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March 29, 2016|Brad Birzer, Edmund Burke, Leo Strauss, Russell Kirk
Before I turn to Birzer’s 2015 book (which was
reviewed for Law and Liberty by Mark Pulliam),
let me discuss the previous works, both their virtues and their limitations.
The first sustained study of Kirk to appear
was James E. Person, Jr.’s highly accessible and readable introduction to the
life and works of the Duke of Mecosta, Russell Kirk: A
Critical Biography of a Conservative Mind. Person provides a
coherent and convincing analysis of Kirk’s enduring significance to American
politics and humane learning. Originally published in 1999, and reprinted in
2016, the volume has not been revised, although it remains an excellent
contribution to scholarship. Person’s mission is to introduce a new generation
of readers to “one of the greatest minds this nation has produced during the
twentieth century.”
The book is organized in four sections that
outline Kirk’s achievement. The first section is devoted to interpreting Kirk’s
background, use of historical consciousness, views on education, and
constitutionalism. The second section critiques Kirk’s devotion to the
importance of literature and social criticism. The last two sections survey
Kirk’s economic thought and his lasting importance as a political thinker. The
greatest contribution of this worthwhile volume can be found in the author’s
review of Kirk’s defense of a social order grounded in justice and the
diffusion of political power.
Person’s biography is written for the general
reader, with the intent to elucidate the life and work of Kirk, while avoiding
the arcane scholarly controversies and personages that often dominate such
academic efforts. In a similar vein, John M.
Pafford’s Russell Kirk, a volume in Bloomsbury’s “Major
Conservative and Libertarian Thinkers,” published in 2013, provides a clear and
sympathetic account of Kirk’s continued importance as a political thinker.
As the first purely academic treatise on Kirk
to appear in this revival, my late friend Wesley McDonald’s book on Kirk’s
political thought, Russell Kirk and
the Age of Ideology, initially faces the challenge of his
imposed, direct framework of transference of ideas—from Burke to Babbitt to
Kirk.[2] The influence of Babbitt is significant and should not be minimized,
although the propensity to incorporate the insights of Irving Babbitt when
Kirk’s own critique would be preferable has manifested itself on occasion among
Kirk scholars. Secondly, the role of literature and humane letters was
even more of an overwhelming influence upon Kirk than McDonald initially
suggested.
Contrary to the claim that the role of
literature became important to Kirk in midlife, it was actually central to his
thought as early as the 1940s: witness, for example, Kirk’s early writings on
tragedy (1940), George Gissing (1950), and Sir Walter Scott (1952). To his
great credit, McDonald provides a close reading and explication of the very
extensive corpus of Kirk’s writings. McDonald’s exegesis of Kirk’s Enemies
of the Permanent Things (1969) should encourage interest anew in a work
that outlines many of the most important themes of the Kirkian enterprise.
McDonald brilliantly articulates Kirk’s use of
history as a tool of analysis for his political thought. His depiction of the
errors of Leo Strauss’s view of Burke, especially in Natural Right and History
(1950), as compared to Kirk’s own critique, are groundbreaking as well. Kirk
often noted that Strauss had reconsidered his original assessment of Burke.
According to Kirk, Strauss offered these comments to him while Kirk was a guest
lecturer under the auspices of Strauss at the University of Chicago. Kirk noted
that Strauss moderated his earlier criticism of Burke, suggesting he was more
receptive to Kirk’s own analysis.[3]
The more precise contours of this dialogue and
related issues remain opaque in nature, but continue to receive great attention
from the epigones of Strauss, as well as from Burke scholars.[4] Finally,
McDonald’s discussion of technology in relation to Kirk’s thought is a seminal
contribution to our knowledge of Kirk as a critic of contemporary culture.[5]
Gerald J. Russello’s The Postmodern
Imagination of Russell Kirk (2007) attempts to revise Kirk’s
insights for the 21st century by examining five aspects of his thought: overall
mission; interpretation of history; political life; jurisprudence; and his
criticism of modern life (Kirk’s “counternarrative”). Kirk’s active engagement
with society and politics is detailed, and those who have neglected his
work—viewing Kirk as either an advocate of “nostalgia” or a “static version of
some ideal past”—are introduced to the more engaging potentialities of his
achievement. The vital role of tradition and history for Kirk are explored with
great clarity and sensitivity, along with Kirk’s views of politics and
statesmanship. The treatment of the interconnection between natural law and
American constitutionalism in Kirk’s writings also deserves commendation. Most
importantly, Russello provides a sagacious refutation of the often unreflective
criticisms of Kirk, while affirming the vitality of his thought for
contemporary politics.
