fbpx
Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Ghost Over the Conservative Graveyard

In memory of Russell Kirk's friend and fellow scholar, a TAC Classic review of The Essential Russell Kirk
Kirk_1962.

Russell Kirk (1918-94) burst upon the American intellectual scene in 1953 with the publication of his third book, The Conservative Mind. His discovery of an Anglo-American tradition of conservative ideas beginning with the 18th-century British thinker, Edmund Burke, catapulted the 35-year-old Michigan college professor of history from obscurity into national prominence. Recognized as a leading intellectual figure, his books were reviewed favorably in Time and Newsweek magazines and the New York Times. Newsweek hailed him as “one of the foremost intellectual spokesmen for the conservative position.”

By the 1980s, though, all had changed. Kirk suffered neglect not only from the intellectual and media establishment, but even from many within the very movement he helped found. Following his death, two intellectual biographies have been written about him. A third book by Gerald Russello will be published next spring. George A. Panichas’ superbly edited compilation of Kirk’s essays provides further evidence that a welcomed and long overdue revival of interest in Kirk’s thought is now underway.

Author of over 30 books and hundreds of essays, a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist, and a regular contributor to National Review, Kirk wore many hats in his long and varied career. He was a leading spokesmen for the conservative movement, adviser to presidents, a scholar, educational reformer, a writer of ghostly tales, and, lastly and most proudly for him, a “man of letters.”

The product of five years of meticulous editing, The Essential Kirk lives up to its title. Even though Kirk’s essays have been anthologized before (mostly by Kirk himself), this collection is the first to cover the entire spectrum of his life’s work. Panichas, a prolific literary scholar and critic, present editor of Modern Age, and a long-time friend of Kirk, has gleaned 43 representative writings from Kirk’s canon, including essays, reviews, review-essays, prefatory pieces, public addresses, and entire chapters from books. Without Panichas’ efforts, many of these pieces would have languished unread in hard-to-find journals and out-of-print books.

Panichas groups his selections thematically into nine sections to “identify the particular locales of the battles in which [Kirk] was engaged” and “encompass the strategies and tactics of the general warfare which demanded from him the utmost effort, tenacity, courage, belief.” He introduces each section with a brief interpretive essay, and each interpretive essay is preceded by a descriptive head note. The bibliography includes works by Kirk and about him. Panichas has also compiled a useful narrative chronology of Kirk’s life excerpted from Kirk’s memoirs, The Sword of Imagination.

“The selections featured in this work,” observes Panichas in his long, informative preface, “are indicative of Kirk’s gifts as an essayist, critic, and lecturer.” Whether they are about history, literature, morals, politics, economics, or religion, none of these essays can be considered as mere “fugitive” pieces of writing. The “interaction and interdependence between” these essays demonstrate the “unity and harmony” and “distinct character and discipline” exemplified in Kirk’s thinking. His works “unfailingly return to a moral center … there is always a state of judgment, a central creed and identity, to which he comes back again and again for support and ratification.”

More than most who have written about Kirk, Panichas understands the importance of the concept of the moral imagination to Kirk’s moral teaching. Kirk described the moral imagination, a term coined by Edmund Burke, as “that power of ethical perception which strides beyond the barriers of private experience and events of the moment”; especially as found in “the higher form of this power exercised in poetry and art.” A uniquely human faculty, not shared with the lower forms of life, the moral imagination comprises “man’s power to perceive ethical truth, abiding law, in the seeming chaos of many events.” Without “the moral imagination, man would live merely from day to day, or rather moment to moment, as dogs do. It is the strange faculty—inexplicable if men are assumed to have an animal nature only—of discerning greatness, justice, and order, beyond the bars of appetite and self-interest.” In any civilized society, the moral imagination reigns supreme. When it functions in an impaired manner or ceases to function altogether, not only does communication between generations become difficult, but distorted views of human nature arise and moral character erodes, resulting in societal moral decadence. The afflictions of our society, Kirk stressed, are chiefly caused by our degraded imaginations.

