A Conservative Mind, And Devoted Spirit
...literary achievement as huge as it is difficult to categorize. He was not exactly a political theorist, nor really a philosopher, certainly not a historian; and yet his work speaks profound truths about politics, philosophy, and history. An ardent enemy of Communism, he was barely more enthusiastic about the commercial civilization of America. With very strong ideologies and abstraction in politics, he determinedly refused to pay any attention to the circumstances and context in which the thinkers he studied had lived. He loved old cathedral towns and country fields, ancient mansions and Gothic universities; he hated cars, television, and shopping malls. For all his patriotism, one has to wonder how comfortable he ever really felt in late-twentieth-century America.
From Mecosta, for four decades, Kirk fired his observations upon the world: two more major scholarly works, Eliot and His Age and The Roots of American Order, books, essays, ghost stories, lectures, columns for magazines and newspapers. From Mecosta too he cast a sharp and often disapproving eye upon the conservative movement that had sprung up in the years since the publication of The Conservative Mind. He disliked libertarians, and apologists for big business, and neoconservatives. He did not mind making enemies: he separated himself from his old friends at National Review after 1980, and in a 1988 critique of neoconservatism he let loose the startling observation that "not seldom has it seemed as if some eminent Neoconservatives"that capital letter again! "Mistook Tel Aviv for the capital of the United States"(Kirk). By the end of his life, he had circled back to his Taftite origins, and joined the opposition to the war in the Persian Gulf.
Kirk's voice echoed less powerfully in those later years than in the 1950s and 1960s. In part, of course, he was the victim of his own success: with...
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