The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot

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Summary: The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot
Review: This was by far the most informational book I have ever read on conservatism. I learned more about the history both the good and bad about conservatism. Also this book is very practicle and worthwhile. No hype just fact and purpose. Anybody who is a conservative should read this book so as to know the rich history we have and the future direction we are taking.
To those who are not conservative or dont know if they are conservative please read this book. It is a book that should not be taken lightly. The very history and future direction of conservatism lies within its covers. A must have in every library. It is in mine.

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Summary: A Book Every Conservative Must Read
Review: "The Conservative Mind" is the book that created the modern conservative movement and is a book that every conservative should read. It isn't an easy read, it does deal intimately with the nuances of conservative thought all the way back to the 18th Century Whig politician Edmund Burke, but at the same time it explains in depth why conservatism developed the way it did and what the philosophical roots of conservatism are.

Even those who aren't conservative but have an interest in truly understanding conservative political philosophy would do very well to read this book.

In order to be an effective advocate for or against any position, it is critical to first understand what the position is. "The Conservative Mind" is a seminal look into conservatism as an ideology and as a political movement, and is critical to an understanding of what conservatism really is.

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Summary: The Ultimate Guide to Conservative Worldview
Review: "The Conservative Mind" made a bigger splash than anyone expected when published. By pulling together the thought of great conservative thinkers from across the ages, Kirk conclusively proved that a philosophy of conservativism did exist and that it was a worthy alternative to the once-dominant liberal line of mid-twentieth century America. That may not sound like a spectacular feat, but at the time many wondered whether there was any such thing as a conservative mind, much as many now wonder whether an evangelical mind exists. Because Kirk mines centuries rather than decades, this is a book that doesn't go out of style.

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Summary: Once upon a time, there was something worth conserving?
Review: An associate once said of Russell Kirk that he had the heart of a liberal which he kept in a jar on his desk. Yet "The Conservative Mind" is not stodgy nor is Kirk's view of the human condition stagnant. It is surprisingly both "liberal" and "conservative" in the traditional sense of the words. Kirk seeks to reconcile the conservative values of respect for tradition, custom, order, hierarchy, as well as awe of the divine (though he includes the freethinker Santayana in his analysis) with the liberal values of innovation, growth, and reform.

Slow change is a means of conservation, Kirk explains. A conservative is never so noble as when he acquiesces to unwanted change for the sake of general conciliation. The great 18th century philosopher and statesman, Edmund Burke, is the locus of conservative philosophy, with whom Kirk opens his study and he repeatedly compares Burke's successors with the original lodestar.

And it is noteworthy that the hidebound Tory was a staunch supporter of self-determination for the peoples of India, Ireland, and North America. This was not a break with conservatism; Burke simply felt that the same respect for liberty, as well as local tradition and custom, due British aristocracy was also due these peoples. As Kirk says, "Burke was liberal because he was conservative".

And while American liberals like to claim the American Revolution as their own, Kirk shows that it was actually a conservative rebellion against royal hegemony, in accordance with precedents set by British nobles of earlier generations.

Burke and most of his successors largely distrust democracy. Government by aristocracy is preferred, though the definition of an aristocrat is startlingly broad: anyone who can command the vote of another besides his own. It's confusing that any conservative would dignify the demagogue and the political boss with such a phrase. Kirk's yearning for aristocratic government seems to anticipate the restoration of an Adams dynasty; what he would later receive would be the enthronement of the Kennedys. Clearly, aristocracy is not always synonymous with conservative caretaking.

The post-Burke history of conservatism is largely a gloomy one. In England, industrialization, technology, massive population movements, and increased literacy shake traditional landed aristocracies and old loyalties. Popular attacks on property rights are fueled, as Marx attempts to incite radical discord.

Into the fray steps Benjamin Disraeli, whose conservative reforms alleviate material shortages and enlarge the franchise sufficient to stem the revolutionary tide while preserving as much as possible of old ties. But time marches on, and the American Civil War, in particular, does irreparable damage to the state of the nation and to the Southern half that is its repository of tradition. Kirk denounces slavery in ringing tones, acknowledging it to be a monstrous cause for the Confederacy to have based its own declaration of independence.

