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Home , Libertarian conservatism, Philadelphia Society, Russell Kirk

No. 1035 Delivered June 22, 2007 July 10, 2007

The Life and Legacy of George H. Nash

In the book of Ecclesiasticus it is written: “Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us.” We gather today to honor the memory of a famous Talking Points man, a man who earned his fame by writing about • Russell Kirk’s magnum opus, The Conservative those who, in an intellectual and spiritual sense, were Mind, published in 1953, stimulated the de- our fathers. In the great chain of being that we call velopment of a self-consciously conservative Western civilization, Russell Kirk was a sturdy link. intellectual movement in America. It gave the movement an identity it had previously lacked. Some years ago, a young libertarian wrote a book • Kirk demonstrated that intelligent conserva- entitled It Usually Begins with . I do not tism was not a mere smokescreen for self- know how many young conservatives in 2007 would ishness, as dismissive liberals charged. It say that their intellectual awakening began with was an attitude toward life with substance the books and essays of Russell Kirk. But certainly and moral force of its own. many in this room can testify to his influence and • He tirelessly reminded his readers that politi- especially to the impact of his masterful book, The cal problems were fundamentally religious Conservative Mind. and moral problems and that social regenera- tion was a goal which required action at lev- As most everyone in this audience knows, The els beyond the political and economic. The Conservative Mind was Russell Kirk’s magnum opus. Conservative Mind endures because it focuses More than 50 years after its publication, it remains in our attention on ends and not just on means. print in several languages. For most scholars, the • Over the next four decades, Kirk churned publication of a book of this distinction would be the out a prodigious torrent of writings that ele- culmination of a career. For Kirk, who was only 34 at vated the tone and substance of conserva- the time, it was just an opening salvo. In the years to tive discourse. He was a bridge-builder to come, he founded two influential journals (Modern the classics of our culture. In the great chain Age and The University Bookman); published a regular of being that we call Western civilization, column for more than two decades in National Russell Kirk was a sturdy link.

Review; wrote a major biography of T.S. Eliot and a This paper, in its entirety, can be found at: classic history entitled The Roots of American Order; www.heritage.org/Research/Thought/hl1035.cfm did more than anyone living to revive The Russell Kirk Lectures as a fountainhead of conservative thought; completed Produced by the B. Kenneth Simon a superb memoir called The Sword of Imagination; and Center for American Studies Published by churned out a prodigious torrent of other writings. 214 Massachusetts Avenue, NE Washington, DC 20002–4999 (202) 546-4400 • heritage.org Nothing written here is to be construed as necessarily reflect- ing the views of The Heritage Foundation or as an attempt to aid or hinder the passage of any bill before Congress. No. 1035 Delivered June 22, 2007

