Russell Kirk: life, ideas and books

Life

Russell Kirk was born in Plymouth, Michigan, in 1918 and studied at Michigan State University and Duke. In 1953 he became the first American to receive a D.Litt. from the University of St Andrews in Scotland, and the same year he published The Conservative Mind, based on his dissertation. He resigned from Michigan State that year and settled in the village of Mecosta, Michigan, as an independent writer and lecturer.

He helped found National Review in 1955 and wrote a column for it for 25 years, helped found the journal Modern Age in 1957 and in 1960 founded the University Bookman, which he edited until his death. He taught at Hillsdale College, was a fellow at the Heritage Foundation and wrote over thirty books and thousands of columns, including ghost stories and novels. President Reagan awarded him the Presidential Citizens Medal in 1989. He died in Mecosta in 1994.

Ideas

Kirk set out a conservatism built on a transcendent moral order, respect for custom and prescription, prudence and the connection between property and freedom. He described six canons of conservatism, including the belief that society needs orders and classes and that change must rest on existing traditions. He distrusted ideology, whether of the left or of an abstract free-market creed, and was critical of libertarianism and neoconservatism.

He saw the preservation of culture, education and religion as at least as important as economic policy and spoke of the "permanent things".

Major works

• The Conservative Mind (1953).
• Eliot and His Age (1972).
• The Roots of American Order (1974).
• Decadence and Renewal in the Higher Learning (1978).

Why conservatives read him

The Conservative Mind helped turn scattered critics of the postwar consensus into a recognised intellectual movement and gave it a lineage from Edmund Burke. Traditionalists treat Kirk as their central figure, and his emphasis on moral imagination, community and the humanities remains influential in conservative debates about education and culture. Readers who favour a more market-centred conservatism often read him as a counterweight.