The Real Russell Kirk

Posted on: January 3, 2020 at 08:49:31 CT

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/01/david-gordon/conservatisms-chief-thinker/

By David Gordon
January 7, 2016

Russell Kirk: American Conservative. By Bradley J. Birzer. University Press of Kentucky, 2015. 574 pages.

When The Conservative Mind was published in 1953, its author, like Lord Byron after the appearance of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, awoke to find himself famous. Russell Kirk was a hitherto unknown American academic, but Time magazine, which “devoted its entire July 6, 1953 book review section to The Conservative Mind,” and other organs of establishment thought touted Kirk as the voice of a renascent American conservatism.

Kirk’s later work never attracted as much notice as The Conservative Mind, but Kirk retained a substantial following as a leading figure of the so-called traditionalist wing of the American Right. For most of his long career as a writer, Russell Kirk hated libertarians. Libertarians, he wrote in an infamous essay of 1981, were “chirping sectaries.” He charmingly remarks: “the representative libertarian of this decade is humorless, intolerant, self-righteous, badly schooled, and dull. At least the old-fangled Russian anarchist was bold, lively, and knew which sex he belonged to.”

How did Kirk acquire so vehement an aversion to libertarians? Bradley Birzer’s comprehensive study of Kirk helps us answer this question. Birzer, who considers Kirk a genius, holds the Russell Amos Kirk Chair in American Studies at Hillsdale College and has had complete access to Kirk’s papers, owing to his friendship with Kirk’s widow, Annette. Much to my surprise, it transpires that Kirk in the 1940s was himself a libertarian, or close to it. During World War II, when Kirk was an army draftee stationed in Utah, he strongly opposed America’s war policy, in particular the use of atomic weapons and the internment of Japanese Americans. He corresponded with both Albert Jay Nock and Isabel Paterson, both renowned libertarians. Indeed, he favorably discussed them in the first edition of The Conservative Mind, though by the third edition of the book he had removed them. (It is a tribute to Birzer’s scholarship that he has noted the changes in the editions of Kirk’s magnum opus: but he errs in calling Nock a “minarchist.” Nock did not clearly specify in Our Enemy the State the nature of the “government” that he thought should replace the state; but we have no reason to think that he intended a monopoly agency.)

As Birzer makes clear, Kirk had come to believe that the mundane issues of politics paled in importance next to religion and philosophy. A sound social order, Kirk believed, rests on respect for the transcendent order of the universe. People gain access to God and the transcendent through the “moral imagination.” Kirk continually evoked the “permanent things,” and he considered himself an Augustinian mystic. He would definitely dissent from the view that mysticism begins in mist and ends in schism.

The views thus described, though, do not account for Kirk’s shift away from libertarianism. Why could not a libertarian accept the transcendent? Kirk’s metaphysics has no immediately evident political implications. Kirk in The Conservative Mind contrasted Edmund Burke’s politics, based on prudence and respect for tradition and natural law, with the French Revolution’s ruthless uprooting of historical precedent; but, once more, appeal to prudence does not suffice to rule out libertarianism. Certainly a libertarian can acknowledge natural law. In fact, on one of the few occasions that Kirk explains some of the content of natural law, rather than endlessly reiterating “there is law for man and law for thing,” he sounds like Murray Rothbard. He, like Rothbard, claims that “all natural rights are property rights.”

The answer to Kirk’s volte-face lies elsewhere. Although he entertained doubts about William Buckley, he decided to ally with Buckley’s then new journal National Review. In doing so, he would have the advantage of keeping his name before a conservative audience. But at what cost? Buckley was a former CIA agent, and the principal point of the magazine was to reorient the American Right from a noninterventionist foreign policy toward a militant pursuit of the Cold War against Russia and to purge those who dissented from militarism and war. Four of the editors, Willmoore Kendall, James Burnham, Frank S. Meyer, and Willi Schlamm, favored preventive war against Russia. Kendall and Burnham were also former CIA agents; and the late great George Resch told me that Henry Regnery, Kirk’s publisher, called National Review a CIA operation.

Kirk knew what he was getting into. Though he rarely wrote on foreign policy, he willingly participated in a purge against the dissent Right. He denounced Robert Welch and his John Birch Society. Welch’s real offense, to the National Review crowd, was his refusal to endorse the Vietnam War, not his opinion of President Eisenhower. In addition, Kirk enlisted actively in the Goldwater campaign. In doing so, he abandoned his former opposition to atomic weapons and supported Goldwater’s policy of confronting the Soviets with force. “Kirk grew increasingly hawkish in foreign policy in the 1960s, not returning to his much more ‘isolationist’ and republican views until after that decade.”

It was precisely this that Murray Rothbard saw as Kirk’s chief failing, in the memo to the Volker Fund that Birzer is kind enough to quote from the collection of unpublished papers by Rothbard, Strictly Confidential, that I edited. Birzer seems puzzled at the vehemence of Rothbard’s rejection of Kirk, but he misses Rothbard’s key point. The Old Right had been anti-war, but Kirk and Kendall were pro-war. In addition, Kirk’s ventures into the empyrean diverted attention from the struggle for liberty against tyranny.

