Russell Amos Kirk (19 October 1918 - April 29, 1994) is an American political theorist, moralist, historian, social critic, and literary critic, known for his influence on American conservatism in the 20th century. His 1953 book The Conservative Mind gave shape to the amorphous post-World War II conservative movement. It traces the development of conservative thought in the Anglo-American tradition, giving particular importance to Edmund Burke's ideas. Kirk is considered a major supporter of traditionalist conservatism. He is also a writer of gothic and ghost fiction.
Video Russell Kirk
Life
Russell Kirk was born in Plymouth, Michigan. He is the son of Russell Andrew Kirk, a railroad engineer, and Marjorie Pierce Kirk. Kirk earned a B.A. at Michigan State University and M.A. at Duke University. During World War II, he served in the American army and corresponded with the libertarian author, Isabel Paterson, who helped shape his early political thinking. After reading Albert Jay Nock's book, Our Enemy, the State, he was involved in a similar correspondence with him. After the war, he attended St. University. Andrews in Scotland. In 1953, he became the only American to have a Doctor of Letters degree by the university.
Kirk "composed a post-World War II program for the conservatives by warning them," Some individuals, some quite unused for large-scale moral responsibility, make it their business to wipe out Nagasaki and Hiroshima populations; should make it our business to limit the likelihood of an instant decision. '"
After completing his studies, Kirk took an academic position at his alma mater, Michigan State. He resigned in 1959, after becoming disillusioned with the university's academic standards, rapid growth in the number of students, and an emphasis on intercultural athletics and technical training at the expense of traditional liberal arts. After that he referred to Michigan State as "Cow College" or "Behemoth University." He later wrote that political scientists and academic sociologists "as dogs are grown". At the end of his life, he taught a semester a year at Hillsdale College, where he was Distinguished Visiting Professor of Humanities.
Kirk is often published in two conservative American journals that he helped find, National Review in 1955 and Modern Era in 1957. He was the last founding editor, 1957-59. Later, he was appointed Fellow of the Heritage Foundation, where he gave a number of lectures.
After leaving Michigan State, Kirk returned to his ancestral home in Mecosta, Michigan, where he wrote numerous books, academic articles, lectures and syndicated newspaper columns (which lasted 13 years) with which he used his influence on American politics and intellectual life. In 1963, Kirk converted to Catholicism and married Annette Courtemanche; they have four daughters. He and Kirk became famous for their hospitality, welcoming many political, philosophical, and literary figures in their Mecosta house (known as "Piety Hill"), and providing shelter to political refugees, hobo, and others. Their home became a kind of seminar about conservative thinking for students. Piety Hill is now home to Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal. After his conversion to Catholicism Kirk was a founding council member of Una Voce America.
Kirk refuses to drive, calls the "mechanical Jacobin" car, and has nothing to do with television and what he calls "electronic computers."
Kirk does not always maintain a stereotypical "conservative" voting record. "Faced with a non-choice option between Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Thomas Dewey in 1944, Kirk said not to the empire and chose Norman Thomas, the Socialist Party candidate." In the 1976 presidential election, he chose Eugene McCarthy. In 1992 he supported Pat Buchanan's main challenge to run George H. W. Bush, served as chairman of the campaign country Buchanan in Michigan.
Kirk is a contributor of Chronicles . In 1989, he presented with Presidential Medal of President by President Ronald Reagan.
Maps Russell Kirk
Idea
Conservative Thoughts
Conservative Thoughts: From Burke to Santayana , a version of Kirk's doctoral dissertation, contributed materially to Burke's twentieth-century revival. It also draws attention:
- Conservative statesmen like John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Fisher Ames, George Canning, John C. Calhoun, John Randolph of Roanoke, Joseph de Maistre, Benjamin Disraeli, and Arthur Balfour;
- The conservative implications of writings by famous writers such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sir Walter Scott, Alexis de Tocqueville, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Russell Lowell, George Gissing, George Santayana, Robert Frost and TS Eliot; English and American writers such as Fisher Ames, John Randolph of Roanoke, Orestes Brownson, John Henry Newman, Walter Bagehot, Henry James Sumner Maine, William Edward Hartpole Lecky, Edwin Lawrence Godkin, William Hurrell Mallock, Leslie Stephen, Albert Venn Dicey , Robert Nisbet, Paul Elmer More, and Irving Babbitt.
