged afresh...

...Yet, of all the books attempting to develop a conservative philosophy during this period, Russe U Kirk's The Conservative Mind (H...

...If forced to label himself, he prefers to be called a Bohemian Tory...

...Out of the infinite mercy of God," he states, "I never have been an intellectual...

...His association with National Review would, therefore, remain limited to his occasional book reviews and fortnightly column, "From the Academy...

...A Bohemian Toiy Reconsidered Russell Kirk Of Piety Hill W. Wesley McDonald After the deaths of Paul Elmer More and Irving Babbitt, the themes of reflective, philosphical conservative thought would not be heard again until after the end of the New Deal era...

...This sudden interest inspired Dr...

...Provided with the leisure to read widely and reflect upon what appeared at the time to be the political and philosophical defeat of his beloved conservatism by ever advancing liberal dogmas, Kirk wrote his doctoral dissertation, The Conservatives' Rout...

...In the same year as his resignation from MSC, his Conservative Mind appeared...

...he's dead, is he not...

...Quite possibly I am on the losing side...

...Despite all the wealth and pride we have gained by the efforts of these men and women (our ancestors)," the young Kirk argues, "with all the luxury and culture which they have toiled to give us, can we hope to be the people they were...

...After a brief flirtation with the political doctrines of Jeffersonian democracy, Kirk turned to the writings of Jefferson's most profound critic, John Randolph of Roanoke...

...Unlike even those famous converts from communism to conservatism, John Dos Passos and Frank S. Meyer, Kirk never flirted with Marxist dogma in the fever of his youth...

...Andrews University in Scotland...

...Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France would provide the intellectual means to convert "prejudice into principle, and confused love of the past into an apprehension of the wisdom of our ancestors...

...I did not live cold harmony and perfect regularlity of organization...

...While working on his latest books, Eliot and the Follies of Our Time, and a college text, The Roots of American Order, his seventeenth and eighteenth books, he concurrently writes his daily columns, and maintains a world-wide correspondence...

...It was his first nationally published piece and indicated clearly that even while Kirk was a teenager he had formulated definite conservative principles...

...Living with his wife, Annette, and their three children at his ancestral home, "Piety Hill," located in Mecosta, Michigan, Kirk maintains a household that is remindful of the style of life that would be expected of the English manor home of the last century...

...Kirk's first acquaintance with the political principles of Edmund Burke came while he was a graduate student at Duke University...

...Having remarkably found conservatism while still a child, he would never trifle with the radical ideologies...

...A scant fifteen years ago, Peter J. Stanlis, author of Burke and Natural Law (University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1958), quipped in a letter to Kirk that he suspected that books on Burke in the libraries were worn out not by the students' use, but by just plain old age...

...In Scotland and England I found, as Hawthorne had found a hundred years before, the metaphysical principles of continuity given visible reality...

...Kirk was its editor until 1960 when he resigned as a result of what he termed "serious internecine disputes over policy and control" with other members of the journal's staff...

...and he wrote with an eloquence and power that could neither be ridiculed nor ignored...

...After pointing out the achievements and courage of his ancestors to the reader, he concludes with an observation that will strike the contemporary reader as the very essence of Kirkean philosophy...

...The first edition of the magazine appeared in 1957...

...In his essay, "Why I am a Conservative," Kirk establishes that he first felt the conservative impulses at the very hour he began to feel and reason...

...The thesis later became one of the few published works upon that early nineteenth century Southern aristocrat...

...Aligning himself with the great traditional, classical theorists, Paul Elmer More and Irving Babbitt, Kirk would do battle with all these "unfavorable tendencies" in his book, Academic Freedom (H...

...The ideologists of reason and cold intellect, Bentham, Mill and the contemporary proponents of Utilitarianism, who would quantify the world making it scientifically rational became for Kirk the betes noires of history...

...Burke, the thinker and statesman would remain "thereafter my guide in much...

...Nowadays, Kirk is considerably more optimistic about the success of his conservative principles in America than he was when he originally penned The Conservatives' Rout...

...The recent, proliferation of societies and journals focusing on Burke and the Eighteenth Century attest to growing interest in the philosophy and times of Burke...

...Here, within the fog and gothic unreality of Scotland, Kirk added still further depth and wisdom to his convictions as a conservative...

...After Kirk's departure, the journal continued to thrive and grow, maintaining its reputation as one of the most respected conservative journals of scholarship and opinion in America...

