The Idea of Kirk
Russell Kirk and the Age of Ideology by W. Wesley McDonald
University of Missouri Press, 2004
(259 pages; $44.95, hardcover)
reviewed by Jeremy Beer
Most readers today, if they have heard of Russell Kirk at all, know him simply as a conservative icon. This is unfortunate, for the actual intentions and thought and life of the real Russell Kirk, who articulated a humane, traditionalist, localist, and deeply religious conservatism, is paradoxically in danger of being permanently sidelined among movement conservatives, and therefore never met at all by anyone else.
Russell Kirk the icon is referred to in official parlance as one of the “principal architects of the postwar conservative intellectual movement” and is an officially revered figure in movement circles. But he was a much more interesting thinker than one might infer from that fact; indeed, his eccentricities and dissenting opinions are what make him so fascinating, and so useful.
Thus, he made it a point to criticize neoconservatives’ ideologically inspired globalist ambitions. (“I had thought that the Neoconservatives might become the champions of diversity in the world,” Kirk lamented in a Heritage Foundation lecture in 1988. “Instead, they aspire to bring about a world of uniformity and dull standardization, Americanized, industrialized, democratized, logicalized, boring.”) He co-chaired Pat Buchanan’s 1992 presidential campaign in Michigan and bitterly opposed the first President Bush’s Gulf War. (There is little doubt where he would have stood on George W.’s sequel.)
A loyal supporter of Goldwater, Nixon, and Reagan, Kirk nonetheless befriended the socialist Norman Thomas and thought highly of Democratic senator and presidential contender Eugene McCarthy. He was a passionate historical preservationist, a quasi-green who unstintingly praised Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Wendell Berry’s Unsettling of America, a reactionary who hated the automobile, a mystic who was captivated by the spiritual implications of quantum physics.
For all of this and more, Kirk was dismissed as a crank by many, and even today he draws fire from certain conservative pundits. But many of his positions are beginning to look more sensible, even prophetic, with the passage of time. Kirk was not perfect in his moral and political judgments, but how much more interesting and honest he was than are so many of our current conservative intellectuals! (“Intellectuals” was for Kirk a pejorative term, along with “capitalist” and “individualist.”)
Despite his iconic status, Kirk, who died in 1994, has until now been the subject of but one monograph. The sparse secondary literature would therefore make Wesley McDonald’s Russell Kirk and the Age of Ideology a welcome addition even if its only function was to draw renewed attention to its subject.
But the value of the book, which focuses on the concordance of Kirk’s thought with the principles of the “New Humanist” writers of the first half of the twentieth century, especially Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More, is greater than that. It is greater than that, first, because McDonald, who teaches political science at Elizabethtown College and served on a couple of occasions as Kirk’s assistant, possesses a broad knowledge of and sympathy for Kirk’s intellectual project and political principles; and second, because his scholarly exposition of Kirk’s thought can be seen as, in part, an effort to rescue Kirk from the conservative movement he inspired by situating him in continuity with an alternative tradition.
The Humanist Kirk
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