The 1953 Book That Told Americans They Already Had a Conservative Tradition

In 1950 the most respected literary critic in America announced that conservatism did not exist. Lionel Trilling, in the preface to The Liberal Imagination, wrote that liberalism was "not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition" in the country, and that conservative impulses expressed themselves only in "irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas." It was an elegant obituary. The only trouble was that the patient got up off the table three years later and started lecturing.

The man who did the lecturing was a thirty-four-year-old historian from rural Michigan named Russell Kirk, and the lecture was a long book called The Conservative Mind, published by Henry Regnery in Chicago in 1953. It did something no American book had done so thoroughly. It told a generation of readers who felt homeless in their own politics that they had ancestors. Conservatism, Kirk argued, was not a mood, a grudge or a business lobby. It was a tradition, with a pedigree running from Edmund Burke through John Adams and on to T. S. Eliot, and Americans stood squarely inside it.

This is the story of the man and the book, and of why both still matter.

A boy from Plymouth and a house at Mecosta

Russell Amos Kirk was born on October 19, 1918, in Plymouth, Michigan, the son of a railroad engineman. His roots, and his heart, lay farther north, in the village of Mecosta, where his family had deep roots and a house that came to be called Piety Hill. Kirk would make that house the center of his life, and later a sort of hermitage and seminar room for students who came from all over the world to read and argue with him.

He studied at Michigan State College, graduating in 1940, and took a master's degree at Duke University the next year, writing on John Randolph of Roanoke, the eccentric Virginia congressman who distrusted every centralizing scheme of his day. That early interest is a clue. Kirk was drawn from the start to men who defended inherited liberties against confident planners.

Drafted into the Army in 1942, Kirk spent most of his service with the Chemical Warfare Service at a remote proving ground in the Utah desert, rising to staff sergeant. The posting was remote and solitary, and he spent much of it reading. Many young men came home from that war more skeptical of mass society and its machinery. Kirk came home with a vocabulary for that skepticism.

St Andrews and a dissertation called a rout

After the war Kirk taught the history of civilization at Michigan State, but he chose to take his doctorate abroad, at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. He was drawn to the old Scottish town as much as to the university, a place where the past was still visibly present in the stones. St Andrews awarded him its doctor of letters, a higher doctorate in letters, and Kirk was described as the first American to earn it.

His doctoral work became a sweeping study of conservative thought in Britain and America since the French Revolution. Its working title was The Conservatives' Rout, which tells you how he felt about the battle's progress. Regnery, a Chicago publisher willing to print books the New York houses would not touch, saw something more hopeful in the manuscript and published it under a title that made a claim rather than an apology: The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Santayana. Later revised editions changed the subtitle to From Burke to Eliot, and the book went through seven editions in Kirk's lifetime.

The change of title was more than marketing. A rout is something that has already happened to you. A mind is something you can inherit, cultivate and pass on.

What the book actually argued

The Conservative Mind is a gallery of portraits, each a statesman or writer who resisted what Kirk called the abstract and the levelling spirit of modern revolution. The gallery is wide. It includes Burke, of course, and in America John Adams, John Randolph and John C. Calhoun, along with James Fenimore Cooper, Orestes Brownson and Nathaniel Hawthorne. In Britain it includes Coleridge, Sir Walter Scott, George Canning, Macaulay, Disraeli and John Henry Newman, along with later figures such as James Fitzjames Stephen and Henry Maine. The American line runs on to Henry and Brooks Adams, Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More, and the book closes with George Santayana and, in later editions, Eliot.

Kirk did not pretend these men agreed about everything. What united them, he argued, was a set of convictions, which he summarized in six "canons" of conservative thought. In paraphrase:

1. A transcendent moral order. There is a divine intent and a moral law that rule society as well as conscience, and political problems are at bottom religious and moral problems.
2. Affection for variety. A love of the proliferating variety and mystery of human life, as against the narrowing uniformity and egalitarianism of radical systems.
3. Orders and distinctions. A conviction that civilized society requires orders and classes, and that the only true equality is moral equality, equality before God and the law.
4. Freedom and property are linked. Separate property from private possession and liberty is erased.
5. Faith in prescription. Trust in custom, convention and old prescription, and distrust of those Burke mocked as "sophisters, calculators and economists" who would rebuild society on abstract designs.
6. Prudent change. Recognition that change is necessary, but that hasty innovation may be a devouring conflagration rather than a torch of progress.

You can argue with any of these. But notice what the list does. It turns conservatism from a reaction into a positive account of human nature, society and the sacred. That was Kirk's gift to American readers.

Burke as the fountainhead

Kirk built the whole book on Burke, and in particular on Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). The passage Kirk returned to again and again is Burke's account of society as a contract unlike any commercial bargain:

Society is indeed a contract... it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.

Everything in Kirk follows from that sentence. If society is a partnership across generations, then no single generation owns it outright. The living are trustees, not proprietors. They may repair the house, but they may not burn it down for the insurance. For more on the Burke at the center of this tradition, see Burke's Doctrine of Prescription Says Old Institutions Deserve a Hearing and Seven Myths About Edmund Burke That His Fans and Critics Both Repeat.