How prodigious? According to Charles Brown, Kirk still essential? Before we can ponder these ques- who has just completed a comprehensive bibliogra- tions, we need a clearer sense of just what kind of phy of Kirk’s works, Dr. Kirk wrote 26 nonfiction he espoused and of where he fits in the books, 9 volumes of novels and collected short jigsaw puzzle of modern American conservatism. stories, 255 book reviews, 68 introductions and forewords to other peoples’ books, 814 essays and Bookish and Precocious short pieces published in periodicals, and nearly To understand his message, we need to know the 3,000 newspaper columns. Among all the founding messenger. Who was Russell Kirk? He was born in fathers of modern American conservatism, only 1918 in the village of Plymouth, Michigan, a few William F. Buckley Jr. rivaled him in productivity. miles outside Detroit. His father was a railroad engi- Surely, a man of such phenomenal intellectual neer who dropped out of school before the sixth output and versatility deserves to be honored, and grade. In Plymouth, and in the hamlet of Mecosta in so Kirk has been and continues to be. Here at The the “stump country” of central Michigan, Kirk lived Heritage Foundation you will find a portrait of him and grew to young adulthood. A romantic - on the wall. If you exercise your imagination a little, alist by instinct, as it were, he came early to share his you may hear echoes of his voice in the Heritage father’s prejudices against the “assembly-line civili- auditorium where he delivered more than 50 lec- zation” already penetrating Michigan under the tures in a little over a decade. aegis of Henry Ford. Sometimes it is hinted that Kirk is slowly becom- Kirk was a shy boy, bookish, and precocious. By ing a forgotten figure. The evidence suggests other- the impressionable age of eight he was devouring wise. Many of his books remain in print, and others the novels of the man he later called his “literary are in the pipeline for republication. Today we cele- mentor,” Sir . The imprint on the boy’s brate the most recent addition to his bibliography: a imagination was indelible. By the time he was ten collection of his most outstanding essays, impres- (he tells us), he had read all of the works of Victor sively edited by Professor George Panichas.1 The Hugo, Charles Dickens, and Mark Twain. By the title of this volume, The Essential Russell Kirk, is dou- time he was a teenager, Kirk’s cast of mind was bly meaningful. It suggests, first, that the essays fixed. Growing up almost as an only child (his one therein contain the essence of Kirk’s teaching, and, sibling, a sister, was seven years younger), he lived secondly, that Kirk himself is essential—essential to in a world of old houses, old villages, old books, American conservatism. I hope you will read this and elderly relatives, many of whom believed in splendid volume and agree. spirits and ghosts. No, Kirk has not been forgotten, nor is he likely After graduating from high school in 1936, Kirk to be anytime soon. And yet there is a sense, at least entered Michigan State College (now Michigan in some corners of the American Right, that in State University), whose spirit of “conformity,” util- 2007, 13 years after his passing, Kirk has come to be itarianism, and “dim animosity toward liberal edu- a figure more admired than studied. Some observers cation” grated against his sensibility. Possessing little have suggested that much of the praise heaped money (the Great Depression was still on), he lived upon Kirk since his death has been “empty homage” frugally, subsisting much of the time on a diet of by people who covet his prestige but care little for peanut butter and crackers, and graduated as a his- his teaching. Others lament that American higher major in 1940. education—the recurrent target of Kirk’s fusil- For the next year, Kirk was a graduate student in lades—seems more degraded than ever, at least by history at , where he wrote a mas- the standards Kirk struggled to uphold. ter’s thesis later published as Randolph of Is Kirk’s conservatism, then, a “live option” for Roanoke. In it he clearly sympathized with the ante- Americans in 2007? To put it another way: Is Russell bellum Virginian’s aristocratic, states’ agrari-

1. George A. Panichas, ed., The Essential Russell Kirk (Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2007).

page 2 No. 1035 Delivered June 22, 2007 anism. During this year, the young scholar from already an Anglophile in his literary tastes, Kirk fell Michigan began to get acquainted with the conser- deeply in love with his ancestral homeland. There, vative South. He read approvingly the Agrarian he became a connoisseur of ancient castles, old manifesto, I’ll Take My Stand. For the rest of his life country houses, and the lore of old St. Andrews. he considered himself a “Northern Agrarian.” There, and in rural England, which he avidly In the summer of 1941, Kirk found himself explored on foot, he found “the metaphysical prin- working at Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village. Even ciple of continuity given visible reality.” There, Rus- before his experiences at the Ford , Kirk sell Kirk found a way to live. Some years later, he had developed a distaste for big business, big labor, himself became a country squire, as we shall see, and big . His year or so at Ford did recreating at the old family house in Mecosta some- nothing to change his attitude. Indeed, his dislike thing of the lifestyle he had cherished in Scotland. of bureaucracy and what he called federal “para- Not without reason did he come to refer to himself sites” was, if anything, increasing. He denounced as “the last bonnet laird of the stump country.” the military draft as “slavery.” He published his The St. Andrews experience affected Kirk in first scholarly article, in which he advocated a another way: It powerfully reinforced his staunchly return to “Jeffersonian principles.” All in all, his classical . Reflecting some was the Midwestern of years later upon his St. Andrews days, when he had Senator Robert Taft. lived in a garret and skimped on the consumption Kirk’s drifting ended abruptly in August 1942 of food, he wrote: when he was drafted into the Army. For nearly four It is good for a student to be poor. Getting and years he lived in the desolate wastes of Utah (and, spending, the typical American college stu- later, at a camp in Florida) as a sergeant in the dent lays waste his powers. Work and contem- Chemical Warfare Service. In one respect, Kirk’s plation don’t mix, and university days ought to wartime experience proved to be invaluable: As a be days of contemplation. clerk with largely routine duties, he found a large For the rest of his life, Kirk held unswervingly to amount of time to read. And read he did—Albert his approach to higher education, embodied in St. Jay Nock’s Memoirs, Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, Irving Andrews, and excoriated the decadence symbolized Babbitt’s and Leadership, the political for him by Michigan State. thought of , and countless classics of English and ancient literature. In still another way, St. Andrews left an indelible imprint upon this highly imaginative young man. After his discharge from the Army in 1946, Even before he arrived in Scotland, Kirk knew—as Kirk was appointed an assistant professor of his- he later wrote—that “Mine was not an Enlightened tory at his alma mater, Michigan State. On the mind.” It was (he said), “a Gothic mind, medieval in side, he founded and operated a used book store. its temper and structure.” But the young scholar with antiquarian interests was not long for the world of East Lansing. In I did not love cold harmony and perfect regu- 1948, Kirk—who was partly Scottish by ances- larity of organization; what I sought was vari- try—undertook doctoral studies at St. Andrews ety, mystery, tradition, the venerable, the University in Scotland. In 1952, he earned the awful. I despised sophisters and calculators; I university’s Doctor of Letters degree—the only was groping for faith, honor, and prescriptive American ever to do so. loyalties. I would have given any number of neo-classical pediments for one poor battered Years at St. Andrews gargoyle. The years 1948 to 1952 were more than just a In misty, medieval St. Andrews and the Scottish time of intensive study, however. In many ways they countryside, Kirk found enough to nourish his set the mold for the rest of Kirk’s career. Already imagination for the remainder of his life. His later deeply attached to rural and ancestral ways, and gothic novel, Old House of Fear, was set in Scotland.

