Russell Kirk's Revolution of Memory
As the American republic approaches the 250th anniversary of her birth, conservatives face a serious paradox: How can we ever hope to preserve a revolutionary foundation? After all, men like Edmund Burke and Klemens von Metternich developed European conservatism as a reaction against the French Revolution. By contrast, Leo Strauss wrote in Liberalism Ancient and Modern, "this country came into being through a revolution, a violent change or break with the past." He thought it was therefore amusing yet appropriate that "[o]ne of the most conservative groups here calls itself Daughters of the American Revolution." Is American conservatism, then, a contradiction in terms? Is the republic just another force of boundless modernity, hurling the world into perpetual revolution?
To solve this riddle, Mark Henrie turned, in an essay recently republished by Modern Age, to the founding father of the American conservative movement: Russell Kirk. The Sage of Mecosta, he argued, "eschew[ed] 'abstractions'" and rejected the idea that the American founders bequeathed to their descendants any kind of ideology. Instead, Kirk preferred to focus on the deep rootedness of American politics and culture in the Western tradition, stressing the continuity of civilization rather than any revolutionary rupture.
While this assessment of Kirk's devotion to the particular is worthwhile, even vital, in an age of ideology, it also somewhat understates his deep and abiding appreciation for the American founding. In The Conservative Mind, for instance, Kirk declared that the United States Constitution is "the most sagacious conservative document in the history of Western civilization," and praised "the fathers of the American Republic" for "devis[ing] an instrument of government unparalleled as a conservative power for ordered liberty." Far from altogether rejecting the notion that the American founding brought forth a new dedication to liberty in the world, he held that the particulars of the nation's revolutionary birth present a path to universal truth.
The American founding could play this role in Kirk's thought because he understood it as a revolution of memory. Although he rejected a Whiggish theory of history as perpetual progress, he nonetheless saw the creation of the American republic as a culminating moment for Western civilization. The War for Independence and its consequences were a crisis that caused the founders to remember their great inheritance, and search out new modes and orders to preserve it. Conservatives in our time likewise face a crisis; Kirk's scholarship can guide us to our own revolution of memory.
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION AND MORAL IMAGINATION
Memory is a vital element of what Kirk called the "moral imagination." He took the phrase from the Anglo-Irish statesman Edmund Burke, who used it to signify, in Kirk's words, "that power of ethical perception which strides beyond the barriers of private experience and momentary events," and an apprehension "of right order in the soul and right order in the commonwealth." Moral imagination is communicated through institutions — such as schools, churches, and families — as well as through the great literature of the West. It allows us to understand "the dignity of human nature"; it is a sense of the permanent things that gives order to our liberty.
Most revolutions, according to Kirk, seek to topple this moral imagination and replace it with ideology. This was the fanaticism, a kind of "inverted religion," that defined the French Revolution and other modern totalitarianisms. Inspired by abstract theories about human nature's perfectibility, ideologues violently reject traditional order and seek to reconstitute society according to a warped political geometry. They isolate certain real goods — liberté, égalité, fraternité — and pursue a radical agenda to promote them at the expense of all others, and even to remake the world.
Wary as he was of ideology, Kirk could defend the American founding because he understood that our Revolution did not have these characteristics. As he put it in one essay, the founders advanced a "Whig revolution" that aimed at a "recovery of what was being lost," not a "Jacobin revolution [that] meant destruction of the fabric of society." Revolution, for the Americans, was a return to the traditions of self-government and the particular rights of place that had developed over long centuries — rights that the imperial Parliament of the 1770s had violated.
Not every thinker on the American right saw eye-to-eye with Kirk on the American founding. The Straussian political scientist Harry Jaffa, for instance, accused Kirk of deprecating the Declaration of Independence and its theory of natural rights and equality. Jaffa saw these doctrines as a radical break with tradition: He believed the American Revolution was conducted on precisely the same kind of abstract and universalizing justification as the French. The "novus ordo seclorum," Jaffa held, utterly delegitimized the ancien régime of throne and altar, and anyone clinging to tradition bore the guilt of historicist heresy.
