Russell Kirk and the Age of Ideology (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Russell Kirk and the Age of Ideology Graeme Voyer Russell Kirk and the Age of Ideology by Wesley McDonaldUniversity of Missouri Press, 2004, 243 pp., $44.95 Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Russell Kirk and the Age of Ideology Russell Kirk was one of the principal American conservative thinkers of the post–World War II era. He is a particularly interesting figure because, unlike many on the American Right, he was a critic of unrestrained capitalism. In Russell Kirk and the Age of Ideology, Wesley McDonald, a professor of political science, seeks to explicate Kirk's social, moral and political thought. Kirk wrote twenty-four nonfiction books, but his most famous and influential was The Conservative Mind (1953). Before the publication of this work, the American intellectual Right was dominated by libertarians, concerned primarily with economic issues. Kirk's book, along with several others, "marked the beginning of the shift in the emphasis of American conservatism away from the atomistic individualism of the libertarians toward a deeper appreciation of man's social nature." Indeed, there was a vast gulf between Kirk's thought and the pro-capitalist libertarians. As McDonald says, "Kirk did not praise the free market uncritically. He supported tariffs to protect the small farmer against a capricious global market. He deplored the ruinous destruction of the environment wrought by corporate greed and commercial excess." Unlike the libertarians, Kirk was concerned with values and "championed those enduring norms of social interaction without which civilized existence is rendered impossible." Central to Kirk's thought was the concept of ethical dualism. This notion, which is consistent with classical and Judeo-Christian teaching, holds that human beings have tendencies toward both good and evil; there is a higher self and a lower self. Kirk believed that the impulses of the lower self must be "restrained by this collective and immemorial wisdom we call prejudice, tradition, customary morality." Opposing ethical dualism are various schools of thought, identified under the rubric of "naturalism," that reject the existence of permanent ethical truths and attempt to explain human behavior "wholly in terms of external phenomenal forces explainable by science." Kirk's work can be seen as a sustained refutation of the naturalist school. The bulk of McDonald's book consists of his elucidation of various concepts and themes of Kirk's thought, all of which are interrelated. These include the moral imagination, tradition and "the permanent things," order, community and education. A principal theme of Kirk's thought is his critique [End Page 199] of ideology. To Kirk, ideology threatens the "civilized order of the Western world." Among the ideologies denounced by Kirk are the rationalism of the eighteenth-century French philosophes, the romantic idealism of the Rousseauists, utilitarianism, positivism, Marxism, Social Darwinism, pragmatism and socialism. These ideologies engendered "the belief in the perfectibility of man, the enthusiasm for social and economic leveling, the impulse for innovation coinciding with a concomitant contempt of tradition, the denial of the power of Providence in history, and the rejection of 'the permanent things,' defined as those enduring moral values which make civilized social existence possible." McDonald's book at times lacks structure and organizational coherence. Still, it is a useful introduction to the thought of a major American conservative writer. Copyright © 2005 The Curators of the University of Missouri