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It sold more copies than all his other books put lems” and that social regeneration was a goal which together. required action at levels beyond the political and Finally, it was at St. Andrews University that Kirk economic. This is one reason why The Conservative discovered—or, more precisely, discovered more Mind has outlived the special circumstances of its deeply—the great intellectual hero of his life: birth: It focuses our attention on ends and not just Edmund Burke. To Kirk’s Midwestern, grassroots, on means. American conservatism, and to his “aristocratic” Kirk did this, moreover, by fearlessly grounding literary humanism, was now added another layer his conservatism in , particularly Christian- of thought: Burkean , which Kirk ity. In an age of predominantly secular public dis- acclaimed as “the true school of conservative princi- course, he unabashedly spoke of the soul and of his ple.” Burke’s writings formed the basis for his doc- conviction that God rules . In an age of the toral dissertation, which was published in 1953 as growing hegemony of the social sciences, he defi- The Conservative Mind. antly quoted poetry and wrote ghostly fiction with a moral twist. Indeed, I can think of no conservative Giving Conservatives an Identity in the past half century who resorted as frequently Of the detailed substance of Kirk’s book, I will as did Kirk to works of literature to buttress his say little, since most of you, I presume, have already social and political commentary. You will find abun- read it. But its significance for American conserva- dant evidence of this in the volume we are helping tism deserves further comment. What Kirk did was to launch today. to demonstrate that intelligent conservatism was The author of The Conservative Mind was not not a mere smokescreen for selfishness. It was an indifferent to the worldly concerns of politics and attitude toward life with substance and moral force economics. A little later in his career, for example, of its own. A century earlier, had he helped to launch the Goldwater-for-President dismissed conservatives as “the stupid party.” In movement. But fundamentally, Kirk realized that 1950, an eminent American literary critic had dared political activism was not his calling. He was, rather, to assert that was “the sole intellectual a moralist and man of letters whose vocation, as he tradition in the United States.” After the appearance saw it, was to remind us, in ’s words, of of The Conservative Mind, the American intellectual “the truths we keep coming back and back to.” landscape assumed a different shape. Kirk’s tour de force breached the wall of liberal condescension. He The Bohemian Tory made it respectable for sophisticated people to iden- It was to these truths that Kirk returned, in more tify themselves as men and women of the Right. ways than one, in 1953. In that year—the very year Above all, The Conservative Mind stimulated the he became an academic celebrity—Kirk coura- development of a self-consciously conservative in- geously resigned his teaching position at Michigan tellectual movement in America in the early years of State—appalled, he wrote, by the administration’s the Cold War. In the words of the book’s publisher, deliberate dumbing down of educational standards. , Kirk gave an “amorphous, scattered” (The president of the university at the time had only opposition to liberalism an “identity.” one earned degree: a Bachelor of Science degree in All this was a remarkable accomplishment for a poultry husbandry. Kirk disparaged him as a “chick- single volume by a little-known author in 1953. enologist.”) Preferring “unsalaried independence” The magnitude of Kirk’s achievement becomes (as he put it) to the corrupting mediocrity of Aca- even more impressive when we observe that The deme, he took up the uncertain life of a professional Conservative Mind was not, in the conventional writer and lecturer. Declining a host of academic job sense, a political book. In its 450 pages he laid out offers, he instead went back to remote Mecosta, no elaborate agenda for legislation. Instead, he tire- Michigan (pop. 200)—and to the old family house lessly reminded his readers that political problems on Piety Hill, to live with his widowed grandmother were fundamentally “religious and moral prob- and two maiden great aunts.

