Although he constantly lauded the British parliamentarian Edmund Burke, called T.S. Eliot "the greatest man of letters of this century," and was proud of his Scottish heritage (and his doctorate from the University of Saint Andrews), Russell Kirk was, first and foremost, an American proud of his Middle West roots. He was born and raised in the small railroad town of Plymouth, Michigan, took his B.A. at Michigan State College (now Michigan State University), and died last May at the age of seventy-five in his ancestral home, Piety Hill, in Mecosta in Michigan's upstate "stump country."

Best known as a man of ideas and letters--founding editor of Modern Age and The University Bookman, writer of the "From the Academy" column for National Review for more than two decades, nationally syndicated columnist, author of thirty books (including the seminal work, The Conservative Mind), Russell Kirk was also a man of political action. For example, he ghostwrote speeches for Barry Goldwater in his 1964 presidential campaign and was the Michigan state chairman of Patrick Buchanan's bid for the Republican presidential nomination some thirty years later.

Kirk had seemingly inexhaustible energy. How else can one explain the river of books (including six volumes of fiction), articles, and letters that flowed smoothly from his typewriter year after year? William F. Buckley, Jr., recounts how after an evening of many Tom Collinses with Russell, he collapsed into a bed in Kirk's house. Rising seven hours later, Buckley bumped into his host, who "had, in the interval since dinner, written a chapter of his history of St. Andrews College, and would be catching a little sleep after he served me breakfast."

Russell Kirk was guided in all that he did by two essential virtues, prudence and humility--the first, as he wrote, "preeminently an attainment of classical philosophy, the second preeminently a triumph of Christian discipline. Without them, man must be miserable." Kirk, who knew the classics well and who was a devout Catholic, was rarely miserable throughout his remarkably productive life, blessed as he was by his devoted wife Annette, four beautiful daughters (all with intellectual and scholarly interests), and countless friends and acquaintances, including such luminaries as Wyndham Lewis, Whittaker Chambers, Ronald Reagan, Flannery O'Connor, Richard Weaver, Ray Bradbury, T.S. Eliot, and Barry Goldwater.

He stuck by his principles. Shortly after the publication of The Conservative Mind, Kirk resigned his teaching position at Michigan State and determined that henceforth he would make his way as an independent man of letters. When his publisher, Henry Regnery, advised caution and stressed the uncertain income of a writer, Kirk responded characteristically:

Poverty never bothered me; I can live on four hundred dollars cash per annum, if I must; time to think, and freedom of action, are much more important to me at present than any possible economic advantage. I have always had to make my own way, opposed rather than aided by the ties and the men who run matters for us; and I don't mind continuing to do so.

"Time to think and freedom of action." How many say those are the things that matter most, and how many actually put all else aside in pursuit of them? As historian George Nash says, Kirk persevered in his fundamental convictions, never surrendering to the allures of the day, always concentrating on what he called "the permanent things." Three works in particular, spanning four decades, give us his vision of those things.

NOT AN OXYMORON

WhenThe Conservative Mind was published in 1953, some liberals jeered that the title was a perfect oxymoron. Critic Lionel Trilling had written only three years earlier that "in the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation."

But liberals stopped laughing when they read the book to discover a brilliant 450-page distillation of Anglo-American conservative thinking of the last two hundred years as well as a scathing indictment of every liberal nostrum, from the perfectibility of man to economic egalitarianism. Kirk departed from the skeptical prognoses of F..A. Hayek in The Road to Serfdom and Richard Weaver in Ideas Have Consequences with a passionate defense of contemporary conservatism, stating that it was "struggling for ascendancy in the United States."

He asserted that the essence of conservatism lay in six canons: (1) A divine intent rules society as well as conscience; "political problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems"; (2) traditional life is filled with variety and mystery, while most radical systems are characterized by a narrowing uniformity; (3) civilized society requires orders and classes; "the only true equality is moral equality"; (4) property and freedom are inseparably connected; (5) man must control his will and his appetite, knowing that he is governed more by emotion than reason; and (6) "change and reform are not identical"; society must alter slowly.

