2016/12/16 by Drew Maciag · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #American Constitutional Law and Politics #American literature #Art #Art history #Classics #Conservatism #History #Law #Library science #Literature #Political Theory and Influence #Political science #Politics #Race, History, and American Society #Sensibility #Sociology #Spanish Civil War #Subject (documents) #World War II
paper · doi:10.1093/jahist/jaw600
openalex publication_date 2016/12/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
Since his death in 1994, the conservative intellectual Russell Kirk has been the subject of four biographies. All were written by Kirk's admirers, though each emphasizes different elements of his life, work, and influence. The latest contribution, by Bradley J. Birzer, is by far the longest and offers the widest sweep of coverage. It is the first book to make extensive use of Kirk's personal papers, illuminating details of his career without greatly altering his established image. Born in 1918 to a family of modest means in rural Michigan, Kirk earned a master's degree in history from Duke University and, following stateside U.S. Army service in World War II, a D.Litt. from St. Andrews University in Scotland. His thesis, published in 1953 as The Conservative Mind, was a best seller and one of the two most influential books in the postwar revival of American conservatism (along with Friedrich Hayek's Road to Serfdom [1944]). Kirk became a prominent, highly paid lecturer and prolific freelance writer of history books, fiction, and social commentary. He penned a regular column for William F. Buckley's National Review, and he founded and edited the conservative journal Modern Age and the traditionalist University Bookman. He also advised politicians, most notably Barry Goldwater, and generally worked as a missionary for the rebirth (“recrudescence,” as he put it) of a conservative sensibility. Still, as Birzer's study demonstrates, Kirk's understanding of conservatism was so unique, idiosyncratic, transcendental, elitist, and in certain respects premodern and European, that it bore little resemblance to political conservatism in the United States. Conservative Mind successfully launched an intellectual challenge to postwar liberalism, but the variety of conservatism Kirk preferred found few takers, even within the American Right.