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In his history of published last Such sentiments, which Kirk expressed with year, Professor Jeffrey Hart, who knew Kirk, gusto in The Conservative Mind and elsewhere, did described him as a “self-invented , pro- not exactly endear him to libertarians. Nor did his digiously learned.” By the mid-1950s his distinctive frequent fulminations against persona seemed complete. Not yet married, the and the gospel of Progress. In 1955, the editor of the peripatetic bachelor proudly called himself a “Bohe- libertarian Freeman magazine, a man named Frank mian Tory.” He defined a bohemian as “a wandering Chodorov, commissioned a critical article on Kirk and often impecunious man of letters or arts, indif- and his so-called new conservatism. The author of ferent to the demands of bourgeois fad and foible.” the article was an argumentative libertarian (and He hated television, which he called “Demon TV.” former Communist) named Frank Meyer. The trou- He refused to drive an automobile, which he labeled ble with Kirk and his allies, said Meyer, was a lack of a “mechanical .” grounding in “clear and distinct principle.” For all It is entirely possible that Kirk would have the froth and evocative tone of their writings, they remained a brilliant, if somewhat reclusive, social failed utterly to provide a crisp analytic framework critic, writing for literary journals and Sunday sup- for opposing the real enemy——that plements, had not William F. Buckley Jr. come call- was threatening to engulf us all. Kirk had no stan- ing in Mecosta in 1955. Buckley was about to dards, said Meyer, no principle for distinguishing launch a conservative magazine called National between what was good and bad in the status quo. Review, and he wanted Kirk to write a regular col- Meyer was additionally angered by Kirk’s sweeping umn for it. To Buckley’s delight, Kirk immediately condemnation of “.” The fiery ex-rad- agreed to do so. But to Buckley’s dismay, his host ical, who believed that “all value resides in the indi- refused to be identified on the magazine’s masthead vidual,” felt that Kirk did not comprehend the as one of its editors. And therein hangs a tale which principles and institutions of a free society. To illuminates much about modern American conser- underscore the point, Meyer’s attack on Kirk was vatism and Kirk’s place in it. given the title “Collectivism Rebaptized.” For Kirk, such an assault was disagreeable, if not Rivals for Intellectual Leadership surprising, considering its source. Far more disturb- For in 1955, Kirk’s Burkeanism was not the ing to him was what transpired next. As it hap- only school of right-wing thought vying for prom- pened, Kirk in 1955 was in the process of founding inence. Another intellectual tendency, known in his own magazine——when Meyer’s those days as “classical liberalism” or “- blast appeared. Someone—Kirk believed it was ism” but generally known to us today as libertari- either Meyer or Chodorov—sent a copy of Meyer’s anism, was also stirring in the United States. critical article to every member of Kirk’s board of Among its adherents, broadly speaking, were such advisors. To Kirk this was a blatant attempt to free- economists as , Lud- undercut him with his sponsors and perhaps kill wig von Mises, and , and the Modern Age in its womb. So when Kirk learned that novelist Ayn Rand. Buckley intended to publish Meyer and Chodorov To Russell Kirk, “true conservatism”—Burke’s in National Review, the Bohemian Tory declined to conservatism—was utterly antithetical to unre- be listed on the masthead as an editor. He was not strained and the egoistic of indi- about to accept any appearance of responsibility for vidualism. “Individualism is social atomism,” he publishing the likes of Chodorov and Meyer, whom exclaimed; “conservatism is community of spirit.” he labeled “the Supreme Soviet of .” Spiritually, he said, individualism was a “hideous And when Kirk discovered that Chodorov and Mey- solitude.” On one occasion Kirk even criticized er had been placed on the new magazine’s mast- “individualism” as anti-Christian. No one, he assert- head, he ordered Buckley to remove his own name ed, could logically be a Christian and an individual- from that page, where he had been briefly listed as ist at the same time. an associate and contributor. Kirk vowed that