But Kirk is still at his clumsiest when discussing Southern conservatism. He attempts to memorialize the eloquence of antebellum conservative, John Randolph, and the ice-cold zeal of his successor, John C. Calhoun on behalf of Southern independence, while distancing himself from their viewpoints on race. In so doing, he fails to adequately address the hypocrisy inherent in Southern agitation for minority rights on a federalist scale, even as the agitators were engaged in denial of same on a local scale.

Still the Union victory produces a smug and interfering Puritan leadership class, as well as the era of the robber baron. As conservatives, Kirk and his sources are vigilant in defense of property ; yet he finds the 19th century capitalists unwholesome. The landed aristocrats that he admires, taking their wealth for granted, exercise it in a way beneficial to their rural communities. The capitalists simply engage in unlimited acquisitiveness for its own sake without regard to consequences. One can imagine how Kirk would regard today's CEO's and dot.com millionaires.

As the book draws to a close in 1953, Kirk perceives two dangers to conservatism in general and to society at large: the expansion of the managerial state (borrowing from James Burnham) and a post-war era in which gratification of the physical senses without regard to moral context becomes the predominant ethic. He sees bases for optimism that these trends will reverse, but unabashed pessimism would have proved more prophetic.

And Kirk, who lived until 1994 and never allowed a television set into his home, presumably came to realize this. If in 1953, he regarded jazz on the radio and comic books in the drugstore as cheap demoralizing sensations, one can imagine how he would regard hip-hop and unexpurgated raunch displayed in TV and movies, and their attendant consequences on human conduct.

Few conservative candidates would dare attempt today, Adams-like, to affirm the moral nature of society, as Kirk urges; for that matter, few clerics attempt to do so, their theology having been annexed by this newer creed. So much for Kirk's faith in American religious institutions. The last politician to attempt to seriously discuss values was laughed out of office. Today Republicans compete with Democrats for the MTV vote.

And the managerial state achieved its conquest with the advent of the Great Society, effectively declawing the conservative administrations which followed. The last presidential election featured the nominally conservative and liberal candidates debating over just how much the social security Ponzi scheme should expand, whose national prescription drug plan was the most efficacious, and how much wealth the state should appropriate from its subjects.

Kirk seems to be as distrustful of counterrevolution as of revolution, and as a result, he fails to leave conservatives today with a blueprint on how to respond when the hammer has fallen and Sansculotte has fully taken over. But he would regard today's world in much the same way he regards, in the first chapter, the living Irish orators in Burke's birthplace of Dublin proclaiming through amplifiers their success in increasing widows' pensions. He would sadly shake his head and deliver the epitaph of the West, proclaiming, as Burke once did, "What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue!"

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Summary: L. Ron Hubbard
Review: Churchill once said something like, a man who is 20 and is not a liberal has no heart; A man who is 40 and is not a conservative has no brain.

Mind you, Churchill was a womanizing alcoholic, but he may have been on to something there.

In this book, you can learn how to be a conservative. I liked this better than Dianetics and will probably love to be a conservative more than a scientologist.

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Summary: Rush Limbaugh and George W. Bush need to reread this
Review: Kirk starts off with 6 basic tendencies that define conservatism. Among them:
Pessimism. Conservatives do not trust human beings to seek the good. We believe human beings are concupiscent, and that government, as an institution made up of concupiscent human beings, is untrustworthy and corrupt. A liberal believes human beings are essentially good. Modern "liberalism," aka socialism, having failed to prove any of its theories as to where evil comes from, has turned cynical. There is a difference between healthy pessimism and cynicism.
Anyway, Kirk begins by outlining 6 key points of conservative thought (which are forgotten by our current liberal Republican president). Then he discusses the major thinkers who defined conservatism from the late 18th to early 20th centuries.

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Summary: The heritage of conservative thought is rich...
Review: One of the important things about this book is that it examines conservative thinkers who weren't primarily known as politicians or political thinkers (e.g. Scott and Eliot). I appreciated Mr. Kirk's lucid examination of the keepers of the conservative flame. I also found it eye-opening as to the relationship between conservatives and what are known today as libertarians (exemplified by the struggles in the Republican party between its social-conservative wing and its supply-side, libertarian wing). The intellectual foundations of this conflict make a great deal of sense when laid bare by Mr. Kirk. His treatment of Burke is one of the finest I have seen and his study of southern thinkers prior to the Civil War deftly balances Hofstadter's in "The American Political Tradition".