...Although, it received spotty reviews from the liberal journals, the book enjoyed an immediate and widespread popularity which at first Kirk neither expected nor could explain...

...Mine was not an Enlightened mind...," he observes, "It was a Gothic mind, medieval in its temper and structure...

...he was obviously well-read...

...Even the few critical and interpretative essays upon Kirk have been almost universally hampered because their authors had not read the great bulk of Kirk's prodigious literary and scholarly output...

...Therefore, this short essay will draw together much that is not generally known of Kirk's moral and political thought nor known about his life...

...Therefore, I am a conservative," Kirk concludes in one of his essays...

...Eliot orce because there are no "lost causes...

...His nocturnal habits permit him the leisure of working between the hours of midnight and eight in the morning, a period which virtually guarantees him the peace to write without interruption...

...These tendencies are the lowering of standards in the policy of grading, and the influence of the so-called objective examination in lowering the college reading and writing standards...

...McDonald is a graduate student at the State University of New York and editor-in-chief of THE HILDERBERG REVIEW...

...Most observers of American politics turn to such political and popular personages as Barry Goldwater, William Buckley, or President Nixon when they seek to describe the tenor and direction of current conservative thinking...

...These cold, abstract theoreticians and ideologues Kirk felt to be the very antithesis of his own thought...

...Each cause merely struggles to keep alive the enduring normative wisdom of the past...

...The material included here is drawn from his lesser known essays, his unpublished correspondence, and my private conversations with him...

...Soon thereafter, Kirk founded and edited The University Bookman, a thin quarterly which primarily reviews college textbooks...

...He was young (then thirty-five...

...Army during World War II, Kirk resumed his graduate studies at St...

...Not that conservatism had become inarticulate and incomprehensible during the Roosevelt years, rather as Bernard L. Kronick wrote in 1947, "it had been drowned out by the clatter and confusion attendant upon the building of the 'Brave New World.' It was only when the resulting edifice demonstrated some alarming deficiencies that older themes were heard again...

...Whittaker Chambers, who greatly enjoyed the book, but did not know Kirk, encouraged Time magazine to give the book its surprisingly favorable review...

...The nomination of Barry Goldwater in 1964 and the election of Richard Nixon to the presidency in 1968 encouraged Kirk to observe recently in a newspaper column that American conservatives "are in the middle of their journey," and in "about 12 years from now, they may be at the height of their influence...

...Ah, Burke...

...As Kirk notes, the conservatives today have an opportunity to regain ground as they have "not seen since that day when modern radicalism issued its challenge to traditional society by decorating 'this hell-porch of a Hotel de Ville' with human heads on pikes...

...what I sought was variety, mystery, tradition, the venerable, the awful...

...Large and Victorian in character, his house is designed for a family that enjoys the pleasure of company with many friends...

...However, their acquaintance with Kirk has been largely limited to this single study...

...Kirk to remark that Burke's reputation "as political philospher and perhaps a man of letters never stood higher than it does today...

...In 1964 Kirk married and became a convert to the Roman Catholic Church...

...Yet, despite the diversions of friends and family, Kirk is still capable of awesome literary productivity...

...The dispute between libertarian and traditional conservative thinkers lingers, however, as a reminder of the deep intellectual abyss that lies between these two important strands of conservative thinking...

...The conservative is realistic and "expects until the end of all things the world will be a battleground, a place of testing...

...His Bohemian peregrinations have taken him from the skid rows of Detroit and Los Angeles to the literary circles of London and Madrid, from the backwoods of Beaver Island to Morocco...

...I am an aristocrat," said Randolph in 1829, "I love liberty, I hate equality...

...Kirk declined the offer, preferring not to be associated on the masthead of a magazine that included articles from authors Kirk considered libertarian or Benthamite...

...After serving with the U.S...

...In 1955 National Review began publishing and its editor, William Buckley, Jr., invited Kirk to take an associate editorship with the magazine...

...His shelf full of books have once again inspired Burke's "moral imagination" to a nation which had nearly forgotten Burke while embracing notions of positivism, pragmatism, and sentimentalism into its politics...

...I never shall be an ideologist...

...f of THE HILDERBERG REVIEW...

...Therefore, even if some new radicalism were suddenly ushered in, sweeping aside all that now exists, we could still expect to find Kirk steadfastly defending Eliot's "permanent things" against the "follies of the time...