page 5 No. 1035 Delivered June 22, 2007 though he might write for the same magazine as repudiated what he called the “Burke ‘cultists’”— Meyer and Chodorov, he would not be “cheek by above all, Russell Kirk. Privately, Kendall called his jowl with them in the masthead.” own book The Conservative Affirmation (1963) a Buckley, who was trying to forge conservatism’s “declaration of war” against Kirk. diverse elements into a coalition, was perturbed. He To Kendall, Kirk’s limitations as a conservative insisted that Meyer was not out to “get” Kirk and teacher were several. Kirk wrote (said Kendall) undermine his influence—although Kirk had what “with an eye too much to Burke and not enough to he considered evidence to the contrary. But Kirk did the Framers” of the American . He had not relent. For the next 25 years, he wrote steadily insufficient grasp of American conservatism and the for National Review—in fact, wrote more for it, I American tradition, particularly as explicated by The believe, than any other person except possibly Federalist Papers. He was “too far above the fray” Buckley himself. But he did not add his name to its and too lacking in clarity about the actual issues in masthead. He remained in National Review but not the ongoing liberal–conservative “war” to serve as a quite of it. good guide to the conservative “resistance.” Kendall It is not possible to give you here a full account of also objected to what he called Kirk’s “defeatism”— the subsequent feud (as some have called it) his sense that contemporary conservatism was between Kirk and Frank Meyer. So far as I know, fighting a noble but losing battle. In truth, Kendall they never met nor fully reconciled, though they did countered, the conservative cause (properly under- correspond and did, I think, develop a measure of stood) had not been routed at all—certainly not respect for each other. Interestingly, each became a in the political arena, where, in his view, the real convert to Roman Catholicism—Kirk in 1964 and battles between Right and Left were being fought. Meyer on his deathbed in 1972. Perhaps, in the end, Privately, Kendall contrasted Kirk’s “literary” conser- they were not so far apart as it seemed. vatism with his own “marketplace conservatism, not very elegant.” Nevertheless, for a long time they personified the two polarities in postwar conservative thought: So much for Kirk’s critics on the Right. Suffice it Meyer the arch-libertarian, for whom freedom to to say here that from the mid-1950s forward Kirk choose was the highest political good, and Kirk the responded vigorously to the challenges hurled arch-traditionalist, who sought to instruct his read- against his formulation of the conservative creed. ers on the proper choices. The important point is Toward doctrinaire libertarianism (especially as that the difference between them was more than expounded by someone like Ayn Rand), he personal. Other conservative intellectuals in the remained utterly uncompromising. It was, he 1950s and beyond were also disturbed by Kirk’s declared in the 1980s, “as alien to real American seemingly nostalgic and indiscriminate yearning for conservatism as is .” It was “an ideology a pre-modern world. Kirk’s repeated invocation of of universal selfishness,” and he added: “We flawed “the wisdom of our ancestors” was no doubt useful, human creatures are sufficiently selfish already, the conservative scholar Richard Weaver remarked without being exhorted to pursue selfishness on on one occasion, but the question was: which principle.” To those who asserted that his Burkean ancestors? “After all,” said Weaver, “Adam is our conservatism was insufficiently principled and ancestor.... If we have an ancestral legacy of wis- mired in historical contingency, he reinterpreted dom, we have also an ancestral legacy of folly....” Edmund Burke as a thinker in the “” tra- dition—a tradition transcending national borders Nor was Meyer the only rival with whom Kirk and changing social conditions. To those who had to contend for intellectual leadership of the thought that Kirk slighted the role of reason in his emerging conservative movement. Another was the defense of what he called the Permanent Things, he political scientist Willmoore Kendall, who had been increasingly grounded his insights on what he one of Buckley’s mentors at Yale. Never a man to shy called the moral imagination. To those who dispar- from a rough and tumble argument, Kendall openly aged his conservatism as an alien hothouse plant, he

