Russell Kirk: American Conservative by Bradley J. Birzer

Abstract

Reviewed by: Russell Kirk: American Conservative by Bradley J. Birzer David S. Brown Russell Kirk: American Conservative. By Bradley J. Birzer. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2015. Pp. viii, 574. $34.95, ISBN 978-0-8131-6618-6.) Over the past several years a number of commentators have explored various facets of political theorist Russell Kirk's thought and "imagination." Among the best of these are W. Wesley McDonald's Russell Kirk and the Age of Ideology (Columbia, Mo., 2004) and Gerald J. Russello's The Postmodern Imagination of Russell Kirk (Columbia, Mo., 2007). Now arrives Bradley J. Birzer's big biography, which will immediately become the standard life-and-times account of Kirk. This work offers a full portrait, appropriately devoting most of its pages to Kirk's writings, politics, and critical role as an intellectual engagé helping elucidate a conservative tradition in America. Kirk's scholarship, particularly his important book The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Santayana (Chicago, 1953), challenged the notion advanced by much of the postwar professoriat that the country's political philosophy, as a rule, trended liberal. In effect, he gave the Right a respectable intellectual heritage, which included Edmund Burke, Jeremy Bentham, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Adams, and Irving Babbitt. More than sixty years after publication, it remains an iconic text among conservatives. The strengths of Birzer's biography are numerous. Birzer, a historian at Hillsdale College, has immersed himself in Kirk's oeuvre, reading not simply his subject's major writings but also Kirk's many opinion pieces, articles, and [End Page 1012] novels. He ventures into Kirk's psychology and makes altogether reasonable and insightful observations about Kirk's search for faith and community, delight in the gothic, and antisocial pose as an undergraduate at Michigan College, now Michigan State University, before flowering in Scotland, where he completed his graduate work at the University of St. Andrews. He was a Catholic convert who swore he saw sundry fairies, goblins, and ghosts throughout his life. One has the impression of a preternaturally mature young man who may not have taken his callow American peers seriously. The bulk of Birzer's work assays Kirk's quixotic quest to challenge the secularism of the twentieth century and create a Christian humanist movement in response to the major ideologies—liberalism, communism, and fascism—of that period. For Kirk, this amounted to a proposed "return to first principles" (p. 185). Birzer rightly notes, however, that Kirk's high-humanistic pursuit began to lose focus in the late 1950s and early 1960s when he became increasingly involved in politics. Much against the advice of his friend T. S. Eliot, Kirk began writing for William Buckley's National Review and advising Barry Goldwater. By the 1980s and the onset of the Reagan Revolution, these connections helped make Kirk an éminence grise among the conservative faithful, but, as Birzer notes, such efforts in print and partisan politics took time away from his intellectual work. Kirk is certainly deserving of a large biography, but this one would have benefited from a bit of careful pruning. There are many pages examining the lives and works of important thinkers who knew or had some influence on or association with Kirk, including T. S. Eliot, Irving Babbitt, Ayn Rand, and Garry Wills. These often expansive vignettes border on becoming extraneous. One seven-page section explicates English critic T. E. Hulme's influence on Eliot and effectively de-emphasizes Kirk. Birzer also devotes considerable space to Kirk's three periods as a short fiction writer in a section that at times feels like a detour. Caveats aside, Birzer has provided an impressively researched and lucidly written study. Readers looking for a sensitive, sympathetic account of Kirk and his commanding role on the last century's intellectual Right will not be disappointed. David S. Brown Elizabethtown College Copyright © 2017 The Southern Historical Association