Kirk offered a gallery of conservative heroes beginning with Edmund Burke, the founder of the "true school of conservative principle," and continuing through Scott, Coleridge, Disraeli, and Cardinal Newman in Great Britain; and the Adams family, John Calhoun, Hawthorne, Orestes Brownson, Irving Babbit, and Paul Elmer More in the United States. These were not second-rate thinkers and scribblers but men of distinction and purpose who made a difference in their countries and in their centuries by their exposition of and commitment to first principles. The New York Times favorably reviewed The Conservative Mind, as did Time, one of whose senior editors called it the most important book of the twentieth century. Political philosopher Robert Nisbet wrote Kirk that he had done the impossible: He had broken "the cake of intellectual opposition to the conservative tradition in the United States."

What accounted for the extraordinary reception of so defiantly conservative a work? First, it was a remarkable feat of scholarship, synthesizing the ideas of the greatest conservative thinkers of Britain and America. Second, the book demonstrated that there was a tradition of American intellectual conservatism, that there had been distinguished, influential conservatives in government and academe since the founding of the Republic. Third, it was the work of a young man (Kirk was in his late twenties and still a graduate student at St. Andrews when he began the book) writing with the passion of someone who, in the words of Henry Regnery, "has discovered a great truth and wishes to communicate his discovery to others."

WithThe Conservative Mind, Kirk made conservatism in America intellectually respectable. No longer could it be said, as John Stuart Mill once jibed, that conservatives were the "stupid party."

In the last chapter, "The Promise of Conservatism" (its very title setting the author apart from ex-communist Whittaker Chambers' belief that he was joining the losing side), Kirk argued that the principal interests of true conservatism and old-style libertarian democracy were approaching identity. Confronted by collectivists and the architects of the New Society, he said, conservatives must "defend constitutional democracy as a repository of tradition and order," while intelligent democrats must "espouse conservative philosophy as the only secure system of ideas with which to confront the planners of the new order." He pointed out that even Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., a Jackson-FDR Democrat, admitted the pressing need for an intelligent American conservatism.

THE TRUE CONSERVATIVE

Kirk was proud to be a conservative. The true conservative, he insisted, was not the cruel caricature of "a dull, boorish, bigoted and avaricious being" as presented by liberal and radical journalists and politicians. The true conservative, he said, could be many different people: a "resolute and strong-minded" clergyman, a farmer who "holds fast" to the wisdom of his ancestors, a truck driver in the very heart of the metropolis, a proprietor of an ancient name endeavoring to moderate inevitable change by "prudence and good nature," an old-fashioned manufacturer (paternalistic and shrewd), a physician, a lawyer, or a schoolmaster. All of them, all true conservatives, Kirk said, prefer "the old and tried to the novel and dubious," and, in whatever they do, endeavor "to safeguard the institutions and the wisdom" of the past, not slavishly but prudently.

Twenty-one years later, Kirk published The Roots of American Order, in which he declared, "The human condition is insufferable unless we perceive a harmony, an order, in existence." In this large and amazingly erudite book (drawing on Plato, Cicero, Saint Augustine, Hobbes, Locke, John Knox, Hume, Montesquieu, Blackstone, Jonathan Edwards, Abraham Lincoln, and Orestes Brownson, to name but a few), Kirk traced the beliefs and institutions that nurtured the American Republic. All were maintained, he stated, "by continuity: by our respect for the accomplishments of our forefathers, and by our concern for posterity's well-being."

The American Revolution, Kirk argued, was not a violent repudiation of the past, as the French Revolution was, but a declaration of political independence that maintained the English institutions of representative government and individual rights. He quoted approvingly Clinton Rossiter, who wrote, "The political theory of the American Revolution, in contrast to that of the French Revolution, was not a theory designed to make the world over."