The Portable Conservative Reader (1982), edited by Kirk, contains examples of posts from most of the above.
Biographer Bradley J. Birzer argues that for all his interests in inspiring the modern conservative movement, not many followers agree with his unusual approach to the history of conservatism. As summarized by reviewer Drew Maciag:
- As the study of Birzer shows, Kirk's understanding of conservatism is so unique, idiosyncratic, transcendental, elitist, and in certain premodern and European ways, that it is less similar to political conservatism in the United States. Conservative Thought successfully launched the intellectual challenge for postwar liberalism, but Kirk's favored conservatism found some interest, even in American Rights.
Harry Jaffa (a student of Leo Strauss) writes: "Kirk is a poor Burke scholar, Burke's attack on metaphysical reasoning is concerned only with modern philosophical efforts to remove skeptical doubt from his premise and therefore from his conclusion."
Russello (2004) argues that Kirk adapted what the 19th-century American Catholic thinker Orestes Brownson called "territorial democracy" to articulate a federalism version based on a different premise partly from other founders and conservatives. Kirk further believes that territorial democracy can reconcile the tension between treating states as provinces only from the central government, and as an independent autonomous political unit of Washington. Finally, territorial democracy allows Kirk to establish the theory of individual rights based on certain historical circumstances in the United States, while rejecting the universal conception of those rights.
Principles
Kirk developed six "canons" of conservatism, which Russello (2004) described as follows:
- Belief in the transcendent order, described by Kirk as a basis in tradition, divine revelation, or natural law;
- Compassion for the "diversity and mystery" of human existence;
- Confidence that society needs orders and classes that emphasize "natural" differences;
- The belief that property and freedom are closely related;
- Confidence in customs, conventions, and recipes, and
- Recognition that innovation should be linked to existing traditions and customs, which require respect for the value of prudential politics.
Kirk says that Christianity and Western Civilization are "inconceivable apart from one another" and that "all cultures arise from religion." When religious faith decays, culture must decline, although it often appears to evolve to space after the religion that has preserved it has drowned in unbelief. "
Kirk Kirk and libertarianism
Kirk bases Burke's conservatism in tradition, political philosophy, belles lettres, and strong religious beliefs of his later years, rather than libertarianism and the reasoning of the free-market economy. The Conservative Mind hardly mentions the economy at all.
In a polemic, Kirk, quoting TS Eliot's phrase, the libertarian "sect of chirp," adds that conservatives and libertarians share opposition to "collectivism," "totalist state," and "bureaucracy," but instead have "none". He called the libertarian movement "an ideological clique that forever split into smaller and more bizarre sects, but rarely conjugated." He says division lines exist between believers in "a kind of transcendent moral order" and "utilitarians that recognize no transcendent sanctions for behavior." He belongs to libertarians in the latter category. Kirk, therefore, questioned the "fusionism" between libertarians and traditional conservatives that marked much of post-World War II conservatism in the United States.
Kirk's view of "classical liberals" is positive; he agrees with them on "commanded freedoms" because they make "common goals with regular conservatives against the threat of democratic despotism and economic collectivism."
Tibor R. Machan defended libertarianism in response to the original Kirk Heritage Lecture. Machan argues that the right of individual sovereignty may be the most worthy of the preservation of American political heritage, and that when conservatives themselves speak about preserving some traditions, they can not at the same time claim unbelief that disrespects individual human minds, from rationalism itself..
Jacob G. Hornberger of the Future of Freedom Foundation also responded to Kirk.
Kirk Kirk and neoconservatism
At the end of his life, Kirk grew up disappointed with American neoconservatives as well. Like Editor Chronicles Scott Richert describes it:
[One line] helps define the emerging struggle between neoconservatives and paleoconservatives. "Not infrequently it seems," said Kirk, "as if some prominent Neoconservatives thought Tel Aviv was the capital of the United States." Several years later, in another Heritage Foundation speech, Kirk repeated the phrase verbatim. After the Gulf War, which he had opposed, he clearly understood that the words brought greater significance.
