Russell Kirk understood that politics was determined by deep cultural and intellectual influences that included the arts, literature, philosophy, religion, and community life. In short, he believed that it was not by politics alone that American and Western civilization would be restored. A Critical Biography of a Conservative Mind by James E. Person, Jr. Russell [...]
In the twentieth century it would be hard to find a better prose writer than Russell Amos Kirk. The competition is certainly stiff. Some of the best prose writing in the history of the English language sprang from the souls, minds, and hands of G.K. Chesterton, George Orwell, Albert Jay Nock, and William F. Buckley. [...]
Russell Kirk Defending tradition is a difficult task in an age that is predisposed to innovation and change. Yet that has been the challenge to conservatives in the modern age. Modernity inverts the conservative prejudice for prescriptive wisdom; it favors change and innovation as the instruments of progress; it places faith in what [...]
In this video, Dr. Bradley Birzer of Hillsdale College brings his background as a Kirk biographer to bear on Kirk’s magnum opus: The Conservative Mind. […]
Speaking about The Conservative Mind on the book’s sixtieth anniversary, Gleaves Whitney explains why Russell Kirk chose Edmund Burke as his book’s central figure. Kirk believed that Burke understood the fragility of civilization and knew that free peoples will have both parties of innovation and conservation. How our culture appropriately balances the will of the two will dictate [...]
In this lecture, Dr. Christopher Hammons of Houston Baptist University addresses the way in which The Conservative Mind traces “a long train of conservative intellectuals contribute to the progress of the human condition despite” the liberalism of the intellectuals of the modern academy. As Kirk explains, conservatives hold “that a people’s core values and beliefs are [...]
The sixty-year anniversary of The Conservative Mind is an opportunity to reflect on Russell Kirk’s achievement in shaping perceptions of conservatism. The book places conservatism in the larger tradition of Western civilization. It also connects it to particular thinkers who embodied the canons of conservatism Kirk describes in the first chapter. The canons intend to [...]
To know The Conservative Mind is to know the mind of its remarkable author, Russell Kirk. He was an old-fashioned man—courtly, retiring, serene, formal in dress and manner—whose view of the world, proclaimed by every photograph, was traditional, anti-modern, even obscure. Captured in his study, his library, his home, surrounded by pens, books, family, and friends, he [...]
I have never concealed the truth that I am a Trekkie. Additionally, I have never hidden my conviction that I am a traditionalist and a conservative in the way defined by Russell Kirk. While there are thematic and ideological elements worthy of criticism in the Star Trek worldview, there is much that can be redeemed. [...]
In 1953, when Russell Kirk published The Conservative Mind, the reigning and virtually uncontested view of America among scholars and other intellectuals was that from the beginning America represented a break with the ancient traditions of Europe. America was not weighed down by feudal and aristocratic social structures and was born out of enlightened, progressive ideas. It [...]
The Conservative Mind by Dr. Russell Kirk, which celebrates its 60th anniversary this year, still exerts considerable influence over the intellectual elements of American Conservatism. Dr. H. Lee Cheek delivers a lecture on this book for The McConnell Center at the University of Louisville’s “Milestones of the 20th Century: Democracy in America” lecture series. This [...]
When Russell Kirk’s Conservative Mind was published in 1953, conservatism was not yet a political or philosophical movement, and in fact the word conservatism was barely in the American lexicon. If not a movement, a few conservatives were beginning to be recognized as a growing political and intellectual force, largely because of their criticism of [...]
Ronald Reagan and Russell Kirk (This is one of a series The Imaginative Conservative is publishing in honor of the sixtieth anniversary of Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind. Essays in the series may be found here.) President Barack Obama’s decisive electoral victory last November caused panic in some conservative circles. Questions about the continuing relevance [...]
Russell Kirk (This is one of a series The Imaginative Conservative is publishing in honor of the sixtieth anniversary of Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind. Essays in the series may be found here.) The Conservative Mind, by Russell Kirk It has been sixty years since The Conservative Mind burst onto the scene, garnering lengthy [...]