In the last chapter, "Contending Against American Disorder," Kirk examined the nineteenth century and, with special care, the Civil War. Kirk praised Lincoln (dismissed as a despot by many southern conservatives) as a defender of order. Kirk argued that Lincoln while in office acquired the virtues of gravitas as well as pietas, the "willing subordination to the claims of the divine, of neighbors, of country." As a statesman, he said, Lincoln upheld the nation-state against the passions of both the North and the South. "In a democratic society," Kirk wrote, "order must have primacy: that was the meaning of Lincoln's successful struggle to maintain the Union."

Nineteen years after The Roots of American Order and one year before his death, Kirk published The Politics of Prudence, based upon a series of lectures delivered at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., most of them to young conservatives. He offered a defense of prudential as opposed to ideological politics, hoping to persuade the rising generation "to set their faces against political fanaticism and utopian schemes."

Kirk rejected the dictionary definition of ideology as "the science of ideas," arguing, rather, that it was "inverted religion," promising collective salvation here on earth through violent revolution. He also rejected ideology because it made political compromise impossible. Its narrow vision, he said, brought about civil war and the destruction of beneficial social institutions.

In contrast, the politics of prudence was based on the certain knowledge that human nature and human institutions are imperfectible and that aggressive "righteousness" in politics ends in slaughter. Prudential politics accepted that political and economic structures are not to be erected one day and demolished the next; they develop over centuries, "almost as if they were organic."

Knowing, perhaps, that he did not have long to live, Kirk packed a lifetime of wisdom and reflection into his Heritage lectures, offering ten basic conservative principles (No. 10: "The thinking conservative understands that permanence and change must be recognized and reconciled in a vigorous society."), ten events that changed conservatism (in 1979, the election of John Paul II as pope), ten important conservative books (beginning with Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France and ending with T.S. Eliot's Notes towards the Definition of Culture), and ten exemplary conservatives (ranging from Cicero through John Randolph of Roanoke to Theodore Roosevelt and Richard Weaver).

Kirk had a special affinity for young people. He lectured on more than five hundred university and college campuses. He always had one or two young interns and editorial assistants in residence at Piety Hill. He constantly enjoined the rising generation to restore and redeem their patrimony, frequently quoting Brownson, who told the students of Dartmouth College 150 years ago: "Ask not what your age wants, but what it needs; not what it will reward, but what, without which, it cannot be saved; and that go and do; and find your reward in the consciousness of having done your duty."

NAMING A MOVEMENT

Of all Russell Kirk's contributions, the most visible (as William Rusher noted) was that he gave the American conservative movement its name. Consider the remarkable impact of The Conservative Mind on two other founders of modern conservatism--Bill Buckley and Barry Goldwater.

In his first book, God and Man at Yale (published in 1951), Buckley made only passing reference to conservatism, arguing that the two great battles at Yale and in America were Christianity versus agnosticism and atheism, and individualism versus collectivism. Bill Buckley thought of himself then as an individualist (or libertarian), not a conservative.

And what of Barry Goldwater, the designated author of the most famous political tract of the last thirty-five years, The Conscience of a Conservative? When he first ran for the U.S. Senate in 1952, Goldwater never once described himself as a "conservative." He called himself many things, including a "progressive," but never a conservative.

Yet a few short years later, both Buckley and Goldwater were self-proclaimed conservatives--Buckley in his new magazine, National Review, and Goldwater in the Senate, and proud of it. What had happened in the interim? One thing: the publication of The Conservative Mind. Clearly, the sequence of events was not coincidence but cause and effect.

George Will once remarked that before there was Ronald Reagan, there was Barry Goldwater; before there was Barry Goldwater, there was National Review; before there was National Review, there was Bill Buckley. Will did not go far enough. Before there was Bill Buckley, there was Russell Kirk, who understood full well that ideas, as Reagan once remarked, "truly rule our world." Kirk and his works will endure because they are filled with the ideas--and the virtues of courage, prudence, temperance, and justice--that the world must have to endure.