Russell Kirk: American Conservative by Bradley J. Birzer (review)

Russell Kirk (1918-–1994) was one of the three or four most important figures in the revival of American conservatism after World War II. Although he worked for Barry Goldwater in 1964 and was a friend of President Reagan in the 1980s, his conservatism was more cultural and literary than political. Political activists on the right regarded him as an impractical dreamer. Whimsical, mannered, a baroque stylist, he gathered disciples and admirers at his out-of-the-way home in Mecosta, Michigan.

Bradley Birzer was one of them. He is now the Russell Amos Kirk Professor of History at Hillsdale College, and there can be no doubt that this admiring, sympathetic, and generous biography is an inside job. He makes the common biographer’s mistake of overestimating his subject’s importance and implies, at times, that the survival of Western civilization through the grimmest years of the Cold War depended on Kirk’s wisdom. The upside is that he has enjoyed access to all of Kirk’s papers and the sympathetic help of Kirk’s family and friends, giving us the fullest account of his subject’s life hitherto.

Kirk, born in 1918 in Michigan, came of age in the Depression, took an early dislike to academia during an M.A. program at Duke University, and was drafted into the army in 1942. Bizarrely, he spent the whole of his four-year enlistment at a chemical weapons testing station in the Utah desert, hated it, but had plenty of time for the encyclopedic reading on which his erudition was based. To his own astonishment the book version of his postwar Ph.D. thesis (from St. Andrews in Scotland) became a best seller. It was The Conservative Mind (1953), which identified Edmund Burke’s protest against the French Revolution as the fount of modern conservatism.

Birzer is at his best in tracing the intellectual influences on Kirk, which led him first to Stoicism and then to a mid-life Catholic conversion. His greatest debts among the moderns were to Irving Babbitt, Albert Jay Nock, and T. S. Eliot. What made Kirk troublesome to many of his conservative contemporaries was that he detested philosophical materialism, and regarded capitalism as hardly better than communism. This belief intensified. As Birzer shows, early editions of The Conservative Mind paid tribute to libertarianism and praised one of its advocates, Isabel Paterson. Later editions (there were seven in all) suppressed these passages completely.

Kirk’s name is often linked with that of William F. Buckley, Jr., as postwar conservative pioneers. They became friends but could hardly have been more different: Buckley was urban, gregarious, combative as a writer and debater, and loved to be in the thick of political affairs, whereas Kirk was rural, shy, a loner. Buckley’s journal National Review, founded in 1955, was irreverent and lively; it brought together diverse conservative writers from many points of the ideological spectrum. In its early years Kirk contributed frequent articles, mostly to deplore progressive education, but he declined to let his name appear on its masthead.

Kirk’s own journal, Modern Age, by contrast, was stuffy and dull, not really academic but not popular either, a point Birzer cannot bring himself to admit. Kirk feuded with his co-editor and soon abandoned it, reverting to his preferred option of working alone. He had abandoned a tenure-track position at Michigan State University, his alma mater, in 1953 and set out to prove that a sufficiently hardworking individual could make his own way as a writer and lecturer.

He wrote gothic fiction and ghost stories, loved mysteries, tried to make his home the Mid-Western equivalent of John R. R. Tolkien’s elfish fantasy-land, Rivendell, and felt a powerful attraction to the non-rational aspects of Catholicism. Vatican Council II appalled him, particularly its aesthetics. On rebuilding his home after a fire in 1975, he incorporated many of the discarded furnishings, stained glass, and statues from a...