THE CONSERVATIVE MIND
From Burke to Eliot
Seventh Revised Edition
Russell Kirk
Chicago-Washington, D.C.: Regnery Books, 1986
535 pp., $19.95
THE WISE MEN KNOW WHAT WICKED THINGS
ARE WRITTED ON THE SKY
Russell Kirk
Chicago-Washington, D.C.: Regnery Books
1987
Shortly after his 1980 landslide victory, the first self-proclaimed conservative president in American history saluted Russell Kirk's contribution to the American conservative movement. As one of the conservative "intellectual leaders" who "shaped so much of our thought," Kirk, President Reagan proclaimed, at the Conservative Action Conference in Washington, D.C., "has helped renew a generation's interest and knowledge of these 'true ideas,' these 'permanent things,' which are the underpinnings and the intellectual infrastructure of the conservative revival in our nation. The values and ancient truths of our civilization have been the focus of his powerful intellect in such major works as The Conservative Mind and The Roots of American Order."
The publication of Kirk's second and most enduring book in 1953, The Conservative Mind, "contributed through the power of the word," Kirk writes in the foreword to this latest edition, "to a large political movement in America...which, within a few years, would supplant in power America's latter-day liberalism." He refers here to the strength of liberalism as an ideological force. Twenty-seven years would pass before the movement of ideas this book helped inspire would lead to significant conservative political victories. Yet such is to be expected, given that in "the United States, as in Britain," as he has observed elsewhere, "the passage of some three decades is required for a body of convictions to be expressed, discussed, and at last incorporated in public policy." Now that this period of gestation has passed, the shaping role of Kirk's principles upon the substance and direction of the intellectual content of the postwar conservative movement bears reexamination.
Born in Plymouth, Michigan, this son of a railroad engineer was only thirty-five when he completed The Conservative Mind. In the next five years, he would publish six more major works in rapid succession, thereby garnering a reputation as a formidable literary and social critic. By the 1950s, Newsweek magazine hailed him as "one of the foremost intellectual spokesmen for the conservative position." His literary output continued to raise eyebrows during the next three decades: sixteen nonfiction works, three novels, three books of collected short stories, over two thousand articles, essays, and reviews published in a variety of scholarly and popular publications, a national newspaper column which ran for thirteen years, and a monthly column (discontinued in 1981) on education for National Review. "Russell Kirk has written more," suggested one of his admirers, "than the ordinary American has read." This political theorist, intellectual historian, literary and education critic, and author of supernatural tales (to cite just a few areas where he has made his mark) is regarded today as one of the principal figures in the post-World
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