As the author of The Conservative Mind and other seminal books, Russell Kirk is usually thought of as one of the American conservative political movement’s most important progenitors. But as this collection demonstrates, Kirk was perhaps at his best as an essayist. This volume also confirms that Kirk’s was principally a literary and historical conservatism that refused to fit the irreducible complexity of human experience to the requirements of any ideological straitjacket. With The Essential Russell Kirk, literary critic George A. Panichas captures the breadth and depth of Kirk’s intellectual project by gathering together forty-four of the most masterful of Kirk’s essays, along with a unique chronology told in Kirk’s own words and a substantial introduction that articulates the deep humanism that animated Kirk’s philosophy. The result is a carefully assembled volume that gives us a fuller picture of an extraordinary man and writer, one whose labors had, and continue to have, remarkable repercussions on the American literary and political landscape.

As the author of The Conservative Mind and other seminal books, Russell Kirk is usually thought of as one of the American conservative political movement’s most important progenitors. But as this collection demonstrates, Kirk was perhaps at his best as an essayist. This volume also confirms that Kirk’s was principally a literary and historical conservatism that refused to fit the irreducible complexity of human experience to the requirements of any ideological straitjacket. With The Essential Russell Kirk, literary critic George A. Panichas captures the breadth and depth of Kirk’s intellectual project by gathering together forty-four of the most masterful of Kirk’s essays, along with a unique chronology told in Kirk’s own words and a substantial introduction that articulates the deep humanism that animated Kirk’s philosophy. The result is a carefully assembled volume that gives us a fuller picture of an extraordinary man and writer, one whose labors had, and continue to have, remarkable repercussions on the American literary and political landscape.

Russell Kirk, author of The Conservative Mind and A Program for Conservatives, has been regarded as one of the foremost figures of the post-World War II revival in conservative thought. While numerous commentators on contemporary political thought have acknowledged his considerable influence on the substance and direction of American conservatism, no analysis of his social and political writing has dealt extensively with the philosophical foundations of his work. In this provocative study, W. Wesley McDonald examines those foundations and demonstrates their impact on the conservative intellectual movement that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. Kirk played a pivotal role in drawing conservatism away from the laissez-faireprinciplesoflibertarianism and toward those of a traditional community grounded in a renewed appreciation of man's social and spiritual nature and the moral prerequisites of genuine liberty. In a humane social order, a community of spirit is fostered in which generations are bound together. According to Kirk, this link is achieved through moral and social norms that transcend the particularities of time and place and, because they form the basis of genuine civilized existence, can only be neglected at great peril. These norms, reflected in religious dogmas, traditions, humane letters, social habit and custom, and prescriptive institutions, create the sources of the true community that is the final end of politics. Although this study does not challenge Kirk's debts to a predominantly Catholic and Anglo-Catholic tradition of natural law, its focus is on his appeal to historical experience as the test of sound institutions. This aspect of his thought was essential to Kirk's understanding of moral, cultural, and aesthetic norms and can be seen in his responses to American humanists Paul Elmer More and Irving Babbitt and to English and American romantic literature.Russell Kirk and the Age of Ideology is particularly relevant because of the growing interest in Kirk's legacy and the current debate over the meaning of conservatism. McDonald addresses both of those developments in the context of examining Kirk's thought, attempting to correct some of the inadequacies contained in earlier studies that assess Kirk as a political thinker. This book will serve as a significant contribution to the commentary on this fascinating figure.

The Portable Conservative Reader illuminates the meaning of the conservative cause. In one of the most wide-ranging and thoughtful anthologies of conservative thought in the English and American traditions, Russell Kirk excavates conservatism's foundations. The breadth of conservative writing reveals that, at bottom, the conservative idea is not an economic theory nor a political program but a penetrating way of looking at the human condition. Here, Kirk brings together a diverse group of thinkers and material - including essays, poetry, and fiction - that articulate the conservative imagination, its veneration of tradition, prudence, variety, and the enduring fallibility and imperfectibility of mankind. These selections set forth basic premises and principles at work in the minds of Edmund Burke, Benjamin Disraeli, and T. S. Eliot in Britain, Alexander Hamilton, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Adams, and Irving Kristol in America, and many more who have elucidated this turn of mind. This balanced and surprising collection is a landmark study of the most potent political force of our time.

It is an incontestable fact of history that the United States, although a multiethnic nation, derives its language, mores, political purposes, and institutions from Great Britain. The two nations share a common history, religious heritage, pattern of law and politics, and a body of great literature. Yet, America cannot be wholly confident that this heritage will endure forever. Declining standards in education and the strident claims of multiculturalists threaten to sever the vital Anglo-American link that ensures cultural order and continuity. In "America's British Culture", now in paperback, Russell Kirk offers a brilliant summary account and spirited defense of the culture that the people of the United States have inherited from Great Britain. Kirk discerns four essential areas of influence. The language and literature of England carried with it a tradition of liberty and order as well as certain assumptions about the human condition and ethical conduct. American common and positive law, being derived from English law, gives fuller protection to the individual than does the legal system of any other country. The American form of representative government is patterned on the English parliamentary system. Finally, there is the body of mores - moral habits, beliefs, conventions, customs - that compose an ethical heritage. Elegantly written and deeply learned, "America's British Culture" is an insightful inquiry into history and a plea for cultural renewal and continuity. Adam De Vore in "The Michigan Review" said of the book: "A compact but stimulating tract...a contribution to an over-due cultural renewal and reinvigoration...Kirk evinces an increasingly uncommon reverence for historical accuracy, academic integrity and the understanding of one's cultural heritage," and Merrie Cave in "The Salisbury Review" said of the author: "Russell Kirk has been one of the most important influences in the revival of American conservatism since the fifties. [Kirk] belongs to an

