The Conservative Mind

Summary

The Conservative Mind is a history of conservative thought in Britain and the United States from Edmund Burke to the twentieth century. Russell Kirk, then a young historian, published it in 1953 with the Henry Regnery Company under the subtitle From Burke to Santayana; later revised editions carried the subtitle From Burke to Eliot. The book gave a name and a lineage to a movement that, in postwar America, had seemed to many observers hardly to exist. Kirk begins by describing what he considers the essence of conservatism, which he presents not as an ideology but as a set of convictions. He lists six canons: belief that a divine intent or transcendent order rules society as well as conscience; affection for the variety and mystery of traditional life; conviction that civilized society requires orders and classes rather than a uniform equality; persuasion that freedom and property are closely linked; faith in prescription, custom and convention, and distrust of abstract schemes to remake society; and recognition that change is necessary but must be prudent, since hasty innovation may be a devouring conflagration rather than reform. The chapters then trace these ideas through a series of thinkers. Burke, the founder of the tradition, defends inherited institutions against the French Revolution. In America Kirk discusses John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, John Randolph of Roanoke and John C. Calhoun. He follows the tradition in England through the romantic conservatives, Walter Scott and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, through Benjamin Disraeli and John Henry Newman, and through later Victorian critics of democracy and utilitarianism. He considers Tocqueville, the New England writers Nathaniel Hawthorne and Orestes Brownson, Henry and Brooks Adams, and the twentieth-century humanists Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More and George Santayana, ending in later editions with T. S. Eliot. Throughout, Kirk sets these writers against what he regards as the main radical schools: rationalism, utilitarianism, Marxism and the faith in material progress. The book was widely reviewed and helped launch the postwar conservative movement in the United States, alongside the founding of National Review in 1955. Critics have questioned whether the thinkers Kirk assembles form a single tradition and whether his conservatism is suited to a commercial and democratic society. Hayek's essay 'Why I Am Not a Conservative' (1960) is one well-known reply from the side of classical liberalism.

Plot or Argument

• The idea of conservatism

  Kirk sets out six canons of conservative thought, from belief in a transcendent order to the need for prudent change, and contrasts them with radical systems.

• Burke and the founders

  Edmund Burke's response to the French Revolution establishes the tradition. Kirk follows it into America through John Adams, Hamilton, and the Southern conservatives John Randolph and John C. Calhoun.

• Romantics, Tories and Victorians

  Walter Scott, Coleridge, Disraeli, Newman and later Victorian writers resist utilitarianism and industrial individualism and defend tradition, religion and community.

• Americans and the twentieth century

  Tocqueville, Hawthorne, Brownson, Henry and Brooks Adams, Babbitt, More, Santayana and, in later editions, T. S. Eliot carry the tradition into the modern age.

Characters

• Russell Kirk, author

  Young historian assembling a conservative tradition in English and American letters.

• Edmund Burke, founder

  Anglo-Irish statesman whose Reflections on the Revolution in France begins the tradition.

• John Adams, authority

  American founder and political theorist of balanced government.

• John Henry Newman, authority

  English churchman whose writings on tradition and development Kirk admires.

• Alexis de Tocqueville, authority

  French observer of American democracy and its dangers.

• T. S. Eliot, authority

  Poet and critic who closes the revised editions as a modern conservative of culture.

Lessons

• Tradition and change

  Kirk does not oppose all change, but insists it should grow from existing institutions rather than abstract plans. Students can consider how institutions should reform.

  • What does Kirk mean by prescription?
  • Can you think of a reform that respected tradition, and one that did not?

• Intellectual history

  The book shows how ideas pass from writer to writer across generations. Students can trace a single idea through several authors.

  • Which ideas from Burke reappear in later chapters?
  • Do all of Kirk's figures really belong to one tradition?

• Conservatism and liberty

  Kirk links freedom with property and with inherited order. Comparing him with classical liberals sharpens questions about what freedom requires.

  • How does Kirk's view of freedom differ from Mill's?
  • Why did Hayek refuse to call himself a conservative?

Context

In the early 1950s American intellectual life was dominated by liberalism; the critic Lionel Trilling wrote in 1950 that conservative ideas hardly circulated at all. Kirk's book appeared in the same years as the Cold War, McCarthyism and the beginnings of the postwar conservative revival.

