Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1874

Pencil notes fastened by paper clips into the front of Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1953)

     Professor Russell Kirk, in his scholarly The Conservative Mind, has done a magnificent service to intelligence in the realm of public affairs. The book is essentially a critique of the “liberal tradition” through the prescient eyes and largely in the warning words of the great conservative minds from Burke to Santayana — such liberals as Ricardo, Bentham, Mill, the whole Classical School — not knowing that their “liberalism” in government loaded with “good intentions” was only sheep’s clothing for radicalism, the devil’s brew of totalitarianism.

     These tough-minded conservatives, Burke, Tocqueville, Stephens, Randolph, Calhoun were under no sentimental illusions about the franchise, mass education. They had no positive program, but they smelled the fumes of totalitarianism here while the flame was still small and shown with a rosy glow. They were powerful to warn yet helpless to act, and wide open to the humanitarian charge of callous unconcern. For modern Society — the spontaneous organization of property and men under contract, under the Golden Rule of non-aggression as distinguished /?/ from government, was historically of recent growth and but little known, its potentialities, both public and private all undreamed.

     The 19th century conservatives knew of the dangers inherent in any and all political action (except repeal), yet they knew no other kind. They had no plan of action, no place to go; so, as even until now, those who would save and conserve could only stand by helpless, whether resigned or alarmed, while bureaucratic coercion, authorized by statutes and financed by taxation impeded social growth and undermined the fundamental rights of men.

     But those who have stood fast to conserve the right of property, and thus the rights of free men to create and to prosper mutually by exchange have, like the Greek chorus, at least admonished while their opposite numbers have gone on to demonstrate the terrible futility of the governmental process. The conservative mind has been a but little heeded prophet of social doom — and how it is vindicated in the political futilities of today! Yet it has high-lighted a need. In it intellect has looked forward in one line — along the line of the rationale of “principalities and powers.” It has seen how government — coercion — of or even by, a people, can only limit and destroy freedom, not create it.

    Concerning political liberalism, and the governmentalism that it invokes, it has seen the evil end implicit in the evil means. The conservative high intelligence is now in position to look forward along another line, to foresee the ends implicit in the social — the contractual — relationships and processes by which Western society and its civilization has so far lifted men into great abundance and length of days.