Mark Henrie's aforementioned essay ably defends Kirk against these charges. "Kirk is famous for his elegiac defense of 'the permanent things,'" he wrote, arguing that this "should raise a suspicion about the adequacy of Jaffa's account of Kirk as a historicist." Kirk, like Burke and the American founders, thought that a conception of natural law could balance permanence and change in a society's constitution. Of course, this kind of traditional conservative understands full well that mere knowledge of natural right cannot serve as a guide to practical politics alone; the virtue of prudence is what enables statesmen to apply universal principles to particular circumstances.
THE DECLARATION'S CONSERVATIVE PURPOSE
Far from denigrating the Declaration, Kirk considered it a monument to statesmanlike prudence. In his book Rights and Duties, he insisted that the men who subscribed to the Declaration's precepts and later drafted the Constitution "were not an elite of theorists, but an assembly of governors, in the old signification of that word governor." They were natural aristocrats, "not philosophes." The opening six sentences of the Declaration were not speculations intended as a spark for perpetual revolution, but a reflection of the basic ideas undergirding the kind of free society the founders thought imperial tyranny threatened.
Kirk's fullest treatment of the document comes in his magisterial Roots of American Order. There, he argued that "the natural-right and natural-law beliefs of 1776 were a blending of Hebraic, Christian, classical, and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theories." The Continental Congress represented a diversity of viewpoints, but the Declaration was a true consensus insofar as it affirmed "not so much a political philosopher's theory as an experienced institutional reality." It was also therefore more "consonant with old 'right reason'" than an "infatuation with the Goddess Reason whom the French revolutionaries would enthrone." The American Revolution was not dreamed up in an Enlightenment philosophe's closet; it was born from thousands of years of civilizational continuity and the efforts of a particular people to preserve it in the face of genuine tyranny.
Indeed, for Kirk, the founders' allegiance to "old right reason" is the true meaning of the American Revolution. Patriots fought and bled and died rather than see freedom, the light of the West, pass away as in a dream. They sought to revive a civilization, not to overturn it, because the ancient roots of their faith constituted a firm "reliance on 'the protection of divine Providence.'" Elsewhere in The Roots of American Order, Kirk would connect this faith to Burke's idea that society is an eternal contract between the living, the dead, and the unborn. The founders, he wrote, prayed "that their commonwealth might be such a moral and social partnership, joining generation with generation."
The kind of traditionalism that inspired the Revolution was not, then, a dead historicism, but a sense of living history. What Publius called the Constitution's "parchment barriers" would be utterly ineffective without the spirited defense of American rights laid out in the Declaration. Yet the latter document is not a simplistic ideological "key" for interpreting the former; it is a written expression of our unwritten constitution — the great symbol of the American founding's moral imagination.
As Kirk noted in The Roots of American Order, "practical government in the United States, and in every other nation, is possible only because most people in that nation accept the existence of some moral order, by which they govern their conduct — the order of the soul." The Declaration provides this kind of framework for reconciling the claims of liberty and law, freedom and virtue, by ordering human action toward the highest good. Remembering it, and the sacrifices of those who fought to uphold it, reminds us of the kind of virtue needed to maintain free government in our own time.
THE CONSTITUTION AS A CONSERVATIVE REVOLUTION
Despite the high sentiments that animated the Revolution, the founders' first attempt at practical government — the Articles of Confederation — ended in failure. "The loose league of the new states," Kirk wrote,
could not have offered much defense against foreign enemies; did not satisfactorily settle disputes among the states; was unable to establish a sound currency, and had no means for protecting property, or other private rights, within states that might fall under the influence of demagogues and radical factions.
The leading statesmen of the early republic all knew that in order to shelter their country, they needed a new frame of government.