Composition

Kirk wrote the book as his doctoral dissertation at the University of St Andrews. Henry Regnery published it in Chicago in 1953; Kirk revised it several times, with the seventh edition of 1986 subtitled From Burke to Eliot.

Reception

Prominent reviews, including one in Time magazine, made the book unusually visible for a work of intellectual history. It became a founding text of American conservatism, though libertarian and liberal critics disputed Kirk's definition of the tradition.

Comparisons

• Reflections on the Revolution in France

  Burke's attack on the French Revolution is the founding document of the tradition Kirk traces, and the first chapters are largely a study of it.

• Democracy in America

  Kirk treats Tocqueville as a conservative analyst of democracy whose warnings about centralization and conformity anticipate his own.

• The Road to Serfdom

  Hayek shared Kirk's opposition to collectivism but, in a famous 1960 essay, rejected the conservative label as too attached to authority and tradition.

• On Liberty

  Mill's utilitarian liberalism is one of the schools Kirk criticizes; comparing them shows two different defenses of freedom.

• The Waste Land

  Eliot, the final figure in Kirk's revised editions, pictures in this poem the cultural fragmentation that Kirk believed only a recovered tradition could heal.

• The Federalist Papers

  Kirk's chapters on Adams and Hamilton draw on the constitutional thought of the founders and their concern for checks on popular passion.

• Ideas Have Consequences

  Weaver's book, published five years earlier, offered a related diagnosis of modern decline from a philosophical rather than historical angle.

• Orthodoxy

  Chesterton's defense of tradition as 'the democracy of the dead' expresses in paradox the respect for inherited wisdom that Kirk calls prescription.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The six canons in the first chapter and where they reappear.
• Kirk's contrast between conservatism and ideology.
• How each thinker responds to a particular revolution or reform of his time.
• Kirk's criticism of utilitarianism and the cult of material progress.

Key terms and names

Prescription

The authority that long usage and custom give to institutions and rights.

Transcendent order

A moral order above human making, which Kirk believes governs society.

Utilitarianism

The philosophy of judging actions by their usefulness in producing happiness, associated with Bentham and Mill.

Ideology

For Kirk, an abstract political system meant to remake society according to a theory.

Moral imagination

Burke's phrase, used by Kirk, for the power to perceive moral truths through tradition and art.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension What are Kirk's six canons of conservative thought?
2. Comprehension Why does Kirk begin with Burke?
3. Interpretation Why does Kirk insist that conservatism is not an ideology?
4. Interpretation How does Kirk connect property with freedom?
5. Big Question When should a society change its traditions, and when should it keep them?
6. Big Question Can a tradition be defended by reason, or only by habit and affection?

Faith Connections

• Jeremiah 6:16 (Scripture)

  'Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths': the prophet's call to recover the old ways echoes Kirk's appeal to inherited wisdom.

• Vincent of Lérins, Commonitorium (Church Fathers)

  Vincent's rule that Christians should hold what has been believed everywhere, always and by all is an early statement of the authority of tradition that Kirk applies to politics.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: Because human reason is limited and society is a living inheritance shaped by a moral order, prudent statesmen should preserve and gradually reform inherited institutions rather than rebuild society according to abstract theory.

Rhetorical device: genealogy. Kirk organizes the book as a lineage of thinkers from Burke onward, implying that conservatism is a continuous tradition with a long and distinguished history.

Debate: Resolved: Tradition is a more reliable guide to political reform than abstract reasoning.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Explain how Kirk's six canons are rooted in Burke's response to the French Revolution.

Comparison with Reflections on the Revolution in France: Compare Burke's own arguments with Kirk's summary of them. What does Kirk emphasize, and what does he leave out?

Creative Prompts

• Essay

  Choose one of Kirk's six canons and evaluate it, using an example from history or from your own community.

• Dialogue

  Write a conversation between Kirk and Hayek about whether they should both be called conservatives.

• Classroom

  Make a timeline of the thinkers Kirk discusses, noting for each one idea he passes on to later writers.

Further Reading

• Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke

• The Roots of American Order, Russell Kirk

• Why I Am Not a Conservative, F. A. Hayek

  Postscript to The Constitution of Liberty (1960).

• Russell Kirk and the Age of Ideology, W. Wesley McDonald