THE CONSERVATIVE MIND (458 pp.)—Russell Kirk—Henry Regnery ($6.50).
The whole unwhole world of 1953—the Communist world, the Socialist world, the liberal world, the reactionary world—agrees on this: the U.S. is the citadel of conservatism in a tumult of innovation. Yet the label "conservative" is about the last tag that the typical American would think of applying to himself. How explain this contradiction?
Conservatism as a fact and a force never died, and it is now vigorous and growing. But as a conscious and proudly defended outlook on public affairs, as a philosophy of life and government, it was driven underground for a hundred years, laughed out of the schools, driven like an old hag in a gunnysack from the glittering and shifting fashion show of ideas. "The
Stupid Party" was what John Stuart Mill called the conservatives a century ago. It stuck.
Russell Kirk* has news for most Americans: "Conservatism is something deeper than mere defense of shares and dividends, something nobler than mere dread of what is new." The American asks: "Is it? And if so, what?" The question has a special interest to a nation which is the reputed champion of a position that has almost dropped out of its own conversation.
Neither Kirk nor any other expounder of conservatism can blueprint the conservative mind or doctrine. Blueprints belong to the radicals, the Utopians, the innovators who drew the plans for new societies in the solitudes of their own minds. The history of conservative thought is found unpackaged, warm with the lives of men, glimpsed by the poets and novelists, hammered out by practical politicians who turned from immediate experience to distill the principles of experience.
Kirk tells his story of the conservative stream with the warmth that belongs to it. Even Americans who do not agree may feel the warmth—and feel, perhaps, the wonder of conservative intuition and prophecy, speaking resonantly across the disappointing decades.
Summer Flies. Where did the conservative stream rise? Before history, when experience, as custom, prejudice, and social institution, began to pass from one generation to another. Kirk does not explore the stream's upper reaches. His subject is conservatism in the modern world, the century and a half dominated by the ideas of the French Revolution, and the infinite, infinitely various get of those ideas.
Kirk begins with Edmund Burke, founder of a great line of British-American conservatives. Son of a Dublin lawyer, devout Anglican, party manager of the Whigs, Burke lived in an England torn and undermined by the philosophy of the French Revolution much as the U.S. in the '305 was torn and undermined by the philosophy of the Communist Revolution. In press, Parliament and public opinion, Burke saw signs that Britain was in danger from the doctrines across the Channel. If his fears now seem exaggerated, that impression is perhaps Burke's greatest achievement. "He succeeded," says Kirk, "in turning the resolute might of England against French revolutionary energies . . . That real Jacobinism* never has come to Britain or America is in some considerable measure the work of Edmund Burke's conservative genius."