Russell Kirk

North Carolina · connected1918–1994

American political theorist, moralist, historian, social critic, literary critic, and writer (1918–1994)

Studied at Duke University

political scientist, philosopher, literary critic, historian, novelist, writer

In the libraries

Open Library Dark Forces · 1980 View library record ↗ Open Library Edmund Burke · 1967 View library record ↗ Open Library Enemies of the Permanent Things: Observations of Abnormity in Literature and Politics · 1969 View library record ↗ Open Library The Dark Descent · 1987 View library record ↗ Open Library The conservative mind : from Burke to Eliot / Russell Kirk · 1960 View library record ↗ Open Library The conservative mind, from Burke to Santayana · 1953 View library record ↗

Read Russell Kirk

The conservative mind : from Burke to Eliot / Russell Kirk 1960 Find a copy Edmund Burke 1967 Find a copy The Dark Descent 1987 Find a copy The conservative mind, from Burke to Santayana 1953 Find a copy Dark Forces 1980 Find a copy Enemies of the Permanent Things: Observations of Abnormity in Literature and Politics 1969 Find a copy

Recorded without a firm citation

Kept here, labelled, rather than mixed in above.

There are six canons of conservative thought:

Rousseau and his disciples were resolved to force men to be free; in most of the world, they triumphed; men are set free from family, church, town, class, guild; yet they wear, instead, the chains of the state, and they expire of ennui or stifling lonelines.

The twentieth-century conservative is concerned, first of all, for the regeneration of the spirit and character – with the perennial problem of the inner order of the soul, the restoration of the ethical understanding, and the religious sanction upon which any life worth living is founded. This is conservatism at its highest.

Even the wisest of mankind cannot live by reason alone; pure arrogant reason, denying the claims of prejudice (which commonly are also the claims of conscience), leads to a wasteland of withered hopes and crying loneliness, empty of God and man: the wilderness in which Satan tempted Christ was not more dreadful than the arid expanse of intellectual vanity deprived of tradition and intuition, where modern man is tempted by his own pride.

Burke, could he see our century, never would concede that a consumption-society is the end for which Providence has prepared man.

Either order in the cosmos is real, or all is chaos. If we are adrift in chaos, then the fragile egalitarian doctrines and emancipating programs of the revolutionary reformers have no significance; for in a vortex of chaos, only force and appetite signify.

Man's rights are linked with man's duties, and when they are distorted into extravagant claims for a species of freedom and equality and worldly aggrandizement which human character cannot sustain, they degenerate from rights to vices.

The mass of mankind, Burke implies, reason hardly at all, in the higher sense, nor ever can: deprived of folk-wisdom and folk-law, which are prejudice and prescription, they can do no more than cheer the demagogue, enrich the charlatan, and submit to the despot.

Conservatives respect the wisdom of their ancestors; they are dubious of wholesale alteration. They think society is a spiritual reality, possessing an eternal life but a delicate constitution: it cannot be scrapped and recast as if it were a machine.

True conservatism rises at the antipodes from individualism. Individualism is social atomism; conservatism is community of spirit.

If a man acknowledges no authority, he sets himself up as Cain, and before long he is struck down by nemesis, which follows upon hubris.

Human nature being irremediably flawed, so that all of us in some degree rebel against the people and the institutions to which we owe most, there is in every man a certain impulse to make himself God: that is, to cast off all authority but his own lust and whim. From this vice comes the corrupting influence of total power upon even the best of natures. The rebellion of Lucifer is the symbol of this ancient anarchic impulse—the passion for overthrowing the just authority of God, that upon the vacant throne of authority the rebel may make himself absolute.

Now the good government […] is the growth of centuries of social experience. It has been called organic; I prefer the analogy “spiritual.” Trusting to the wisdom of our ancestors and the experience of the nation, it puts its faith in precedent, prescription, historical trial and error, and consensus of opinion over the generations. Not infatuated with neatness, it prefers the strength and majesty of the Gothic style.

The conflict is not really between royalty and democracy. It is between both and plutocracy, which, having destroyed the royal power by frank force under democratic pretexts, has bought and swallowed democracy.

The natural law is an instrument for progress, not a weapon of revolution.

What else do conservatives and libertarians profess in common? The answer to that question is simple: nothing. Nor will they ever. To talk of forming a league or coalition between these two is like advocating a union of ice and fire.

Conservatives have no intention of compromising with socialists, but even such an alliance, ridiculous though it would be, is more conceivable than the coalition of conservatives and libertarians.

When heaven and earth have passed away, perhaps the conservative mind and the libertarian mind may be joined in synthesis, but not until then.

Global environmentalists have said and written enough to leave no doubt that their goal is to destroy the prosperous economies of the world's richest nations.

In politics we do well to abide by precedent and precept and even prejudice, for the great mysterious incorporation of the human race has acquired a prescriptive wisdom far greater than any man’s petty private rationality.