Russell Kirk, the Canon, and the Conservative Movement
Recently at Takimag, there have been a number of critiques by the articulate, provocative, and acerbic Austin Bramwell. Bramwell questions the idea of the “conservative canon” as something of a put up job by the conservative establishment, and argues that many of the canonical conservative authors would not be in print—must less read—without the support of their respective coteries. Bramwell asks the pointed—and critical—question: “To what extent would anyone read the authors of the movement conservative canon (Russell Kirk, Frank Meyer et al.) if a conservative movement did not exist to promote their works so relentlessly?”
One of the authors he uses as an example is Russell Kirk, who was born ninety years ago this October. Bramwell’s piece provides an opportunity to reflect on Kirk’s continuing importance.
In response to Bramwell, Daniel McCarthy for example, has come to the defense of the canon and certain of its members. McCarthy sees little connection between a conservative canon and the current movement. He writes that “Kirk endures more because of a dedicated corps of Kirkians” rather than any approval by the “movement.” In the end, Bramwell makes the less incendiary, but more pertinent, observation that his “point is not that the authors of the canon shouldn’t be read but simply that they shouldn’t be read as canonical.” To which argument, I think we can all heartily agree, and even can acknowledge that many of the criticisms Bramwell do in fact indicate flaws of the movement, though not of the authors now considered canonical. One could not imagine an assemblage that would be more ill-at-ease at a CPAC gathering that Kirk, Richard Weaver, and Robert Nisbet.
In some sense, this debate is reminiscent of the stale core curriculum debates of the 1980s and 1990s. Liberals argued for inclusion, ignoring merit and basing their decisions on ideological criteria. Conservatives, meanwhile, defended a “canon” whose elements were in some circumstances barely a generation or two old. Both sides missed the point. Conservatives lost the sense that merit is always context-based, so that one could not flash-freeze a set of canonical works. Liberals, on the other hand, gave up the idea of merit altogether and combined that rejection with disdain for the Western cultural heritage.
With respect to Kirk, or almost any author, it is unclear whether he would be in print without, for example, the efforts of some coterie of supporters. But why would that matter? Could not the same thing be said of someone like Freud? The question isn’t whether authors are somehow supported, or even in some quarters considered canonical, but whether, once out there, their work remains valuable aside from their status as a movement icon. Bramwell tries to distinguish conservatives reading say, Burnham, with liberals reading Mill, because Mill was not only a liberal but was also a “great thinker.” This of course begs the question of who may qualify as a great thinker, and by what standard—liberals also read Foucault and Derrida.
Kirk’s work, I would argue, does remain valuable. (The other members of the canon each has his defenders, I suppose. I for one never really warmed to Kendall, whose prose I liked but whose liberal-conservative divide focuses too much on party politics for my taste. Weaver, while his prose is full of penetrating insight and criticism of our cultural decline, falls harshly on my non-Southern ears). The cultural and social vision Kirk lays out in The Conservative Mind and his other works was a stark contrast to the liberal worldview of the 1950s—and also of the postmodern world of today. While Nisbet and others focused on empirical social science, and so retain academic cachet, that was never Kirk’s objective. He was writing for a wider group of people, to give them an imaginative reworking of the Western intellectual tradition as a resource to counter the dominating liberalism of the last century. It is not a trivial point to note that Kirk was a newspaper columnist for decades, with an audience far beyond the conservative base.
One metric by which to value the work of a writer, even one considered canonical, is the importance placed upon it by its enemies. Kirk certainly satisfies that criterion The neocons, for example, have had little use for Kirk. He has always been a target for those seeking to punish deviationism from whatever the current right-wing groupthink happens to be. However, it should be noted that David Frum – whose intellectual positions I think he would agree have little to do with the conservative order Kirk espoused—wrote an appreciative and thoughtful piece on his legacy. Similarly, when Kirk’s collected essays appeared, The New Republic featured a blistering and hate-filled attack by Alan Wolfe. The New Republic is still one of the central standard-bearers of intellectual liberalism. One would not mount such an offensive unless the threat were perceived to be real. Coulter and Limbaugh get mockery among the liberal press. Kirk gets the true vitriol. Has the liberal press devoted that much recent space to any conservative thinker aside from Buckley?