Later, when reading a biography of Gladstone, I found that I understood the conflicts between himself and Disraeli (and, in some instances, members of his own party) with far more precision than I would have without this book as a background.

Finally, it should be read simply because people should be introduced to the heritage that informs their conservative impulses. Battles are often lost simply because people do not believe they have the intellectual high-ground - when, in fact, they do. This book is a new round of combat in the struggle of freedom - the struggle that is never lost, says Mr. Kirk, because it is never won. That's a refreshing and often needed perspective.

A fine piece of intellectual history and a resounding answer to Mill's quip that "the conservatives were the stupid party".

Kelly Whiting

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Summary: A Founding Document of Modern Conservatism
Review: Russell Kirk burst onto the scene in 1953 with the publication of THE CONSERVATIVE MIND, which helped set the course of conservative thought for years. (Murray Rothbard wrote somewhere that prior to this work, conservatives were generally called "the right.") This work went through several editions, and the final (seventh) edition came out in 1986.

The focus of this book is Anglo-American conservatism, however Tocqueville does get some attention. Kirk starts with his hero, Edmund Burke (widely seen as the father of modern conservatism) and develops the principle conservative themes down to roughly present times. I found Kirk's discussion of American history quite interesting. He sees Jefferson as a conservative thinker and views Hamilton as a liberal.

Kirk introduces you to a number of important authors who aren't generally mentioned by conservatives today. One such writer is the W.H. Mallock who wrote a number of important works attacking socialism and liberalism. Kirk's discussion of Mallock is important in that Mallock emphasized the importance of inequality. As Mallock noted, society advances when those of superior ability are permitted to utilize their talents as much as possible. The less able are in fact the principle beneficiaries of such a system. (This is what Ayn Rand called the "pyramid of ability" principle years later. Hence George Reismann, in CAPITALISM, appears incorrect in claiming that it was Rand who first identified the principle.)

Russell Kirk was a member of the Old Right (other leading representatives being Robert Nisbet, Richard Weaver, and Donald Davidson). It's not quite accurate to label him a "paleoconservative" because paleoconservatism has a populist bent not present in the Old Right.

Rating:
Summary: A Founding Document of Modern Conservatism
Review: Russell Kirk burst onto the scene in 1953 with the publication of THE CONSERVATIVE MIND, which helped set the course of conservative thought for years. (Murray Rothbard wrote somewhere that prior to this work, conservatives were generally called "the right.") This work went through several editions, and the final (seventh) edition came out in 1986.

The focus of this book is Anglo-American conservatism, however Tocqueville does get some attention. Kirk starts with his hero, Edmund Burke (widely seen as the father of modern conservatism) and develops the principle conservative themes down to roughly present times. I found Kirk's discussion of American history quite interesting. He sees Jefferson as a conservative thinker and views Hamilton as a liberal.

Kirk introduces you to a number of important authors who aren't generally mentioned by conservatives today. One such writer is the W.H. Mallock who wrote a number of important works attacking socialism and liberalism. Kirk's discussion of Mallock is important in that Mallock emphasized the importance of inequality. As Mallock noted, society advances when those of superior ability are permitted to utilize their talents as much as possible. The less able are in fact the principle beneficiaries of such a system. (This is what Ayn Rand called the "pyramid of ability" principle years later. Hence George Reismann, in CAPITALISM, appears incorrect in claiming that it was Rand who first identified the principle.)

Russell Kirk was a member of the Old Right (other leading representatives being Robert Nisbet, Richard Weaver, and Donald Davidson). It's not quite accurate to label him a "paleoconservative" because paleoconservatism has a populist bent not present in the Old Right.

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Summary: Should have been called Our Struggle
Review: The Conservative Mind is one of the sorts of books I like reviewing because it doesn't fit neatly into any single category. It's a challenge. There's plenty to recommend here to any reader who can follow it, and that may be easier said than done. Russell Kirk likes using large words, and even more, he likes making his allusions without reference and dropping names without background. I think it's unlikely that many readers will follow every statement without work, myself included I confess, but at least Kirk dispels the myth that all conservatives are anti-intellectual illiterates. Of course Kirk would be the first to deny that he is one of those nasty intellectuals, so I'll specify here that I use the term to mean an articulate, educated and well-read person who centers his life on affairs of the mind.

