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

A biography of the important, albeit now virtually forgotten, traditionalist conservative Russell Kirk has been long overdue and with this splendid intellectual history about the Christian humanism of Kirk’s work, the defect in understanding the Kirkian perspective on American conservatism has been rectified. And it has been accomplished by a writer whose own Christian humanism, midwestern roots and Michigan home—much akin to Kirk himself—transcends every page. At many points in the book, it was unclear whether I was reading Kirk or Bradley Birzer. This is a biography of veneration and not a critical assessment of Kirk’s life and work. It is also a biography which is more about Kirk’s connectedness to the ideas he studied rather than telling us much about his life and times (there is one page on Kirk’s relationship with his four daughters and half a chapter on his marriage to Annette Courtemanche). That may be troubling for many readers who would want an exhaustive discussion of Kirk’s place in conservatism and more understanding of Kirk the man—a traditional biographical approach—but Birzer’s understanding of Kirk is within the context of the ideas he put forth and in this respect, his work is truly an engaging and beautifully written intellectual biography.

Why is Kirk an important figure to modern conservatism and why is he not better remembered if he was? Kirk was not political and thereby readers who will want to understand the rise of the political Right will not find much in this work to interest them. Kirk constantly stated—and Birzer joins him in this regard—that politics was for the quarter-educated. Yet Kirk worked for and wrote speeches for Barry Goldwater in 1964, sought out and received invitations from presidents like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, and by the end of his life, in 1992, supported the populist insurgency of Patrick Buchanan (a strange episode as Buchanan was known as a critic of Israel, and a controversial columnist who had written some columns akin to Holocaust revisionism). Why was political conservatism okay when Kirk embraced it, but when others did, they were quarter educated? It is a question unaddressed by Birzer, who often in the book is critical of those who embrace political conservatism at the expense of humanist conservatism. At one point, Birzer makes the shocking claim that Barry Goldwater was more intelligent than Ronald Reagan, an extraordinary statement for any historian who has read the writings of both men (or by the accomplishments of Reagan as president).

Birzer demonstrates why Kirk’s thought and contributions were important to the development of humanist conservatism in twentieth-century America. The development of this tradition after World War II was shaped by the experience of war. For Kirk, it was time spent in the deserts of Utah as a draftee, and as someone horrified by the regimentation of military life. But the war years gave Kirk ample time to read and he did so diligently and with great breadth. He also kept a journal which reveals much in the mind of the youthful Russell Kirk, including his disdain for the use of the atomic bomb (a similarity he shared with another emerging traditional conservative, the University of Chicago professor Richard Weaver). Kirk argued how the bomb represented a new departure in war and the Americans were culpable in this new barbarism. Both Kirk and the author share this vision of America’s use of the atomic bomb against Japan; neither consider the context or fact that the bomb, as horrifying as it was, actually saved lives and demonstrated in it use the futility (it is to be hoped) of ever using such a weapon again.

Kirk consistently battled ugliness, opposed regimentation by the army, government or universities. He famously resigned his position at Michigan State University due to it being a “behemoth” (though the revelation that this was as much a stunt by Kirk is interesting) and sought to...