What holds America together? In this classic work, Russell Kirk identifies the beliefs and institutions that have nurtured the American soul and commonwealth. Beginning with the Hebrew prophets, Kirk examines in dramatic fashion the sources of American order. His analytical narrative might be called a "tale of five cities": Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, London, and Philadelphia. For an understanding of the significance of America in the twenty-first century, Russell Kirk's masterpiece on the history of American civilization is unsurpassed.

The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot by Russell Kirk is arguably one of the greatest contributions to twentieth-century American Conservatism. Brilliant in every respect, from its conception to its choice of significant figures representing the history of intellectual conservatism, The Conservative Mind launched the modern American Conservative Movement. A must-read. (Abridged edition)

Emerging from two decades of the Great Depression and the New Deal and facing the rise of radical ideologies abroad, the American Right seemed beaten, broken, and adrift in the early 1950s. Although conservative luminaries such as T. S. Eliot, William F. Buckley Jr., Leo Strauss, and Eric Voegelin all published important works at this time, none of their writings would match the influence of Russell Kirk's 1953 masterpiece The Conservative Mind. This seminal book became the intellectual touchstone for a reinvigorated movement and began a sea change in Americans' attitudes toward traditionalism. In Russell Kirk, Bradley J. Birzer investigates the life and work of the man known as the founder of postwar conservatism in America. Drawing on papers and diaries that have only recently become available to the public, Birzer presents a thorough exploration of Kirk's intellectual roots and development. The first to examine the theorist's prolific writings on literature and culture, this magisterial study illuminates Kirk's lasting influence on figures such as T. S. Eliot, William F. Buckley Jr., and Senator Barry Goldwater—who persuaded a reluctant Kirk to participate in his campaign for the presidency in 1964. While several books examine the evolution of postwar conservatism and libertarianism, surprisingly few works explore Kirk's life and thought in detail. This engaging biography not only offers a fresh and thorough assessment of one of America's most influential thinkers but also reasserts his humane vision in an increasingly inhumane time.

The modern conservative intellectual movement began in 1953 with Russell Kirk’s groundbreaking book The Conservative Mind. Four years later, he published a pithy, wry, philosophical summary of what conservatism really means. Originally titled The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Conservatism, this little book was essentially a popular version of The Conservative Mind. Now, a century after its author’s birth, this neglected gem has been recovered. It remains what Kirk intended it to be: an accessible introduction to conservative ideas, especially for the young. With a new title and an introduction by the eminent intellectual historian Wilfred M. McClay, Russell Kirk’s Concise Guide to Conservatism arrives with uncanny timing. The movement that Kirk defined in 1953 is today so contested and fragmented that no one seems able to say with confidence what conservatism means. This book, as fresh and prophetic as the day it was published sixty years ago, is a reminder that no one can match Russell Kirk in engaging people’s minds and imaginations—an indispensable task in reviving our civilization.

The essential concerns of conservatism are the same as those that motivated Nisbet's first and most influential book. The Quest for Community. In fact, Conservatism unites virtually all of Nisbet's work. In it, Nisbet deals with the political causes of the manifold forms of alienation that underwrite the human quest for community. The sovereign political state is more than a legal relationship of a superstructure of power, it is inseparable from its successive penetrations of man's economic, religious, kinship and local allegiances, and its revolutionary dislocations of established centers of power. Nisbet holds that although political philosophers are often conceived in terms of their views of the individual and the state, a more useful approach adds the factor of social groups or communities mediating between the individual and the state. Such groups comprise "society" the protection of which is the "sole object" of the conservative tradition, according to Nisbet. This conservative ideology arose in the West as a reaction to the French Revolution and its perceived impact upon traditional society. Edmund Burke was the first spokesman of the new ideology. In this book, Nisbet argues that modern conservatism throughout the West can be seen as a widening of Burke's indictment not only of the French Revolution, but of the larger revolution we have come to call modernity. From Edmund Burke and his contemporaries such as Bonald, de Maistre, Haller, and Savigny, down to T.S. Eliot, Christopher Dawson, Michael Oakeshott, Irving Babbit, Paul Elmer More, and Russell Kirk, the essential themes of political conservatism remained the same. They are centered upon history, tradition, property, authority, liberty and religion, and attack equally the political collectivism and radical individualism that have the same irrational outcomes. Nisbet makes the point that, at present, conservatism is also in a crisis, one created in large measure by mixing in the political arena economic liberalism and welfare state socialism - a lethal mix for conservative politics.