The Conservative Mind

The Conservative Mind

I just finished reading Russel Kirk’s “The Conservative Mind, From Burke to Eliot”, which was Kirk’s “magnum opus” about the evolvement and metamorphosis of conservative thought throughout history.  He really starts with Aristotle, but chooses Edmund Burke as the definitive beginning of contemporary conservative thought. 

Kirk’s book explores how modern conservatism is related to the classic liberalism of America’s founding fathers, and how the nuances imposed by such thinkers as Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Jeremy Bentham and many others affected the evolution of conservative thought.  The impact of the thinking of 18^th and 19^th century American figures such as John and John Quincy Adams (and their progeny Henry and Brooks Adams), Alexander Hamilton, John Calhoun, John Randolph, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Russell Lowell and Daniel Webster are also highlighted, as are  foreign notables who have had an impact on the continuing evolvement and growth of conservative philosophy, such John Stuart Mill, Alexis de Tocqueville, Auguste Comte, Benjamin Disraeli and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, among others.

Kirk continues into the 20^th century with Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More, George Santayana, Thomas Stearns Eliot and Rudyard Kipling.  William H. Buckley, George Will and more recent conservative figures are not included, since Kirk’s book was written in 1953.

Overall, Kirk crystalized for me the historical origins and continuing evolution of conservative philosophy and politics.  People will ask “if you are a conservative, what are you conserving?”  The answer is not some nostalgic or euphoric past that does not exist anymore. Conservatives acknowledge the wisdom, knowledge, experience, ethics and morals that were developed in the past as a starting point for living life and operating in the present.  Not in some rigid or inflexible adherence to the past, but as a starting point.  Conservatives believe that not only this “politically correct”, instant gratification generation is capable of erudite and politically acceptable thoughts and actions.  Conservatives don’t indiscriminately tear down what civilization created in the name of some ill-defined “progressivism”.  They build on the beneficial features of what came before to create an even better world, and a better starting point for those that come after us.

Ray Gruszecki

August 6, 2019