Kirk - The Essential Russell Kirk: Selected Essays

R USSELL A MOS K IRK ( 1918 )

THE ESSENTIAL
RUSSELL KIRK

Selected Essays

EDITED BY
GEORGE A. PANICHAS

Wilmington, Delaware

I offer perpetual congratulation to the scholar; he has drawn the white lot in life. The very disadvantages of his condition point at superiorities. He is too good for the world; he is in advance of his race; his function is prophetic.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Man of Letters
Lectures and Biographical Sketches (1895)

T here is nothing more wholesome than to dip into the strong and steady current of wise judgment.

Paul Elmer More
The Centenary of Sainte-Beuve
Shelburne Essays, Volume III (1905)

I.
THE IDEA OF CONSERVATISM

II.
OUR SACRED PATRIMONY

III.
PRINCIPLES OF ORDER

IV.
THE MORAL IMAGINATION

V.
PLACES AND PEOPLE

VI.
THE DRUG OF IDEOLOGY

VII.
DECADENCE AND RENEWAL IN EDUCATION

VIII.
THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC

IX.
CONSERVATORS OF CIVILIZATION

P REFACE

I

The Essential Russell Kirk has as its chief purpose the task of offering to a new generation of readers representative writings of a distinguished American man of letters of the twentieth century. The crises of modern civilization that Kirk confronted head-on in his lifetime have not abated and now continue into the twenty-first century in forms and with a force and thrust perhaps different from but surely no less threatening than in the preceding century.

To the office of the man of letters Kirk brought considerable distinction, and for which he will be principally remembered and honored. He exemplifies the supreme importance of the Man of Letters in modern Society, about which the nineteenth-century Scots social prophet and historian, Thomas Carlyle, has valuable things to say. The man of letters, he states, is a heroic seeker who proclaims that life must be pitched on a higher plane. Above all, he struggles against the ravages of spiritual paralysis in a world in which the battle of Belief against Unbelief is the never-ending battle. These pregnant words of his famous Scots forefather help us to gauge Kirks calling as a modern man of letters who discharges his function as a guardian of old truths and old rights, and who strains to push things up to their first principles.

For more than forty years and in more than thirty books, and in countless articles, Kirk fought on the front line in the war of ideas. The nine major categories and the selected essays contained in this book present a map of the terrain on which Kirk fought. They identify the particular locales of the battles in which he was engaged, and they also encompass the strategies and tactics of the general warfare which demanded from him the utmost effort, tenacity, courage, belief.

The Idea of Conservatism; Our Sacred Patrimony; Principles of Order; The Moral Imagination; Places and People; The Drug of Ideology; Decadence and Renewal in Education; The American Republic; Conservators of Civilization: these are the respective titles of the nine categories around which The Essential Russell Kirk is organized and developed. They are arranged so as to aid the reader not only in reflecting on the primary questions that Kirks major critical texts pose, but also in measuring the significance of his mission, his work in life. It should also be remarked at this point that a succinct interpretive summary, or overview, introduces each category, and a descriptive headnote precedes each essay. The object of these editorial inclusions is to supply the reader with pertinent background material, as well as to facilitate a more cogent comprehension of the books content in its discrete parts.

The selections featured in this work are indicative of Kirks gifts as an essayist, critic, and lecturer. (He was also an accomplished writer of fiction whose three novels and three collections of ghostly tales constitute a body of work that stands on its own and deserves separate critical comment.) Full-scale essays, reviews, review-essays, prefatory pieces, whether in the form of a foreword or an introduction, public addresses, and entire chapters from his books disclose Kirks range of interests and the nature of his criteria and opinions as a man of letters. Seen in their completeness, these selections disclose his extraordinary breadth and thought as a social critic and an ethical teacher. Whether one studies these writings selectively or systematically, one is bound to respond to the issues they present and to the challenge of Kirks interpretations. And one becomes not a mere spectator to but rather a foot-soldier in what Kirk himself was to experience in a half-century of literary conflict in the modern age.

From these nine categories there emerges a graphic picture of the struggle in which Kirk was involved and in which he displayed unusual perseverance. These categories are closely interconnected and interdependent, as they should be in establishing the main lines of Kirks achievement as a major American thinker and critic in the twentieth century. The organization of this anthology is a thematic one, with the aim of assisting a reader to respond to Kirks fundamental preoccupations, to fathom his critical disquisitions, to hear his distinct voice speaking in each of the selections published here. Additionally, a reader will be enabled to enter the assiduous process of Kirks arguments, to ponder the circumstances that inspired their exposition, and to assess the social, political, intellectual, philosophical, literary, and religious conditions that characterize the historical setting of Kirks commentaries. Although Kirk is examining the prevailing state of American consciousness, his findings and judgments travel beyond regional and temporal frontiers and are founded in universal history and mankind.

In a large sense, then, these categories seek to outline the intellectual and moral struggles in which Kirk took part without interruption, from beginning to end, when only death itself finally intervened. The scope of these epochal struggles is specified here, and is to be seen in its magnitude, its urgency, its significance. It is hoped that the nine categories, and the particular essays found in each, will provide a detailed index to Kirks multiple efforts to expose the profane dialectics of a modern cosmology and to defend the values and principles of a humane civilization. It is hoped, too, that they will substantiate his unfolding vision of order and virtue, which he steadfastly avowed as a moral historian, a political philosopher, a conservative humanist, and a social and cultural critic.

The pressing needs of the American community and the condition of the American soul are pivotal concerns which Kirk addresses in essay after essay with fierce independence of thought. His prose writings, as they are arranged here, are further designed to involve the reader as an active player in American social and cultural history in a time of swift transition and change in the years following World War II. A discriminate reading of these writings will help pinpoint the consequences of these changes as they continue to affect the present-day situation. Even for those who harbor doubts about or objections to the traditions and the institutions of Western society, the pervasive seriousness of these writings will prove compelling and will illustrate the truth expressed by the ancients, that the greater joy comes from seriousness.