The Godfather of Permanent Things

Russell Kirk stands alongside a pantheon of conservative thinkers and writers from the past century. His The Conservative Mind, now 70 years old, was the magnum opus of conservative intellectual thought which highlighted for readers during the height of post-New Deal liberalism the venerable conservative tradition as Kirk saw and understood it. In our own time when conservatism is fraying and cracking with intense infighting, returning to that question of What is Conservatism? is worth doing. None better to do it with than Russell Kirk.

The Politics of Prudence was first published as a collection of lectures given by Kirk in the 1990s, in the immediate aftermath of America’s victory in the Cold War. In it, Kirk lays out a warning to conservatives over the “errors of ideology” and the emerging dangers of democratic imperialism, or “democratism,” that ideology which blends democratic politics with neoliberal economics on a global scale as the final and only political form destined for global domination now that Soviet communism had been defeated. The 17 lectures included in this insightful volume touch on a range of subjects, but many are issues being revisited today.

Michael P. Federici’s new introduction does a superb job providing a concise understanding to new readers the essence of Kirk’s writing about conservatism. “Conservatism,” Federici writes in assessment of Kirk, “is a disposition of character rather than a collection of reified, abstract political doctrines. It is the rejection of ideology rather than the exercise of it.” Furthermore, conservatism stands in opposition to the “radical and revolutionary ideological movements that centralize power as the means to escape the limits of the human condition.”

This basic framework for understanding conservatism is then revealed through the chapters of this book, beginning with the “Errors of Ideology.” Ideology, as Kirk defines it, is a dogmatic approach to “transforming society and even transforming human nature.” The ideologue generally takes as their starting point a hatred of the current political order, a hatred of human nature, and a belief in progressive utopia from some thinker or book who revealed to humanity what could be. Ideology, as practiced by the ideologue, becomes “merciless” in that “march toward Utopia.” Drawing upon other thinkers like Eric Voegelin and Gerhart Niemeyer, Kirk sharply explains the essence of ideology as “promis[ing] mankind an earthly paradise.”

Conservatism, standing in opposition to ideology, isn’t about rejecting change or reform. Kirk, quoting Burke (one of his heroes), knows and affirms that change and reform are necessary (change is a natural part of existence). Change and reform can be good things too. However, the change and reform that conservatism promotes is within the limits of worldly and human nature—to make it better, not perfect. In the merciless march to Utopia promoted by ideology and conservatism’s opposition to ideological madness, Kirk implies that conservatism acts within the boundaries of nature (both earthly and humanly) while ideology seeks to eradicate nature to escape the limits of nature.

Kirk is also apt in noting why ideology is popular. In an age when religious faith wanes and spark notes philosophy becomes the substitute for reading and wrestling with the intellectualism of the Great Books:

Ideology provides sham religion and sham philosophy, comforting in its way to those who have lost or never have known genuine religious faith, and to those who are not sufficiently intelligent to apprehend real philosophy. The fundamental reason why we must set our faces against ideology—so wrote the Swiss editor Hans Barth—is that ideology is opposed to truth: it denies the possibility of truth in politics or in anything else, substituting economic motive and class interest for abiding norms. Ideology even denies human consciousness and power of choice.

This is very true. Many ideologues I have known, from the halls of Yale to online forums, pretend to be interested in philosophy but are minimally knowledgeable in philosophy. They throw out the names Plato, Spinoza, Rousseau, Marx, or Foucault but they know little of these thinkers when you press them or try to converse with them. Likewise, they almost always tend to be atheistic or embrace some personal spirituality that subordinates God (and Christ) to being the ideological prophet of social justice revolution. Their sham religion often amounts to Marx was a real Christian and Jesus was the first socialist, a subordination of religion to an ideological end.

If, however, conservatism principally stands in opposition to ideology, is there a positive approach to conservatism rather than it being a negative phenomenon? Is conservatism more than just a phenomenon of opposition? Kirk answers most definitely, and most hopefully, Yes!

The matter of the “conservative disposition” is where Kirk shines brightest. Looking at the politics of T.S. Eliot, the problems with ideological libertarianism, and the conservative’s home in society, what we begin to see with Kirk is that conservatism is rooted in love: love of self, love of home, love of existence. Far from being a Scrooge, the conservative “finds himself in a realm of mystery and wonder, where duty, discipline, and sacrifice are required—and where the reward is that love which passeth all understanding.” Conservatism sees society as held together not by the fictious social contract of modern political theory but by friendship and love, “the conservatives declare that society is community of souls, joining the dead, the living, and those yet unborn; and that it coheres through what Aristotle called friendship and Christians call love of neighbor.” Conservatism affirms the goodness of existence and the loves human beings cultivate to make sense of the lives they live.