page 6 No. 1035 Delivered June 22, 2007 reaffirmed Burke’s intellectual influence on Ameri- month period between mid-1967 and mid-1968, can statesmen and emphasized the pre-modern for example, he delivered about 150 lectures roots of American order. Repeatedly, for example, he around the country. highlighted the most conservative features of the Although married life imposed new obligations American war for independence and its culminating on Kirk, it also created new opportunities to in- achievement, the Constitution. crease his influence on American conservatism. It is sometimes said that as men become old, they With Annette as his helpmeet, the Bohemian Tory revert to the political mindset of their youth. In the evolved into a Tory squire and paterfamilias: the final decade of his life, Kirk, it seems to me, laird of Piety Hill. Willmoore Kendall privately returned more overtly—at least in his politics—to called him “the Benevolent Sage of Mecosta”—a the noninterventionist, Taftite, bedrock conserva- designation I think Kirk would have enjoyed. tism of his boyhood. He did so, in part, under the And like all sages, he attracted inquiring students stress of the growing quarrel between the so-called to his door. With the assistance of the Intercollegiate neoconservatives and their traditionalist right-wing Studies Institute, he held periodic conferences— critics, the most militant of whom took the label of called Piety Hill seminars—at his home in Mecosta: paleoconservatives. In this imbroglio, which still scores of them over a period of 20 years. According continues today, a number of Kirk’s friends, such as to Annette, a total of two thousand students and M. E. Bradford, were firmly in the paleoconservative professors participated in these events. For some it camp, and toward it Kirk tended to gravitate. In was a life-changing experience. With the help of the 1988, in a controversial address at The Heritage Wilbur Foundation, the impecunious refugee from Foundation, he mixed considerable praise for the what he called Behemoth University created his neoconservatives with mordant criticism. The next own informal campus in Mecosta—an endeavor year he permitted his name to go on the masthead of that persists today in the Russell Kirk Center for the paleoconservative monthly, Chronicles, where it Cultural Renewal. If he had not married, probably remained for approximately three years until he none of this would have happened, and his impact took it off. In 1991 he condemned the first Gulf War on American conservatism would have been less. as an arrogant and imprudent “war for an oil-can.” The next year he served as chairman of Patrick What, finally, may we say about Kirk’s place in Buchanan’s presidential campaign in Michigan. the galaxy of American conservatism? First, a word about his message. More than any other conserva- In general, though, Kirk tried to stay aloof from tive writer of his era, he elevated the tone and sub- the factional infighting that was once again afflicting stance of conservative discourse. As Gregory Wolfe the Right. Early in his career, he had described him- has put it, he was a “bridge-builder” to “the classics self as one who played “a lone hand,” and to a con- of our culture.” Whatever we may think about his siderable extent he succeeded. It is one reason why, interpretation of Burke, or of the American Revolu- at his death in 1994, he was so widely respected by tion, or of any other past or present controversy, his fellow conservatives. Kirk’s legacy as a moralist endures. He elevated our The Benevolent Sage of Mecosta discourse—and our vision. There was another reason for this respect, which Secondly, a word about the messenger. Kirk’s I must touch upon before closing. In 1964, at the anti-modern persona did not win universal appro- age of almost 46, Russell Kirk married. In the next bation on the American Right. It attracted some and 11 years he became the father of four daughters. repelled others. And it raised a perennial challenge With his new station in life came new duties; as he for those who would propagate his teachings: remarked in his memoirs, “married men require namely, how adversarial toward modernity can one money.” The years ahead brought little diminution become without losing one’s ability to influence in the pace of his intellectual activity, nor could one’s fellow men and women? We might call this the there be, with a growing family to support. In a 12- dilemma of traditionalist conservatism in untradi- tional times.

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Here Kirk himself gave us a clue on how to fruit, as this scintillating volume, The Essential resolve it. In the words of an old Christian hymn, Russell Kirk, attests. “This is My Father’s World.” Russell Kirk knew In a way, Kirk’s life illustrates the truth of a this, and because of that, he never withdrew bit- remark attributed to the : “If terly into a “hideous solitude.” He never gave up you stand still long enough, sooner or later you’re on communicating with the world around him. avant-garde.” Russell Kirk did not stand still all his “This is My Father’s World,” and as Kirk liked to life, but on the issues that truly mattered he stood say, cheerfulness keeps breaking in. He did not let his ground. And because he did, we, his grateful his critique of modernity lead him into the Slough heirs, can carry on. of Despond. —George H. Nash is Senior Fellow at the Russell Of Kirk’s career, it can well be said that he took Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal and President of the the road less traveled by. No doubt he paid a price . He is the author of The Conserva- for his independence—in diminished income, in tive Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, caricature at times, and in lost prestige among the 30th Anniversary Edition (Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, American professoriate. And yet his labors bore 2006).

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