Kirk expanded the meaning of Burke’s concept of the moral imagination by applying it in an innovative fashion to counter the pseudo-scientific formulations of contemporary ideologies like neo-Benthamite libertarianism, behaviorism, and social engineering. This may be his most enduring contribution to modern political thought. He further recognized moral imagination’s critical importance to the revival of conservatism in an age when the very sources of imaginative inspiration are withering. If conservatism is to become a lasting intellectual, moral, and political force against the discordant impulses of our age, Kirk argued, it must be rooted in a faith in the power of imagination to control man’s lower impulses.

This faculty of ethical perception, as Kirk informs us in these essays, has among its many sources history, humane letters, fable, myth, and religion. The creations of historians, theologians, or poets of great genius, for example, fashion out of the myriad fragments of human experience intuitive wholes or moral universals. These ethical universals embody the truths of human nature from which we derive the self-knowledge that teaches us about our potentialities and limitations. The imagination further enables us to escape from the confining limits of our personal sensual experience to become conscious of what is beyond ourselves. By perceiving what we hold in common with others, or imaginatively seeing things from the perspective of others unlike ourselves, we become aware of ourselves as members of a community.

This awareness of the ultimate good common to all mankind is the basis of the final end of politics—namely, genuine community. Kirk believed that personal experience and individual rationality, whether separately or in combination, cannot account for the most important things in life. It is the non-conceptual and non-definitional power of the moral imagination, not the faculty of reason, which gives rise to the ultimate norms by which the soul and commonwealth are ordered.

Kirk’s trust in the controlling power of the moral imagination is closely connected in his thought with his distrust of human nature. “Men’s appetites are voracious and sanguinary,” Kirk affirmed, and must be “restrained by this collective and immemorial wisdom we call prejudice, tradition, customary morality.” In his account of human nature, he described man as having an immutably flawed character that gives rise to a proclivity for selfish, arbitrary, and socially destructive behavior, the chief obstacle of utopian reformers who imagine that man can be perfected by schemes of societal or economic transformation.


One of Kirk’s self-appointed tasks was to demonstrate that unlike fascism, communism, liberalism, and libertarianism, conservatism is not an ideology, but the rejection of ideology. Kirk insisted that the mind of the ideologue and that of the conservative man of moral imagination are always at opposite poles. For the distorted visions of reality that emerge from the imaginations of ideologues create social and moral disorder. Ideologues formulate static doctrines severed from historical experience and moral authority. They deduce in a casuistic fashion vast schemes for social and political improvement. They reduce the complex nature of man to abstract formulae intended to help bring forth an earthly Paradise. Lacking a conception of the inner life, ideologues perceive man as a being whose behavior is wholly determined by the phenomenal forces of nature. They imagine that once these forces are fully understood, they will have within their grasp the means ultimately to control man’s destiny. These “armed doctrines” threaten religion, tradition, convention, custom, prescription, and constitutional government. They are the enemies of the humane social order, which Kirk, throughout his career, strove mightily to preserve. These central arguments of Kirk’s thought are well captured in Panichas’ anthology.

Panichas incorrectly believes, however, that postmodernism is just another insidious form of ideology. “There is no doubt in [Kirk’s] mind,” he writes, “that those who are known as post-modern intellectuals were held fast in ‘the clutch of ideology.’” But there are both left- and right-wing postmodernists, as Peter Augustine Lawler and Paul Gottfried have pointed out. Kirk was himself a postmodernist, as Gerald Russello demonstrates in his important forthcoming book The Postmodern Imagination of Russell Kirk. Contrary to Panichas’ argument, then, it is possible to be a postmodernist who acknowledges the existence of an ethical ultimate.

This volume will long be recognized as an important and substantial contribution to Kirk scholarship. Panichas’ careful editing and explanatory notes will ensure that this work will be a standard resource for future generations wanting to acquaint themselves with the thought of one of the most important conservative minds of the 20th century. I only have two complaints with his considerable achievement. First, his convoluted prose style and penchant for “Latinisms” made reading his prefatory essay sometimes hard slogging. Second, since the book is about as thick as the New York City telephone directory, it is a little unwieldy. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute would have done better to have published it as a two-volume set. 
__________________________________________

W. Wesley McDonald teaches political theory and was chairman of the Political Science Department at Elizabethtown College. He is the author of Russell Kirk and the Age of Ideology.

The American Conservative welcomes letters to the editor.
Send letters to: letters@amconmag.com

Advertisement

Comments

Become a Member today for a growing stake in the conservative movement.
Join here!
Join here