Russell Kirk: The Historian of Conservatism

Scott McLemee, in the Chronicle of Higher Education (May 7, 2004):

W. Wesley McDonald, a professor of political science at Elizabethtown College, could not have planned for his new book, Russell Kirk and the Age of Ideology (University of Missouri Press), to appear in the middle of the recent debate over"intellectual diversity" in academe. But someone who wanted to argue that the deck has been stacked against serious engagement with conservative ideas might well take Mr. McDonald's scholarship on Kirk's legacy as Exhibit A.

Mr. McDonald's book is, after all, the first monograph devoted to the thought of one of the founding fathers of postwar conservatism in the United States. It was Kirk's landmark study The Conservative Mind (1953) that provided activists on the right with a sense that their movement had inherited a serious intellectual legacy -- rather than merely being, as the liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill put it in 1861,"the stupid party."

Today, 10 years after his death, Kirk is still more likely to be discussed in meetings of the Young Republicans than in the seminar room. The first biography of Kirk appeared five years ago; at least two others are now under way. But Mr. McDonald is the first scholar to try to puzzle out the conceptual architecture of Kirk's work -- a body of writing that included memoir, fiction, and essays in cultural criticism, as well as a daily newspaper column syndicated by the Los Angeles Times that ran from 1962 to 1965. (Not to mention his monthly column"From the Academy" for National Review between 1955 and 1981, in which he criticized developments in American higher education.)

"Though he's a very fine thinker," says Mr. McDonald,"Kirk doesn't really provide a rigorous philosophical argument. That's a weakness. I openly admit that, and I try to take it seriously."

His approach to analyzing Kirk's ideas, says Mr. McDonald,"is dialectical. You only understand what something is by defining it in terms of its opposite." At this point, one might well expect him to begin contrasting Kirk with any of dozens of Marxist thinkers studied in the humanities. But Mr. McDonald seems less interested in that sort of ideological distinction than in the way Kirk's thought differs from the worldview of what he calls"movement conservatives" -- activists who pepper their speeches with references to Kirk, but ignore his work.

"One of the main purposes of my book is to rescue Russell Kirk from the ghetto of movement conservatism," says Mr. McDonald."My argument is that he's an intellectual worthy of consideration apart from current politics. Conservative thought is really suffering because it lacks substance and direction. Kirk has much greater significance than what these people are giving to him."

Mr. McDonald is not alone in his frustration: Scholars who call themselves"Kirkians" or"traditionalist conservatives" tend to have severe reservations not only about the present Republican administration but also about some of the dominant strains in conservative policymaking, whether libertarian or neoconservative. As if to make things more complicated, some Kirkians also distinguish themselves from a faction known, half-jokingly, as"paleoconservatives," a group that tends to refer to the events in the United States between 1861 and 1865 as"the War of Northern Aggression."

Such fine shadings of ideological difference do not usually register at the ballot box. But they are a reminder of fundamental conflicts over ideas and values that go beyond the familiar and simplistic distinction between left and right. As Mr. McDonald and other admirers discuss Kirk's ideas and influence, they seem to be introducing a new variation on the theme of"intellectual diversity" -- emphasizing that conservatism itself is heterogeneous. And Kirk's variant of it, some argue, gets short shrift within both academe and the movement itself....