by Mark G. Malvasi

Russell Kirk

America is the land of progress, speculative, contingent, pragmatic, experimental, traditionless. An American conservatism, accordingly, is oxymoronic, blundering, graceless, and embarrassing in a society devoted to change and forgetful of the past. “The storybook truth about American history,” began Louis Hartz in The Liberal Tradition in America, is that the country “was settled by men who fled from the feudal and clerical oppressions of the Old World. If there is anything in this view…then the outstanding thing about the American community in Western history ought to be the non-existence of those oppressions, or since the reaction against them was in the broadest sense liberal, that the American community is a liberal community.”[1] In 1953, two years before the appearance of The Liberal Tradition in America, Russell Kirk, then an unknown professor at Michigan State College (later University), had published The Conservative Mind. Kirk not only announced the existence of a vibrant Anglo-American conservative tradition, but, as his publisher Henry Regnery declared, he gave “coherence and integrity” to the postwar conservative movement in the United States.[2] [Read more...]