Bramwell asks serious questions about the future of the conservative movement, not the least of which is why so many writers and scholars with conservative sentiments have shied away from the movement itself. This may be a problem with the movement, as Bramwell suggests, but the movement’s problems may have little connection with the books it chooses to admire–but perhaps not read.
Gerald J. Russello is the author of The Postmodern Imagination of Russell Kirk.
Comments
In one sense, at least, one must concede Bramwell’s critique. American “conservatism” has always been a case study in political schizophrenia. It could never decide whether it was merely the right-wing of Enlightenment Liberalism, or the remnant of the pre-Enlightenment order. As right-wing, it combines radical economic Liberalism with a nostalgic social antiquarianism, attempting to uphold “family values” that its own liberalism must destroy.
As truly “conservative,” it is also pre-Englightenment and therefore anti-modern. Ironically, as anti-modern it forms, or should form, the avant-garde of postmodernism.
Two examples of this should suffice. For me, the quintessential postmodern text is G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy. When one picks up a text with such a title, one expects an exercise in scholastic thought. Instead, one gets a narrative, a biography of a journey from Hanwell to Home, from madness to sanity. Chesterton presents ideas in the same way they are presented in the Scriptures: as history and biography. The second example is Pope Benedict’s Spe Salvi which pounds all the post-modernist themes, and even praises the Frankfurt School.
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that some left-wing post-modernists have turned toward towards Christianity. Slavoj Zizek has discovered Chesterton and upholds the ideal of a Christian Europe, while the “radical orthodoxy” movement seeks to rescue theology from its Enlightenment and Reformation dead ends.
The problem, however, is that this sort of genuine conservatism was always confined to Catholics, high-Church Protestants, and Southern Agrarians. But without them, American conservatism inevitably becomes neo-conservatism; it becomes that because it always was that to begin with. Therefore, the choice for conservatives is to be merely the fuddy-duddy’s of the Enlightenment, or the avant-garde of the new order.
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It was, of course, The Conservative Mind itself which created the novel idea of conservatism as essentially a literary canon. It soon found itself the core of a canon which included Leo Strauss, now correctly read as a neocon, and Eric Voegelin, who ought to be read as one, not only for the characterization of geopolitical foes as representatives of a heresy to be exterminated, but for his realization, in a late volume of Order in History that Pauline Christianity is itself the origin of this heresy.
Curiously enough I came upon your thoughtful essay after adding, thanks to Amazon, a short bibliography of conservatism, neoconservatism, and paleoconservatism to my own attempt to define the latter:
http://www.squidoo.com/paleo
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It seems rather indirect to place Kirk and Weaver into a some sort of canon when what they themselves were doing was creating a canon. The “Conservative Mind” is itself a canon of thinkers that need to be read to form a certain cast of mind. Similarly, Weaver was writing the nominalists out of and the metaphysical realists into the canon. If one is only reading Kirk and not the authors he recommends or reading Weaver and still thinking like a nominalist, then that explains all the shortcomings of the conservative movement.
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Neither Kirk nor Weaver was a philosopher, nor claimed to be. Kirk despised the discipline of philosophy, and probably feared it; Weaver did not. Weaver of course had no real arguments to offer against nominalism, as Charles Sanders Peirce did, but the prejudices of the age would have made me immune to all argument on the subject had Weaver not appealed to my moral imagination.
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Good point, Charles!
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Here’s for adding John Milbank (who John Medaille mentioned above), David Bentley Hart, and Catherine Pickstock to the canon, as exemplars of how the critical apparatus of “postmodernism” can be selectively deployed so as to de-throne Enlightenment, liberal/whig/state-capitalist, and secularist categories, and replace them with genuinely Catholic, pre-modern, and traditionalist ones.
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Gerald – many thanks for this thoughtful response. It is indeed question-begging to dismiss the canon by simply stipulating that none of the authors was a “great thinker”. However, my comments do suggest an independent test of an author’s achievement – namely, do even those who reject his teachings regard him as essential reading? Burke makes it onto any number of assigned reading lists and thus easily satisfies this criterion. (Other conservatives that satisfy this criterion would be Joseph Schumpeter and, as mentioned below, Michael Oakeshott). Generally speaking, however, the only people who recommend reading the authors of the conservative movement canon are those who are heavily invested in the conservative movement to begin with.