If we consider Kirk on his self-chosen ground as a devotee of the “permanent things”, our verdict must be a mixed one. He often called attention to important but neglected thinkers, such as Paul Elmer More and W. H. Mallock, but he rarely analyzed critically what his favorite authors said. His work bulges with pleasant quotations from Plato, Burke, Santayana, and T.S. Eliot, among many others; but readers searching for more than this will look in vain. As an example, let us consider Kirk’s essay “Eric Voegelin’s Normative Labor.” Kirk provides a competent summary of some of the main ideas in the first three volumes of Voegelin’s Order and History, of course replete with long quotations. He does not ask such basic questions as, is Voegelin’s account of contemporary political movements as gnostic correct? What arguments does Voegelin advance to support his readings of Biblical and Greek texts? Does Voegelin sufficiently clarify what he means by a “leap in being”?

Birzer seems himself unclear on the meaning of Gnosticism. A gnostic is not, as Birzer apparently takes it, someone who believes that salvation is immanent in the world rather than transcendent. This was Voegelin’s claim about various political movements and people he deemed gnostic, but this does not characterize Gnosticism in its essence. Gnostics consider the world the creation of an evil power, not the true God. Birzer also seems unaware of the controversy Voegelin’s contentions have generated. Cyril O’Regan, The Gnostic Return in Modernity (2001), offers an excellent account of these disputes. Almost everyone writing on the topic thinks that Voegelin’s usage was impossibly vague, and Voegelin in his later work tended to withdraw some of his more extreme claims of gnostic influence. Birzer also wrongly claims that Voegelin talked about the topic in his Political Religions (1938). Birzer notes that Cardinal Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, admired Voegelin’s work, but he calls him “Karl Ratzinger.” Also, what is meant by the “Thomist” interpretations of Vatican II which according to Birzer the journal Communio had as one of purposes to counter?

Kirk’s ventures into political philosophy and economics do not inspire confidence. He believed that Burke defended classical natural law, and he and the Burke scholar Peter Stanlis lobbied aggressively to promote this interpretation. There is much to be said in favor of it, but Kirk unaccountably considered Leo Strauss an ally for this view. As Birzer correctly notes, Strauss in Natural Right and History in fact rejected this interpretation. Instead, he thought that Burke opposed the high view of reason and philosophy taught by the Greeks. One may conjecture that Kirk mistakenly thought from the first few paragraphs of Strauss’s account that he and Strauss were in agreement. He did not grasp that Strauss was stating the position he intended to counter.

Birzer deserves great credit for bringing to light that Kirk and Strauss were friends, even though some of Strauss’s students, such as Walter Berns and Harry Jaffa, looked on Kirk with contempt. Unfortunately, though, Birzer’s own understanding of Strauss is deficient. He points out that Kirk supported the idea of a republic of letters, going so far as to claim of his own books, “Anyone who strays among these pages. . .soon finds himself a citizen of the republic of letters.”; but Strauss opposed the notion. Birzer fails to see that Strauss did not mean by the republic of letters the classical authors whom Kirk had in mind. Instead, he meant the Enlightenment idea of the republic of letters advanced by Pierre Bayle, whom neither Kirk nor Birzer mentions. Further, Strauss did not say that philosophers should form a sect, as Birzer has it. Birzer has misread the passage from Strauss that he cites. Strauss was responding to Alexandre Kojève, who thought that because individual human beings cannot get beyond subjective certainty, claims to truth must be validated interpersonally. It was Kojève, not Strauss, who preferred the sect to Bayle’s republic of letters; but Strauss rejected this, holding that Kojève’s contention presupposed an incorrect account of reason and philosophy.

Kirk does even worse when he gets to Mises, who in his opinion “does not seem to differ much in his postulates about the nature of man from the views of modern orthodox Marxists.” He has ignored entirely Mises’s account of free will as a methodological postulate, as well as Mises’s criticism of economic determinism in Theory and History. If Kirk ever read Human Action, he must have done so with his eyes firmly shut. Kirk also wrongly says that Friedrich Hayek believed “if only a perfectly free market economy could be established, all social problems would solve themselves in short order.” Where did Hayek ever advance such an impossibly naïve view? In his essay on the “chirping sectaries”, Kirk without basis traces modern libertarianism to John Stuart Mill.

Birzer usefully informs us that Kirk had done considerable reading for a comprehensive book about justice. In it, he “was in opposition to the work of both the utilitarian liberal John Rawls and the anarchist Robert Nozick”. Rawls was of course a leading opponent of utilitarianism, and Nozick was not an anarchist; it is fortunate that Kirk did not complete has planned treatise. Birzer does not catch Kirk’s egregious errors.



Birzer’s book is the product of very substantial research, and he offers discussions not only of Kirk, but of many other figures as well, including T.S. Eliot, Flannery O’Connor, and T.E. Hulme. The book contains, it must be said, its share of careless errors. J. Middleton Murry becomes J. Murry Middleton, a change that would have surprised Mansfield Katherine. He mentions in a note Willmoore Kendall’s critical essay, “The Benevolent Sage of Mecosta,” but he dismisses it as confused and does not discuss it. It deserved better than that. The bibliography fails to cite Kirk’s economics textbook of 1989, Economics: Work and Prosperity. But these are minor matters.

Toward the end of his life, Kirk returned to his anti-war beginnings. He went so far as to say that “not a single American war—even the war for independence—had been absolutely necessary.” He denounced the neoconservatives as warmongers; and he had no use for National Review. “Kirk came to believe that Buckley had sold out to the neocons, claiming in a private letter to [Peter] Stanlis, ‘As Patrick Buchanan remarks, National Review is now the New York office of the New World Order.’” For this he merits praise, but for the long period of the Cold War, he was on the interventionist side. Those like Rothbard who remained steadfast in the struggle for peace and liberty could echo to Kirk the famous reproach of Henri IV: “Hang yourself, brave Crillon! We fought at Arques, but you were not there.”