Edmund Burke To resist the idyllic imagination and the diabolical imagination, we need to know the moral imagination of Edmund Burke. Cato the Elder told his friends, “I had rather that men should ask, ‘Why is there no monument to Cato?’ than that they should ask, ‘Why is there a monument to Cato?’” [...]
Imagine a man travelling through the night, without a guide, thinking continually of the direction he wishes to follow. That is the image of a man in search of order, says Simone Weil: “Such a traveler’s way is lit by a great hope.” Above even food and shelter, she continues, we must have order. The [...]
To protest against the existence of order is to protest against well-being, justice, freedom, and prosperity. Happiness is found in imaginative affirmation, not in sullen negation. Gratitude is one form of happiness; and anyone who appreciates the legacy of moral and social order which he has inherited in America will feel gratitude. The pursuit of [...]
The wittiest of our public men, Eugene McCarthy, remarked a few months ago that nowadays he uses the word “liberal” as an adjective merely. That is a measure of the triumph of the conservative mentality in recent years—including the triumph of the conservative side of Mr. McCarthy’s own mind and character. Perhaps it would be [...]
Russell Kirk In honor of Russell Kirk’s birthday (October 19, 1918) we offer this very fine quote in which Dr. Kirk lays out the essentials for those of us seeking to preserve and restore Western civilization. He makes clear that true conservatives do not limit themselves to questions of politics and economics. “Cant [...]
Mere unthinking negative opposition to the current of events, clutching in despair at what we still retain, will not suffice in this age. A conservatism of instinct must be reinforced by a conservatism of thought and imagination.–Russell Kirk […]
The conservative…knows the peril of power, and the practical means for restraining power. To John Adams and James Madison in the United States, to Burke and Disraeli in England, we can turn for guidance. The thinking conservative has consistently sought to keep power from the appetite of any man or any class, through respect for [...]
The following essay appears in the final chapter of Russell Kirk’s textbook Economics: Work and Prosperity (Pensacola, Fla.: A Beka Book Publications, 1989), pp. 365–368. Some people would like to separate economists from politics, but they are unable to do so. Another name for economics is political economy. As we mentioned in earlier chapters, a [...]
Russell Kirk Some of you may have read this before but we post it (from the Russell Kirk Center web site) because it deserves revisiting. Pay special attention to the last two paragraphs. Are any of today’s conservative media personalities capable of making the point that “A conservatism of instinct must be reinforced by [...]
In the affairs of nations, the American conservative feels that his country ought to set an example to the world, but ought not to try to remake the world in its image. It is a law of politics, as well as of biology, that every living thing loves above all else—even above its own life—its [...]
Leviathan is a Hebrew word signifying “that which gathers itself in folds.” In the Old Testament, Leviathan is the great sea-beast: “Canst thou draw out leviathan with a hook?” In the 17th century, Thomas Hobbes—whom T.S. Eliot calls “that presumptuous little upstart”—made Leviathan the symbol of the state, or rather of mass-society, composed of innumerable [...]
Russell Kirk Once upon a time I was seated in an automobile passing rapidly along the broad highway that runs between Grand Rapids and Kalamazoo. My companion in the back seat was the very young person who today is among this school’s graduates: Miss Cecilia Abigail Kirk. For some miles, that highway [...]
America as a Civilization by Max Lerner. By attempting to discuss everything in America, Professor Lerner succeeds in analyzing nothing well. Pretentious and shallow, America as a Civilization offers little insight into the culture of the United States. As a textbook, whether in college or high school, it is lamentably inadequate and prejudiced. What a [...]
Irving Babbitt Democracy and Leadership, first published in 1924, still is in print at the end of a whole generation. This new printing indicates how little ephemerae found their way into the body of Babbitt’s writings, and how he foresaw, far more clearly than his opponent John Dewey, the great issues of the [...]