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.

Top 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.

• Intellectual history

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

• Conservatism and liberty

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

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