The conservative disposition is predicated on love rather than fear or hatred, which is the disposition of the ideologue. Modern political theory, given to us by Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, and Rousseau is premised on fear and hatred. Is it better to be feared or loved, mused Machiavelli? He answered feared. Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau are misanthropes, they hate other people. The problem of the supposed perfect freedom enjoyed in the state of nature was other people. The state of nature, because other humans exist, descends into the state of war. The problem is always other people. Life becomes “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” to quote Hobbes. Other people and the laws and institutions they create make us all imprisoned and miserable, asserts Rousseau.

From this fear and hatred of others, from this hatred of human nature, the modern political project forsook friendship and love—the two great gifts of understanding politics and existence from the classical and Christian inheritance. No wonder why, in following the path of the modern political philosophers, rather than the gifts of Athens and Jerusalem, we now have hateful and polarized societies where friendship is nearly impossible with our neighbors! Is existence a gift? Is the cosmos beautiful and loving? The ideologue, shaped by the fear and hatred that undergirds modern thinking, answers No!

This, I believe, is Kirk’s greatest contribution—more-so than what he has to say about politics, ideology, and society. “The cosmos” of the ideologue, Kirk explains, “is an arid, loveless, realm, a ‘round prison.’” The disposition of the conservative in contrast with the disposition of the ideologue, whatever form or shape they take, walks the path of awe, mystery, and wonder. The ideologue walks the hellish highway to alienation, emptiness, and loneliness. The conservative disposition leads to grace and thankfulness, a recognition that beauty and love govern all things. The ideological disposition leads to a hatred of existence and belief that nothing matters, nothing governs the world but one’s own choices, which then permits any and all choices to become reality—often directed at destroying the beauty and love that others have out of envy. The ideologue is like Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost, gazing upon the good and beautiful world and being filled with jealousy which propels the desire to destroy.

Concerning the problem of ideological democratism, a term sometimes employed by Kirk but loosely defined, The Politics of Prudence is a very important read as we live through the suffocating tyranny of democratism in the twenty-first century. Kirk, standing in agreement with T.S. Eliot, advocated for a renewal of democracy at the local and humane level, a democracy of the “humane scale.” Democracy is best when practiced at the communal level. This is something Kirk shares with Alexis de Tocqueville who marveled at the localist democratic ethos when he traveled in America during the 1830s.

In looking at the now often derided “neoconservatives,” Kirk demolishes and deconstructs all the lies and grandstanding—peddled by the far left and far right—of some sort of “neocon” conspiracy and cabal. The neoconservatives, Kirk shows, were, in fact, conservatives during the Cold War era. However, Kirk was already detecting the neoconservative drift into ideology: “Democratic Capitalism,” now that the Cold War had ended, and how this prospective new ideology was going to be imposed over the entire world.

Let us not misconstrue Kirk’s opposition to “Democratic Capitalism,” or what he elsewhere calls “democratism.” He notes that the problem with democratism is its simplification of the complexities of market economics and political society governed by democratic means and institutions. Kirk is both a democratic and a capitalist in the little sense, but not in the ideological sense. Kirk warns against the emerging desire to “export” democracy and capitalism to the world in the aftermath of the Cold War. He also reminds Americans that the desire to export democracy and capitalism had gotten America into foreign policy troubles in the 1960s and 1970s. The danger of democratism, as Kirk saw it, was its boundless desire for global domination—the elimination of all alternatives and the singular supremacy of a universal and homogenized vision of the end of history. In a word, the ideology of democratism conceptualizes itself in a way that is ultimately intolerant and imperialistic. Therefore, the irony is, it is not democratic despite claiming that it is, it is not capitalistic and supportive of free markets despite claiming it is.

This ideology of global, imperial, democratism threatens the genuine self-governance of individuals in their local communities and the mom-and-pop shops that served as sources of piety in small and medium-sized towns and suburbs. Kirk wants to rebuild democracy at home, among local communities and with the people who take pride in their homes and with their neighbors. Kirk warns that too much preoccupation with grandiose foreign policy designs will alienate Americans and suffocate the actual heart of American democracy: local communities and pride in those communities.

The Politics of Prudence is an essential and timely read as we deal with many of the same issues that Kirk grappled with 30 years ago. Moreover, in our age of degenerate and polemical rhetoric, it does everyone well to go back to one of the great writers of conservatism to understand conservatism on its own terms rather than on the terms of its critics. For those without much familiarity with Kirk, Federici’s introduction does a great job setting the framework for the reader. One may just be pleasantly surprised and filled with hope for the future by picking up Kirk and rereading him or reading him for the first time.

The Politics of Prudence
By Russell Kirk (Introduction by Michael P. Federici)
Washington DC: Regnery, 2023; 314pp

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