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 [...]
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 [...]
Since the nation’s founding a salutary tension has informed American political thought—a tension between the abstract, universal truths expressed in the first part of the Declaration of Independence and the particular, experience-based prudence of the Constitution. The one establishes moral imperatives (and defines a just government) while the other establishes a new order out of [...]
Conservatism’s most conspicuous difficulty in our time is that conservative leaders confront a people who have come to look upon society, vaguely, as a homogeneous mass of identical individuals whose happiness may be obtained by direction from above, through legislation or some scheme of public instruction. Conservatives endeavor to teach humanity once more that the [...]
Russell Kirk by Russell Kirk The…conservative is concerned, first of all, for the regeneration of spirit and character—with the perennial problem of the inner order of the soul, the restoration of the ethical understanding and the religious sanction upon which any life worth living is founded. This is conservatism at its highest.—The Conservative [...]
The Conservative Mind: from Burke to Santayana, by Russell Kirk (currently entitled The Conservative Mind: from Burke to Eliot). Books on the topic of this essay may be found in The Imaginative Conservative Bookstore. The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will [...]
by Gordon Keith Chalmers —May 17, 1953 New York Times Review of “The Conservative Mind” The author of The Conservative Mind is as relentless as his enemies, Karl Marx and Harold Laski, considerably more temperate and scholarly, and in passages of this very readable book, brilliant and even eloquent. All American thought, whether religious, political, literary, [...]
The Conservative Mind The whole unwhole world of 1953—the Communist world, the Socialist world, the liberal world, the reactionary world—agrees on this: the U.S. is the citadel of conservatism in a tumult of innovation. Yet the label “conservative” is about the last tag that the typical American would think of applying to himself. [...]