Russell Kirk’s Enduring Constitution

Russell Kirk wrote of the Constitution often, singing its praises as coming directly from the experience of a people. It was not written for any other, as it came into existence in a specific time and a specific place. To Kirk, the Constitution was a practical document, not an ideological or abstract one.

Throughout his professional writing career, Russell Kirk found himself quite taken with the American Constitution. Though as a younger man, he had warned against making a fetish of the Constitution itself—i.e., seeing it as a device for some kind of permanent republican utopia—he nevertheless wrote of it often, singing its praises as a document that had kept peace and order for not just decades but centuries. Indeed, in the time that the Constitution has governed us, Kirk noted, entire governments, religions, peoples, and societies have fallen. The Constitution, though, has endured.

Kirk wrote of the staying power of the U.S. Constitution in the 1950s, especially in The American Cause, but came back to it again—each time adding depth to his many thoughts on the document—in 1974’s Roots of American Order and, even more fully, in 1990’s The Conservative Constitution (later revised posthumously as 1997’s Rights and Duties: Reflections on Our Conservative Constitution). These works were in addition to several speeches and presentations Kirk made for ISI, the Heritage Foundation, and Young America’s Foundation.

In large part, Kirk believed, the Constitution had endured because it reflected the very real history of the English-speaking peoples of Colonial North America. Though at a rather abstract level, the Founders—especially men such John Adams, as well as the three authors of The Federalist Papers—had drawn upon historians of the republics and polities of the classical and ancient worlds, they had also drawn upon their own experiences as colonials, especially during the salutary neglect of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In their own colonial experiences, the Americans, whether in New England or Virginia or Pennsylvania, had learned to govern themselves through natural law as well as common law. “Deeply rooted, like some immense tree,” Kirk wrote, “the American Constitution grew out of a century and a half of civil social order in North America and out of more than seven centuries of British experience.” In those centuries of self-rule, the colonials had gained experience and, perhaps even more importantly, confidence in themselves.

The U.S. Constitution of 1787, therefore, came directly from the experience of a people. It was not written for any other, as it came into existence in a specific time and a specific place. It was, therefore, not available for export, as Daniel Boorstin once asserted. To be sure, Kirk continued, the Constitution is a practical document, not an ideological or abstract one.

Despite believing America’s own constitutional experience singular, he did believe that constitutions, writ large, needed four things to make them work. First, Kirk argued, any effective constitution must “provide for stability and continuity in the governing of a country.” That is, one should have reasonable assuredness that the policy of today will not become the anti-policy of tomorrow. Rather, there should be a steadiness of purpose and reflection.

Second, Kirk continued, a proper constitution will divide political power at every level, meaning that which is horizontal (as in the three branches of the federal government) as well as that which is vertical (as in the division of federal and state and local). Wherever possible, Kirk stressed—in a rather Roman Catholic fashion—a constitution should embrace the theory of subsidiarity. That is, the power to execute a policy and a law should exist at the most local and immediate level possible.

Third, “a good constitution should establish a permanent arrangement by which holders of political authority are representative of the people they govern.” Kirk, of course, was no lover of abstract democracy or the Rousseauvian general will. Still, he recognized that governments can only function properly when they represent the mores, traditions, customs, and habits of a people. Should they stray too much from observing an overall representation, they might very well stray indefinitely, making a political body a thing in and of itself, obsessed with its own survival at the expense of all other considerations.

Finally, Kirk believed, “a good constitution should hold accountable the persons who govern a state or a country.” As George Washington, John Adams, and other Founders had noted, a republic demands the rule of the virtuous. In no way did they expect every American to be virtuous, but they hoped that the republic would create the space in and through which the virtuous could offer their talents to the country. When virtue is lacking, however, means must be made to remove the corrupt from office, thus giving the people as a whole a type of veto or negative upon their governors. Only in this fourth point does Kirk even toy with the idea of the Constitution as anything other than a practical document.

For Kirk, critically, even the events leading up to the American Revolution were not so revolutionary.

The men who made the American Revolution were not abstract visionaries. Suffering practical grievances, they sought practical redress; not obtaining that, they settled upon separation from the Crown in Parliament, as a hard necessity. That act was meant not as a repudiation of their past, but as a means for preventing the destruction of their pattern of politics by King George’s presumed intended revolution of arbitrary power, after which, in Burke’s phrase, ‘The Americans could have no sort of security for their laws or liberties.” That was not the cast of mind which is encountered among the revolutionaries of the twentieth century.

Given their own reactions to the loss of their liberties and their ability to govern themselves, the Founders appropriately and commensurately created a constitution that would not only uphold these four Kirkian virtues, but would also address their specific, practical needs.

And, to be sure, as Kirk celebrated the Constitution’s long endurance—to 1956, to 1974, to 1787—we can be sure to celebrate its endurance to 2022. Battered, beaten, distorted, mocked, and, sometimes even just plain ignored, it still remains.

The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now.

The featured image is courtesy of Pixabay.