He also commented that neoconservatives "are often smart, never wise."
Midge Decter, director of the Free World Committee, called Kirk's remarks "bloody anger, a piece of anti-Semitism by Kirk that imposed neoconservative allegiance." He told The New Republic, "It's an idea of ​​Christian civilization, you have to be part of it or you're not really fit to preserve anything, that's an old line and very ignorant."
Samuel T. Francis calls Kirk's "Tel Aviv" commentary a joke about the pro-Israel sympathizers of the neoconservatives. " He described the Decter's response as incorrect, "careless" and "passionate". Further, he argues that such criticism is "always played in the left hand, which can then repeat the allegations and claim conservative support for them.
Kirk and the Gulf War
Toward the end of his life, Russell Kirk was very critical of Republican militarism. President Bush, Kirk said, has initiated "radical intervention in the Persian Gulf region".
Excerpts from Russell Kirk's lecture on the Heritage Foundation (1992):
President Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson are fans of American domination in the world. Now George Bush seems to emulate those famous Democrats. When Republicans are once nominated for the "One World" presidential candidate, Wendell Willkie, they are sadly defeated. In general, Republicans throughout the 20th century have advocated caution and restraint in doing foreign affairs.
Unless the Bush Administration abruptly reverses its fiscal and military, I suggest that Republicans should lose their former reputation for frugality, and be a wasteful party of "butter and weapons." And public opinion will not last long. Also the influence of the American world and the remaining American prosperity.
But the president of the United States should not be encouraged to make the Eternal War for Perpetual Peace, or to suppose that they can shape the New World Order through the abolition of disagreeing parties. In the second century before Christ, the Romans generously liberated the Greek city-state from the Macedonian yoke. But it was not long before the Romans felt the need to impose on the quarreling Christians a more gripping dominance of Hellenic freedom and culture than ever in Macedonia. It is the duty of the United States Congress to see that the great American Caesars did not act that way either.
Man of letters
Other important books of Kirk include Eliot and his Age: The Twenty-Thirtieth Imagination of TS Eliot in the 20th Century (1972), The Roots of American Order (1974), and his autobiography > The Sword of Imagination: The Memoir of the Half Century Literary Conflict (1995). Like his hero Edmund Burke, Kirk became famous for his prose style of intellectual writing and his polemic.
Fiction
Beyond his scientific achievements, Kirk is both talented as an oral storyteller and as a genre fiction writer, especially in telling the perfect ghost stories in the classical tradition of Sheridan Le Fanu, MR James, Oliver Onions, and H. Russell Wakefield. He also wrote other admired and anthologized works that are variously classified as horror, fantasy, science fiction, and political satire. This earned him the praise of his fellow creative writers who varied and distinguished as T. S. Eliot, Robert Aickman, Madeleine L'Engle, and Ray Bradbury.
Though simple in quantity - it includes three novels and 22 short stories - Kirk's fictional body is written in the midst of a busy career as a prolific writer, editor, and productive nonfiction speaker. As with other speculative fiction writers such as GK Chesterton, CS Lewis, and JRR Tolkien (all also writing only nonfiction for their "day-to-day work"), there is a conservative undercurrent - social, cultural, religious, and political - for Kirk Fiction.
His first novel, Old House of Fear (1961, 1965), as with many short stories, was written in a conscious Gothic vein. Here the story is about an American assigned by his employer to a bleak place in the Scottish countryside - the same country where Kirk has attended graduate school. This is Kirk's most commercially and critically successful work of fiction, doing a lot to sustain it financially in subsequent years.
Then the novel is A Creature of the Twilight (1966), a dark comedy that mocks post-colonial African politics; and Lord of the Hollow Dark (1979, 1989), a Scottish background, exploring the great evil that inhabits a haunted house. During his lifetime, Kirk also oversaw the publication of three collections that together cover all his short stories. (The other three collections have been published posthumously, but they only reprint stories found in previous volumes.)
Among his novels and stories, certain characters tend to reappear, enriching the already large unity and resonance of his fictional canon. Although - through the theme and style of prose - the work of fiction and nonfiction Kirk is complementary, many readers do not yet know his work in other works.
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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