As noted, all of these Kirk studies are
outstanding efforts, but Birzer’s encyclopedic critique of the Duke of Mecosta
is a masterwork. When approaching a study of the greatest figure in modern
conservatism, it should be noted that Russell Kirk was a political thinker,
historian, political theorist, journalist, and one who served in many other
capacities. Kirk’s significance is also not limited to the conservative
movement, and while he identified himself as a conservative, he was a man of
humane learning who engaged the major political movements he encountered and
all personages who crossed his path.
In Birzer’s first chapter, entitled “Desert
Humanist,” the reader will discover a very useful survey of Kirk’s early life,
and a critique of Kirk’s emerging plea for the return to traditional concepts
of political order and power. Kirk’s early academic experiences, especially at
Duke University as a graduate student under the influence of his two mentors,
Jay Hubbell (English) and Charles Sydnor (history), are also important to the
narrative Birzer constructs. Unfortunately, Hubbell does not receive mention in
the text, but was a major influence upon the young Kirk in all matters
literary.
Birzer appropriately spends a great deal of
time on Kirk’s developmental defense of the moral basis of social and political
life. Two problems arise, though: the overdependence on Catholicism to explain
Kirk’s emerging worldview; and the unintentional effort to make Kirk more
libertarian than he was, even in his earlier writings. Kirk was essentially a
Christian ecumenist, although he did make his way to Rome. Of Kirk’s four
greatest clerical friends, Canon Basil Alec Smith, Rev. Dr. Lynn Harold Hough,
Canon Bernard Iddings Bell, and Father Martin D’Arcy, S. J., only one was Roman
Catholic—and all four were major advocates of ecumenism, properly
understood—Smith as a man of letters and leading Anglican clergyman, Hough as
the Dean of Drew Divinity School, Bell as a leading cleric and President of
what is now Bard College, and D’Arcy as an internationally respected
intellectual.[6] Additionally, Kirk’s view of natural law is closer to the
classical, consensual Christian tradition than other schools of interpretation.
Perhaps of greatest enduring importance to
scholarship is Birzer’s very convincing and accurate depiction Kirk’s abiding
humanism and the centrality of community to Kirk’s thought. Kirk believed that
humankind’s primary obligation lies in his or her community.
Self-discipline and love of neighbor began with the individual, and spread to
the community, and then to society as a whole. In other words, Kirk’s concept
of community serves to define the limitations of society and politics for on
one hand, while on the other it presupposes and defends the necessity of a
properly constituted community for securing the moral and ethical results
concomitant to society’s perpetuation.
With Birzer’s Russell Kirk, the
academic community has the definitive assessment of Kirk as a social,
historical, and political thinker. The work also encourages a much-needed
reaffirmation of the vitality of the conservative intellectual tradition. With
great clarity and erudition, this new study allows readers to appreciate Kirk
as a defender of community and genuine diversity.
[1] Another exception to the inadequacy of
thoughtful and scholarly engaged recent scholarship on Kirk is James
McClellan’s “Russell Kirk’s Anglo-American Conservatism,” in History of
American Political Thought, edited by Bryan-Paul Frost and Jeffrey Sikkenga
(Lexington Books, 2003).
[2] See http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2014/09/remembering-w-wesley-mcdonald-marylander.html.
[3] Russell Kirk, Edmund Burke: A Genius
Reconsidered (Sherwood Sugden and Company, 1988), p. 185.
[4] See Bradley J. Birzer, Russell Kirk:
American Conservative (University Press of Kentucky, 2015), p. 190.
[5] Consider Kirk’s “Humane Learning in the
Age of the Computer,” in Wise Men (republished in the posthumously
published collection of essays, Redeeming the Time {1996}). Kirk’s
response to the critical reviews of Wise Men may provide some additional
commentary as well.
[6] Birzer neglects to integrate Father D’Arcy
into his larger Kirkian narrative, but he is appreciative of his contribution
to scholarship and Catholic social and political life. See Bradley J.
Birzer, “Order”: The Brief and Extraordinary Life of a Catholic
Movement,” Catholic World
Report, September 13, 2015.
H. Lee Cheek, Jr., is
Dean of the Social Sciences and Professor of Political Science and Religion at
East Georgia State College, and a Senior Fellow of the Alexander Hamilton
Institute. Dr. Cheek's latest book is Patrick Henry-Onslow: Liberty and Republicanism
in American Political Thought (Lexington Books, 2013).
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