What Exactly Is Conservatism: Russell Kirk Edition

I can think of few men of the twentieth century who thought more deeply about the nature and meaning and definition of conservatism than did Russell Kirk. We can accept, reject, or take in partial form what he said, but we’re fools if we don’t take him seriously, especially as we think about the present, the past, and the future of conservatism.

In recent months, because of a Wall Street Journal editorial in late November of 2022, there has been a profound discussion across the internet about the meaning and definition of conservatism. As I mentioned in a previous essay here at The Imaginative Conservative, this has to do, I believe, with the confusion of populism with conservatism and nationalism with conservatism over the past decade.

Populism and nationalism are each their own thing, however, and the mix with conservatism only comes about haphazardly, awkwardly, and with no small amount of peril. At root, conservatism is about conserving the best of the past, conserving all things humane, and promoting the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Perhaps most importantly, conservatism is a term demanding the recognition of the mores, norms, habits, customs, and traditions of association (family, church, etc.), and community. It means conserving the philosophy of Socrates and Aquinas, the literature of Chaucer and Shakespeare, the imagination of Virgil and Dante, and the politics of Aristotle and Cicero.

As the debate rages across the internet, there’s no reason not to go back to the founder of post-war conservatism, Russell Kirk (1918-1994).

“‘Conservatism,’ as a term of politics, signified originally the guardianship of ancient liberties,” Kirk wrote in Continuity in its introductory issue, 1982. This definition—one to which Kirk gave a lifetime of thought—is the most succinct one he ever offered. While it’s not a complete way of thinking, it is a good one. Yet, for Kirk, generally, conservatism was apolitical, ante-political, and anti-political. “For conservatives, the first necessity lies beyond politics,” he wrote in 1990 in Policy Review. “For such recovery, the conservative imagination is required; but it scarcely can be pursued as a public policy. Rather, the renewal of a moral order must be the work of the insights and the eloquence of individual men and women.” Kirk grew especially frustrated with those reviewers of 1953’s The Conservative Mind who focused almost exclusively on a political understanding of the book. As Kirk understood it, he was making a philosophical, literate, and poetic statement with his magnum opus.

Though these have been explored and analyzed, time and again, it might be—at the very beginning of 2023—best to go back to fundamentals and look at Kirk’s six tenets of conservatism. At some points in his writing career, Kirk posited four tenets, at others five, and, toward the end of his life, ten. But, his six as listed in The Conservative Mind remain the classic statement, as long as one remembers the caveat that these are only tenets, or canons, not absolutes. Kirk did everything possible to avoid the appearance of conservatism as an ideology. Thus, he offers them as canons, or little statements of dogma, rather than as systematic truths. Or, as Kirk put it in 1953, “conservatism is not a fixed and immutable body of dogma, and conservatives inherit from Burke a talent for re-expressing their convictions to fit the time.”

First, “belief that a divine intent rules society as well as conscience, forging an eternal chain of right and duty which links great and obscure, living and dead.” Something—perhaps the traditional Natural Law of Western morality or the Tao of C.S. Lewis’s Abolition of Man—reigns over human existence, connecting all persons, highest and lowest, first and last, to one another and to the Divine.

Second, an “affection for the proliferating variety and mystery of traditional life, as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity and equalitarianism and utilitarian aims of most radical systems.” As such, each person is unique—though reflecting the universal—born in a specific time and a specific place, clothed in the accidents (ethnicity, skin color, religion, language, etc.) of his birth.

Third, a “conviction that civilized society requires orders and classes.” Here, Kirk echoes Aristotle and Aquinas, noting that man is, by nature, meant to live in community. Uniquely gifted, each person brings the particular to the community, and the community both sharpens and delimits individuality.

Fourth, a “persuasion that property and freedom are inseparably connected, and that economic leveling is not economic progress.” Kirk rarely talked in terms of rights, especially after the 1950s. With Burke, though, Kirk believed in natural rights, but he only reluctantly named what such rights were. When pushed, though, especially in the late 1950s, Kirk argued that the highest right—even above the right to life—was the right to property. Essentially synonymous with the right to life, the right to property guarantees that each person takes responsibility for his moral decisions and claims.

Fifth, a “faith in prescription and distrust of ‘sophisters and calculators.’” Again, drawing on Burke, Kirk paraphrases the great Anglo-Irish statesman’s famous passages in Reflections on the Revolution in France dealing with the “unbought grace of life” and the “wardrobe of the moral imagination.” The human person, as such, is much more than a calculator of pleasure and pain. He/she is a being of incredible depths and infinite mysteries, made for eternal life. This canon carefully answers the longings of the second one.

Sixth, an understanding that “change and reform are not identical, and that innovation is a devouring conflagration more often than it is a torch of progress.” Harkening back to the classical virtues, Kirk recognizes that to be a good citizen, one must employ prudence (the ability to discern good from evil) and temperance (using the created good for the Good) in deciding what is necessary for a well-ordered society. When one inherits the customs of the past, he can 1) approve them, 2) reject them, or 3) reform and improve them. It was this third option that Kirk so approved in society. Indeed, as is clear from a study of the past, the history of Western civilization is a history of reformations.

As I conclude this essay, let me be as clear as possible. By drawing upon Kirk, I’m not trying to be authoritarian or ideological or sycophantic. Rather, I can think of few men or women of the twentieth century who thought more deeply about the nature and meaning and definition of conservatism. We can accept, reject, or take in partial form what Kirk said, but we’re fools if we don’t take him seriously, especially as we think about the present, the past, and the future of conservatism.

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The featured image is “Fall Plowing” (1931) by Grant Wood, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.