...Before Kirk revived Burke's philosophical arguments this opponent of the fin-de-siecle French Jacobins was of interest only to the occasional scholar of the Eighteenth Century of the few men of humane letters moved by Burke's "moral imagination...

...It was with much dismay that I viewed the growth of certain unfavorable tendencies in the Basic College," he reported at the time of his resignation...

...The manuscript was later retitled and published as The Conservative Mind...

...Observing that there existed no monthly magazine "of a reflective, leisurely, imaginative, serious and good-natured character" widely circulated in America, he began plans in 1954 for the creation of Modern Age...

...Like Samuel Johnson, his Toryism is that of a man "attached to orthodoxy in church and state...

...There are no "gained causes" wrote T.S...

...However, the wells of intellectual conservative thought from which these men must draw have been immeasurably enriched by Kirk's elegant and lucid defense of conservative principles...

...Kirk soon thereafter emerged as one of America's leading conservative thinkers and writers...

...His associates and friends have included a wide range of conservative thinkers and writers, such as Raymond English, the late Richard Weaver, Henry Regnery, Thomas Molnar, and numerous others who have made pilgrimages to Mecosta...

...Kirk was so moved by Randolph's brilliant Burkean insights that he committed himself to writing a Masters thesis upon him...

...Regnery Co...

...He acquired, in 1952, the Doctor of Humane Letters degree from St...

...Chicago, 1955), and ten years later in The Intemperate Professor (Louisiana State University Press Baton Rouge, 1965...

...Andrews, the only American to ever earn this eminent degree from that ancient Scottish seat of learning...

...This journal would maintain, he wrote at the time, an appreciation of religious and ethical values, a respect for conservative social principles, and would be an "expression of the culture of the Middle West and the heart of the United States generally...

...often I think so...

...I feel that these errors, although by no means confined to MSC, were sufficient for my departure...

...and, if Providence continues kind...

...Kirk's career as a university professor was short-lived...

...Regnery Co...

...British society and the face of Britain were for me the expression (as they had been the inspiration) of Burke's principles of social immortality and social reform: the past ever blending with the present, so that the fabric continually renews itself, like some great oak, being never either wholly old or wholly young...

...Hard on the heels of the New Deal, during the late forties and early fifties, a great number of articles and books were published resounding the "older themes...

...Kirk's thick book (478 pages in the Regnery hardback edition) was largely responsible for the revival of interest in the Eighteenth-century Whig, Edmund Burke...

...Mr...

...In the teeth of Liberal assertions that conservatives are superannuated and inarticulate," wrote M. Stanton Evans seven years later, "Kirk hurled a monumental defense of the conservative philosophy...

...Any association with them would only hurt his reputation as a Burkean conservative...

...Kirk also revealed at an astonishingly early age this capacity to express himself lucidly and with passionate eloquence in his essays...

...Yet out of a curious perversity, I had rather lose with Socrates, let us say, than win with Lenin...

...I had much rather sacrifice the support of ten ossified Bethamites," he wrote Buckley, "than the support of one real conservative...

...Chicago, 1953) would enjoy the most widespread and enduring impact upon the character and direction of conservative thinking for the next two decades...

...At age seventeen, Saplings, a journal for high school student articles, published his essay, "Momentos...

...This hatred of enthroned Reason and abstract doctrines led him to the subsequent suspicion of ideologists and intellectuals...

...Until 1953, he was a professor of Humanities at Michigan State College...

...However, nowadays, it is plainly evident that the fortunes of Burkean studies have taken a turn for the better...

...History's recent turn of events have made the conservatives' lot appear a great deal more promising...

...In The Conservative Mind Kirk defended Burkean principles tracing them through the works of Adams, Coleridge, Randolph, Calhoun, Santayana, Babbitt, More, Eliot and others--a powerful exercise in scholarship which most American conservatives are aware of...

...At the turn of the Twentieth Century, Paul Elmer More could only shake his head sadly when a radical sociologist responded phlegmatically to the mention of Burke...

...Names such as Richard Weaver, Peter Viereck, Clinton Rossiter, William F. Buckley, Jr., and Russell Kirk became 'associated with a renascense of conservative thinking...

...Although he had held this position only a few years, he soon found that he was unable to abide with the lowering educational standards at MSC...