Kirk consistently held that the outcome of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia was a kind of miracle precisely because the framers did not aim at overturning society. "The American Constitution functioned not because it was a consistent, far-sighted contrivance (though it was that)," he wrote, "but because, more important still, the Constitution accorded with social realities and necessities in the new Republic." The French Revolution produced a vast quantity of proposed written constitutions devised by philosophes and demagogues alike, but none of them lasted because an ideological regime could never secure a genuine common good. America's constitutions, written and unwritten, endure because they are rooted in something deeper than airy utopian dreams.
The motivating force of the U.S. Constitution is the same moral critique of tyranny that fires the Declaration. The founders held that absolute power, in and of itself, was a terrible violation of the natural law. The genius of the Constitution, according to Kirk, is that it grants the federal government enough power to vigorously secure order while also establishing a complex series of checks and balances to preserve freedom. But given the moral foundations of the document, these arrangements are not mere "parchment provisions"; they are a means by which deliberation can express patriotic sentiments and rise from the competition of interests to an authentic expression of the common good.
The conservative mind to which Kirk most often turned to understand America's constitutional edifice was John Adams. Adams was intimately involved with the drafting of the Declaration, but offered only an indirect influence on the 1787 Constitutional Convention. Yet throughout the founding, Kirk wrote in The Conservative Mind, he worked to remind the American people of "old verities" such as "the Christian assumption that men are equal in the sight of God"; "the idea of an eternal social contract divinely sanctioned"; and the truth that freedom, "practically speaking, is made of particular local and personal liberties." These notions formed the basis of a moral imagination that necessarily undergirded constitution-making, and Adams saw the Revolution and its legacy as an opportunity to revive them.
All of Adams's revolutionary and constitutional labor came to a head in his defense of decentralized government. In his works of political theory, he developed an account of balanced government that reflected in turn a balanced sovereignty, which for Kirk did much to explain the American Constitution's success. Adams was, to Kirk, the "truest Federalist of them all" because he completely "believed in the federal principle as the best possible government for America." But Kirk also appreciated the second president's immense skill in "the practical art of achieving political balance," both as a maker of constitutions and as an officeholder in the new republic. Adams, more than any other member of the founding generation, represented the best of the Revolution for Kirk, and showed the fullest possibilities of a right understanding of it.
REVOLUTION AND AMERICAN MISSION
However excellent the regime it established, Kirk was not foolish enough to believe the American founding brought about an end to history. Republics have always faced a turbulent world; they need skillful and wise leadership to survive the never-ending clash of great powers. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in Democracy in America, simply exporting the U.S. Constitution would not ensure a society's freedom: A political regime must be properly suited to the people it will govern.
Nonetheless, Kirk believed there was something truly exceptional about the American founding that peoples at all times and in all places could admire. To help distinguish between universal truths and universalizing ideology, he turned to the 19th-century man of letters Orestes Brownson. The New Englander went on a life-long religious journey — from strict Calvinist Congregationalism to Transcendentalism until finally converting to Roman Catholicism — that also led him to reflect deeply on God and democracy. From his writing, especially The American Republic, Kirk came to understand how the founding could stand as a force for order and justice in an antagonistic world.
Brownson drew a stark distinction between what he called the "humanitarian democracy" of ideology and the "territorial democracy" of the founding. A humanitarian democracy, like the Jacobin Republic of the 1790s, "scorns all geographical lines, effaces all individualities, and professes to plant itself on humanity alone." It seeks perpetual and universal revolution through a kind of philanthropic despotism. Territorial democracy (a term he borrowed from Benjamin Disraeli), on the other hand, is aware of its limits: It is constituted to secure order, justice, and freedom for a particular people in a particular way. A territorial democracy may represent and even advance certain universal truths, but it has no ambition to remake the entire world in its own image.
