Mini-Review: The Conservative Mind

Russell Kirk is one of the biggest names in American conservatism. William F. Buckley might have been the charming face of the conservative movement, but it was Kirk's great brain that dreamed up its philosophy "The Conservative Mind" remains his best-known work, and with good reason.

First, a warning. Readers--especially conservatives ones--might want to pop a few Prozac before opening "The Conservative Mind." This is a book that might have been co-written by Eeyore and Puddleglum. Kirk originally titled it "The Conservative Rout," and every page, every sentence, every word exhales that gloomy spirit. This is a story of declines and falls, plural. Everything is bad. Everything is going to get worse.

Civilization might be sinking, but there are a few brave (or stupid) souls who insist on bailing out the boat before she goes under. These are Kirk's conservatives. He begins with Edmund Burke, the British statesmen who defended tradition against the ravages of the French Revolution. The cautious, pessimistic spirit of Burke was expressed in America by John Adams. According to Kirk, Adams believed that private morality was the key to good government--not exactly the most popular sentiment nowadays.

Some of the names in this book are familiar: Tocqueville, Disraeli, Walter Scott. Some are a little more obscure: Brooks Adams, George Santayana. And some are absolutely unknown: Maine, Mallock, Fitzjames Stephen. Interestingly, Kirk makes no attempt to claim Abraham Lincoln for the conservative cause. The Great Emancipator makes only a cameo in "The Conservative Mind." Indeed, Kirk rushes through the middle of the nineteenth century, stopping to nod briefly at James Fenimore Cooper.

"The Conservative Mind" is as much a polemic as a history book. Kirk is not just a historian; he fancies himself a sort of intellectual bouncer, keeping the rowdies from crashing to conservative party. Social conservatives are in, and anti-communists are welcome, but libertarians have to stand waiting outside the velvet rope. Their vision of a chaotic, progressive capitalism makes Kirk shudder in his tweeds.

Can modern conservatives learn anything from Kirk? Certainly, "The Conservative Mind" should be required reading for anyone who has ever confronted--or made--the argument that conservatives are brain-dead numskulls who wouldn't know their Condorcet from their Crevocoeur.

Be careful, though not to be overwhelmed by Kirk's gloom and doom. Remember that this is a man who talked about "Demon TV" and who referred to cars as "mechanical Jacobins." You can accept most his arguments without swallowing his anti-modernism. In this day and age, when everybody owns a mechanical Jacobin, you need to make some small concessions to the modern world. Kirk, of course, felt differently.