I should note that your measure of an author’s value – namely, whether his enemies consider him worthy of attack – is less stringent than mine. Kirk satisfies your criterion but it is unclear whether he satisfies mine. Of course, we can argue over the reasons for the comparative neglect of Kirk. Undoubtedly, he was a unique “man of letters,” as he liked to call himself; his posthumous reputation probably deserves better.
Finally, it is worth noting that there is in fact one more or less “canonical” author who without doubt achieved greatness by my criterion—namely Michael Oakeshott. (No less a leftist than Richard Rorty took Oakshott’s notion of “conversation” as a model of how philosophy should proceed.) Oakeshott you could view as the philosopher of the Burkean tradition.
Trouble is, of course, Oakeshott was a Brit rather than an America. Moreover, if ever there were philosophy less encouraging to movement-builders, it would be Oakeshott’s.
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I agree with Mr. Medaille. Movement conservatism has always been schizophrenic, although I think this may at least partially reflect the schizophrenic nature of the American “founding” that it is paying lip service to conserving, and not just a result of an unthoughtful or conflicted movement. (Although the movement may well be the former and is certainly the latter.) This may well be an inherent aspect of conserving this place we call America.
Kirk’s conservatism has always impressed me as a bit cobbled together. He stops at Burke, but it is not really clear that Burke was that much of an influence on America’s Founders. Burke is probably more of an influence on modern conservatives, partially thanks to Kirk, than he was on America’s Founders who he was a contemporary of.
I’m not knocking Burke, just making an observation. It seems to me that America’s conservatism was more intuitive than philosophically based. More British and dare I say Protestant (he ducks and covers) than philosophical. I am not sure that this isn’t a good thing. A healthy distrust of philosophers with all their bright new ideas seems an inherently conservative impulse.
But as for what constitutes a “great thinker” and “essential reading,” I believe Mr. Bramwell’s bar is too high. In relatively modern times, with the explosion of information and access, I think it is much harder for someone mid century like Kirk to become a great thinker by his standard. There is too much competition these days. Were a Rousseau to show up on the scenes today, who knows if he would be read or just considered a crank. Ditto Fraud, Marx, etc. There is a lot of historical good fortune and chance involved in such “greatness.” Also, I’m not sure that the system that determines “greatness” is fair to conservatives. Don’t such measures of greatness inherently favor the novel thinker as opposed to the defender of the status quo?
That we have our own canon of what is great strikes me as almost certainly necessary and not necessarily bad.
The problem with the canon, IMO, is that it is too myopic. It is a canon of the conservative movement approximately1950 give or take a couple of decades and beyond. American conservatism needs a canon beyond the canon of the movement. Such a canon would obviously include Calhoun, Randolph, and Dabney. Perhaps more thought needs to go into who belongs in this canon.
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Dr. Russello, you are kind and prudent, virtues that I have strived for but never quite attained in almost seven decades. The truth is that Mr. Bramwell’s essay was mean-spirited and juvenile. To keep only to the subject of Kirk, a “great thinker” by any standards that are not limited to “theorists,” the moral and literary imagination dwarfs writers like J.S. Mill and even, God bless him, Michael Oakeshott. One wonders what of Kirk that Bramwell has read.
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Dr Russello,
It is unfortunate that Christopher Dawson, whose work you have studied and popularized, is not widelsy studied.
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As I have posted before. The Neo-conservatives hate Kirk because he defined a Neo-conservative as one who believed the capital of the United States to be Tel Aviv.
The New Yorkers still seethe over his penetrating truth.
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Thanks for your kind comments, John and Stan. Yes, Dawson is another of those who should be read more widely. Whether he fits into a conservative “canon” is a question for another day.
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Look for the new book on Dawson by Bradley Birzer, a brilliant young scholar from Hillsdale College, and one soon to come out by James Hitchcock, a brilliant older scholar from St. Louis University. Dawson is getting his due.
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