The American claim, measured against the Founding

Here is where Kirk did his most important work for Americans. The common view in 1953 was that the United States was born in a liberal revolution, a Lockean experiment with no feudal past and therefore no conservatism to conserve. Kirk answered that the American Revolution was, in Burke's own understanding, a revolution prevented rather than made: colonists defending the chartered rights of Englishmen against a Parliament that had overreached.

He leaned heavily on John Adams, whom he treated as the great American conservative of the Founding. Adams wrote to the officers of the Massachusetts militia in 1798 a sentence that sums up Kirk's whole American argument:

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

And the Constitution's own text supports Kirk's reading of the Founding as conservative in structure. It does not sweep away the states; it assumes them. Article IV, Section 4 commands that "The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government." The Tenth Amendment reserves to the states, "or to the people," every power not delegated to the United States. Madison explained in Federalist No. 45 that "the powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite." That is not the language of men starting over from a blank page. It is the language of men building on what they already had.

Kirk understood that a written constitution survives only if the unwritten one, the habits, faith and loyalties of a people, sustains it. That is the link between his book and the citizens who read it: the Constitution is the frame, but the house is the culture. For a related reading, see Ordered Liberty Is Not a Contradiction, It Is the Only Kind That Lasts.

The columnist from Piety Hill

The book made Kirk famous almost overnight. The book was widely reviewed, and suddenly a young scholar from Mecosta was in demand as a speaker and a writer. He resigned from Michigan State in 1953, disgusted by what he saw as the college's turn toward mass enrollment and vocational training at the expense of real learning, and he never again held a regular academic post. He chose instead to live by his pen at Piety Hill.

He used that pen constantly. When William F. Buckley Jr. founded National Review in 1955, Kirk joined as a contributor and wrote a long-running column on higher education, "From the Academy." In 1957 he founded the quarterly Modern Age, and in 1960 he started The University Bookman, a review devoted to books and education. For years he also wrote a syndicated newspaper column, carrying the case for tradition into papers across the country. He wrote some thirty books, including biographies of Burke and Randolph, The Roots of American Order (1974), and, to the surprise of those who knew only the philosopher, a shelf of well-regarded ghost stories.

In 1964 he married Annette Courtemanche, and the couple raised four daughters at Piety Hill, which they kept open to refugees, drifters and students in a way that put his ideas about community into daily practice. Kirk died there on April 29, 1994.

The quarrel with the libertarians

Kirk was not a man for big tents. His sharpest quarrels were with fellow travelers on the right, especially libertarians, and the dispute still defines the movement.

His case against them, stated most bitterly in a 1981 essay in Modern Age that called them "chirping sectaries," ran roughly as follows. Libertarians, Kirk said, make freedom an abstraction and the individual the measure of all things. They have no room for the transcendent moral order, for duty, or for the inherited institutions that make freedom usable. A society of atomized individuals, each bound only by contract, is not free; it is lonely, and lonely people eventually seek a master. Kirk thought freedom grew out of order, not the other way around.

Now the strongest answer from the other side, stated fairly. Libertarians and fusionists such as Frank Meyer replied that Kirk's "order" was dangerously vague. Whose order? Enforced by whom? A conservatism that speaks of orders and classes, and that is suspicious of markets, could easily become an excuse for the state to impose someone's idea of virtue. And in America, they said, the tradition to be conserved is a tradition of individual liberty, written into the Declaration and the Bill of Rights. To conserve America is to conserve freedom.

Who had the better of it? I'd argue each side caught something real, and the American conservative movement became strong precisely by holding both. Kirk was right that liberty without virtue does not last, and that markets cannot manufacture the moral habits they depend on. The libertarians were right that the American inheritance specifically includes limits on government, and that the state is a poor instrument of virtue. The Founders themselves held both convictions at once: a government of enumerated powers, and a people expected to be moral and religious. The quarrel is not a flaw in conservatism. It is the shape of it. Meyer's side of the argument gets its own treatment in Frank Meyer, the Ex-Communist Who Married Liberty to Virtue.

What Kirk asks of us now

Kirk's lasting achievement was to give conservatives self-respect. Before 1953 an educated American who loved his town, his church and the Constitution was told he had no ideas, only reflexes. After 1953 he could reply that he stood in a line of thinkers stretching back to Burke and forward through Adams, and that the burden of proof lay on the people who wanted to tear the house down.

That gift came with a demand. Kirk believed a tradition lives only if each generation actually learns it. He spent his life writing for readers, teaching students at his kitchen table and editing journals that most people never saw. His message to the rest of us is plain: you cannot conserve what you have never read. The tradition is not self-executing. It is a library, and someone has to open the books.

The case in brief

1. In 1953 Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind answered the claim that America had no conservative ideas by tracing a tradition from Burke to Eliot, with John Adams at its American center.
2. Kirk grounded that tradition in six canons: a transcendent moral order, love of variety, moral equality, property as the guard of freedom, trust in prescription, and prudent change.
3. The Constitution's own design, from Article IV's guarantee of republican government to the Tenth Amendment and Federalist No. 45, fits Kirk's reading of a Founding that built on inherited institutions.
4. Kirk's quarrel with libertarians was real, and both sides were partly right: liberty needs virtue, and the American inheritance includes strict limits on the state.
5. A tradition survives only if each generation reads it, and Kirk spent his life making that possible.

What you can do: pick one figure from Kirk's gallery, John Adams is a good start, and read his own words on our Founders page, then teach one thing you learned to your children or a friend.