I do recommend Kirk. Conservatives troubled by the neo-con trends today may like to read a philosophically erudite survey of the foundations of their beliefs. And liberals and otherwise uncommitted readers ought to know just how scary and truly deranged conservative thinking really is. I recall back to my high school days when I was learning to express myself philosophically. I told my conservative friends that conservatism meant living in the past, being unwilling to accept new ideas, and generally shutting themselves off from the world as it is today. Over time I had to abandon this attack because it seemed that no actual conservatives used the dictionary definition. And unlike conservatives, if I'm debating someone, I like to avoid straw manning them. How refreshing it is to see that I was right all along, but for Kirk this is not even a slur (though he would phrase it all differently). Rather than devote his time to specific ideologies, he examines conservatism as a broader mindset. It starts with Edmund Burke in the late eighteenth Century and extends roughly to the middle of the twentieth, so any mention of current events is entirely absent. Actually, most actual history is absent.

The biggest problem I see here is not Kirk's fraudulent or delusional statements of liberal principles. It is not that he takes specific stances against a particular expression of human decency. The biggest problem is that I can't tell where Kirk stops and the various men discussed here begin. Kirk himself is ever present in nearly every page, stamping his approval or lack thereof on every word of every quote. He is a human filter, taking that aspect of conservatism in each man that he likes best and stamping it with the Kirk seal of approval. And after hearing what he wants to hear, he disregards the rest as so-and-so's deviation from true conservatism. I suspect that some of this is the subject matter. After all, according to Kirk and myself, there's not really that much variation in conservative thought. Heard one, heard them all, especially with true, old-fashioned conservatism (the neocons can still produce shock and awe). Is it coincidental that Kirk's favorite is Edmund Burke, and that Burke gets the largest chapter and the most references in later chapters? By Kirk's own ideas, this would not be unusual or wrong.

In a nutshell (Kirk's), conservatives believe in the wisdom of man over the wisdom of a man. Hence their willingness to accept the order that has come down from their ancestors and their unwillingness to change except in the slowest and most thoughtful manner possible. Better the devil you know, I suppose. I wonder how Kirk would react if anyone ever asked him a specific question. If Kirk's thinking had prevailed in 1860, would we only now be granting emancipation after slow and careful consideration? I began reading The Conservative Mind as news reports celebrated the ten-year anniversary of the end of Apartheid (a conservative system if ever there was one). What, I wonder, would Kirk have suggested they do instead? Just ending a four hundred year old system like that? Sacrilege! Shouldn't they have carefully thought out the problem, and incrementally changed things so slowly that society as a whole never has to feel disjointed? It there's one thing Kirk makes clear, it is that aristocrats should never be made to feel worry about the great unwashed masses. When I said earlier that Kirk is scary, this is what I mean. His adulation for aristocratic and anti-democratic societies seems anachronistic and would be humorous if people didn't take it seriously.

Kirk has wisely limited his vision to American and British conservatives exclusively (aside from Alexis de Tocqueville), likely fearing what would happen if he tried to defend other societies. After all, they have their ancestors too. I mentioned South Africa. There are others. One could say that the late Soviet Union was ruled by conservatives, adoring the legacies of Marx and Lenin. I doubt Kirk would praise them. Perhaps he would praise the Czarist system instead? On second thought, maybe he really would. It would fit with other passages. The Czarists respected private property (another conservative trait Kirk mentions prominently), especially as only a few people owned property in that system. I could go on, space permitting.

But I still recommend reading this stuff. Despite the wordiness, it's not unfathomable. True, following the references can be tough, but it's not essential because Kirk really only makes a half dozen or so points early on and repeats them endlessly. This is old style conservatism. The conservatism of the old Victorian House of Lords, or perhaps the Prussian Junkers. It praises a classed society, a strictly religious one, and one that is not open to change. It is socially Darwinist, but not industrial. In fact, it is anti-scientific (and never let scientists lead). It is anti-educational, because too much learning makes the masses uppity. It is the stale, sneering, demon of closed minds in charge, desperate to avoid the real world. Read the book, but don't let this happen to you.