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Russell Kirk (1918-1994)
Born in Plymouth, Michigan, Russell Kirk received his B.A. at Michigan State and M.A. at Duke before serving in the military during World War II. He received a D. Litt. from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. His thesis was published as The Conservative Mind (1953).
Kirk taught for several years at Michigan State in the 1950s. The university was rapidly expanding enrollment and technical education and deemphasizing liberal arts, policies that he opposed. He resigned to become a public intellectual, and spent the rest of his life writing and speaking about conservative ideas. He helped found National Review and Modern Age, leading conservative journals, and was awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal by Ronald Reagan. His former home in Mecosta, Michigan, now houses the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal.
Ten Conservative Principles (1993)
Russell Kirk’s essay does just what its title implies–summarize ten principles that he identified in the works of American conservatives. As you read his essay, see if you can identify other writers in this compilation who shared these values. Candidates include Tocqueville, Calhoun, Taney, Buchanan, Sumner, Brown, Theodore Roosevelt, Hayek and Reagan.
…So far as it is possible to determine what conservatives believe, the first principles of the conservative persuasion are derived from what leading conservative writers and public men have professed during the past two centuries. After some introductory remarks on this general theme, I will proceed to list ten such conservative principles.
Perhaps it would be well, most of the time, to use this word “conservative” as an adjective chiefly. For there exists no Model Conservative, and conservatism is the negation of ideology: it is a state of mind, a type of character, a way of looking at the civil social order.
The attitude we call conservatism is sustained by a body of sentiments, rather than by a system of ideological dogmata. It is almost true that a conservative may be defined as a person who thinks himself such. The conservative movement or body of opinion can accommodate a considerable diversity of views on a good many subjects, there being no Test Act or Thirty-Nine Articles of the conservative creed.
In essence, the conservative person is simply one who finds the permanent things more pleasing than Chaos and Old Night. (Yet conservatives know, with Burke, that healthy “change is the means of our preservation.”) A people’s historic continuity of experience, says the conservative, offers a guide to policy far better than the abstract designs of coffee-house philosophers. But of course there is more to the conservative persuasion than this general attitude.
It is not possible to draw up a neat catalogue of conservatives’ convictions; nevertheless, I offer you, summarily, ten general principles; it seems safe to say that most conservatives would subscribe to most of these maxims….
First, the conservative believes that t