(This is the first essay in a series The Imaginative Conservative will be publishing in honor of the sixtieth anniversary of Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind.) A vital date for those of us who read Winston Elliott’s The Imaginative Conservative is May 11, 2013, the sixtieth anniversary of the publication of Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind. It’s [...]
by W. Winston Elliott III There is still time to sign up for this Saturday’s conference celebrating the 60th anniversary of the publication of Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind. The program is being held at Houston Baptist University. Speakers include The Imaginative Conservative’s Bradley J. Birzer, Gleaves Whitney, W. Winston Elliott III and Barbara J. Elliott. Please use [...]
In the book of Ecclesiasticus it is written: “Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us.” Today I propose to honor the memory of a famous man, a man who earned his fame by writing about those who, in an intellectual and spiritual sense, were our fathers. In the great chain of being [...]
I'd say a conservative is a person who prefers the devil he knows to the devil he doesn't. He knows there are always ills and devils in the world, and he would rather get along with present imperfections than dash into some ruinous and impossible scheme of perfectibility. Editor's Note: This interview, conducted in the [...]
Based around a loose alliance of similarly-minded persons, conservatism sought to defend the Platonic good, true, and beautiful in the second half of the twentieth century, believing it necessary to promote a proper anthropology of the human person. More of a way of thinking, a set of guiding principles, or a habit of being than [...]
In an article in the February 13, 2012 TIME magazine, “The Conservative Identity Crisis,” the author says that “modern conservatism was born in the early 1950s” when “a young writer named Russell Kirk unearthed a rich philosophical tradition going back to British writer and politician, Edmund Burke; Kirk's 1953 book, The Conservative Mind was a [...]
By and large, the American Revolution was not an innovating upheaval, but a conservative restoration of colonial prerogatives. Accustomed from their beginnings to self-government, the colonials felt that by inheritance they possessed the rights of Englishmen and by prescription certain rights peculiar to themselves. When a designing king and a distant parliament presumed to extend [...]
Dear Imaginative Conservative readers, When I submitted part five of the reactions/reviews to Kirk’s magisterial The Conservative Mind, I claimed it to be the final part. I lied—but not with malicious intent. I’d forgotten I still had a few more reviews in the stack. That, or I simply spaced the memory. If you’ve ever seen [...]
Dear Imaginative Conservative Readers, This is the fifth and final round of the critics against Russell Kirk. I’ve offered quotes (I hope) from a fair and representative sampling of original reviews of The Conservative Mind (1953). Some of these praised Kirk, some offered fair criticisms, and some missed his point entirely. From what I can [...]
Bernard Theall, OSB, “A Survey and Defense of Conservative Way,” Books on Trial 12 (November 1953): 59. “The is surely one of the most heartening and thought-provoking books to have appeared in recent years” “In an age of ‘statistical morality’ and of the apotheosis of democracy, and when Catholics are being urged, as a noted [...]
It is a commonplace that the defining characteristic of that characteristically modern literary form, the novel, is a concern for the revelation of the inner life of the ordinary man. Hence, the frequent use at first of the device of diaries or letters (e.g. in Richardson’s Clarissa and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe) culminating in the stream [...]
Here in all of its glory is round three of reactions re: Kirk’s 1953 The Conservative Mind, the book that gave a name and a unity—at least briefly—to the post-war conservatism. Even those who hold little respect for Kirk regard this book as the beginning of all things conservative. In the standard left-ish history of [...]
As I continue to read through and digest the contemporary reviews of The Conservative Mind, I find I keep noticing certain common themes: 1) Few knew what to make of Kirk’s romantic style, though most reviewers appreciated it; 2) Catholics seem to have liked Kirk the most, seeing in him a latent Romanist; and 3) almost [...]
As some Imaginative Conservative readers know, I’ve the great privilege of working on a book on the endlessly fascinating Russell Kirk. At this point, I’ve written an introduction, three full chapters, and two partial chapters. I’ve written about 50,000 words, and I’m projecting a total word count for the completed project at roughly 120,000 words. The tentative [...]