Russell Kirk offers us a rich legacy in words and deeds. If we heed them we may yet play our part in preserving our Republic’s ordered liberty... The thought of Dr. Russell Kirk has inspired many people and many projects, including the journal that you are now reading. Founded by Dr. Bradley Birzer and myself [...]
For the conservative, the real end of economic production is to raise man above the savage level, to make possible the leisure which sustains civilization, and to free man from the condition of a simple drudge. When efficiency or production becomes an end in itself, then truly technology has triumphed over humanity. —Prospects for [...]
The true conservative does defend private enterprise stoutly; and one of the reasons why he cherishes it is that private enterprise is the only really practicable system, in the modern world, for satisfying our economic wants; but even more than this, he defends private enterprise as a means to an end. That end is a society just and [...]
Conservatism, then, is not simply the concern of the people who have a great deal of property and influence: it is a social concept important to everyone who desires equal justice and personal freedom and all the lovable old ways of humanity. —Russell Kirk, Prospects for Conservatives: A Compass for Rediscovering the Permanent Things [...]
What the church is to the spirit of religion, liberal learning is to the unbought grace of life—the only means for realizing the end. Where there is no liberal learning, in the long run there is no civilization—at least no civilization in our Christian and Western tradition. For some years or even generations after [...]
Prospects for Conservatives: A Compass for Rediscovering the Permanent Things by Russell Kirk, with a new introduction by Bradley J. Birzer. Imaginative Conservative Books, 2013. Russell Kirk’s most spirited work, Prospects for Conservatives is a vigorous defense of an authentic, elevated conservatism in the tradition of Edmund Burke, John Adams, and Alexis de Tocqueville. Written in part [...]
Prospects for Conservatives: A Compass for Rediscovering the Permanent Things by Russell Kirk, Imaginative Conservative Books, 2013, 278 pages In 1954, in a span of less than two months, Russell Kirk hammered away at what would become, arguably, his best book, A Program for Conservatives. Two years later, he revised and re-titled it, Prospects [...]
Quite often, when leading a college class studying a great poem, I begin by reading it aloud. When I finish reading it, instead of beginning comment and discussion, I read it again, perhaps even a third time. Among other effects, this concentrates the student’s mind on the object, which is the subject. Commentary is [...]
By the conservatism of desolation, I mean the forlorn endeavor of certain persons of conservative instincts to convince themselves that they are “individualists”—that is, devotees of spiritual and social isolation. The dreary secular dogma of individualism is the creation of Godwin, Hodgskin, and Herbert Spencer, and it progresses from anarchy back to anarchy again. [...]
Russell Kirk at Piety Hill At the back of every discussion of the good society lies this question, What is the object of human life? The enlightened conservative does not believe that the end or aim of life is competition; or success; or enjoyment; or longevity; or power; or possessions. He believes, [...]