When Brownson was writing, the great test confronting America's territorial democracy was chattel slavery. Radical abolitionists, he wrote, represented a form of humanitarian democracy — consider William Lloyd Garrison's literal burning of a copy of the U.S. Constitution on the Fourth of July — that would undermine the American republic's particular commitments. But he also fully understood the barbarism of slavery as an institution and the political peril embodied by the forces that sought to defend and extend it. These ideological factions plunged the nation into chaos as they seized control of different sections and battled with each other. Brownson saw that the question, then, was how to promote freedom and justice while also preserving the Union and its laws.
The struggle of the Civil War ultimately answered that question. Brownson rejected the secessionism of the South and the radicalism of the North alike; he knew that, if the nation were to survive, emancipation would have to take place by constitutional statesmanship, not revolutionary power. In one of his essays on Brownson's thought, Kirk said that this element of the Civil War revealed what made our country exceptional. "America's mission, as Brownson discerned it," he wrote, "was to present to mankind a political model: a commonwealth in which order and freedom exist in a healthy balance or tension — in which the citizen is at once secure and free." In so doing, the American republic could serve as a great example for all the world's people, an image of a humane liberty altogether different from the tragic history of ideological regimes.
CONSERVATIVE STATESMANSHIP AMID REVOLUTION
Abraham Lincoln was the statesman who accomplished this great conservative task in practice, and he did so by explicitly appealing to the memory of the American Revolution. Kirk wrote in 1954 that the Rail Splitter's example could serve as an excellent guide to "the vastness of [America's] moral responsibilities throughout the world" because his greatness "came from his recognition of enduring moral principle." And like Kirk, Lincoln drew those moral principles from the founding itself.
"What is conservatism?" Lincoln asked in an 1860 campaign speech at Cooper Union. "Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried?" In the United States, the "old and tried" was the founding. He argued that those seeking to expand the institution of slavery, or those who stood by a hidebound neutrality on the issue, were "unsay[ing] what Washington said, and undo[ing] what Washington did." The slave states and the Northern politicians in their thrall were committing treason against the Revolution because they rejected or undermined its conception of human dignity.
The Cooper Union address is one of the best illustrations of how a moral imagination oriented toward the Revolution inspired Lincoln to practice the virtue of prudence. He held firm to his position that slavery was an evil that ought to come to an end, but he also condemned the terrorist uprising led by John Brown at Harper's Ferry. In his excellent essay "Abraham Lincoln and the Dignity of the Presidency," Kirk argued that this spirit of genuine moderation marked his entire career:
Prudent amidst passion, Lincoln never was a doctrinaire; he rose from very low estate to very high estate, and he knew the savagery that lies close beneath the skin of man, and he saw that most men are good only out of obedience to routine and custom and convention. The reckless fire-eater and the uncompromising Abolitionist were abhorrent to him; yet he took the middle path between them not out of any misapplication of the doctrine of the Golden mean, but because he held that the unity and security of the United States transcended any fanatic's scheme of uniformity.
The Union was a great good worth conserving, Lincoln believed, because the Revolution gave it a higher purpose. Just before the outbreak of the Civil War, he described "the principle of 'liberty to all'" expressed in the Declaration as a "philosophical cause." "No oppressed people will fight and endure, as our fathers did," he wrote, "without the promise of something better than a mere change of masters." Lincoln fought because he believed the Revolution provided a set of principles by which Americans could order their lives. As Kirk put it in The Roots of American Order: "In a democratic society, as in every society, order must have primacy: that was the meaning of Lincoln's successful struggle to maintain the Union. To that cause he rendered up the last full measure of devotion."
Aside from the Gettysburg Address — which Kirk often praised — Lincoln expressed this philosophical cause most beautifully in an annual message to Congress just one month before signing the Emancipation Proclamation. "Fellow-citizens, we can not escape history," he wrote. "In giving freedom to the slave we assure freedom to the free — honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope of earth." Saving the Union and emancipating the slaves were exactly the acts of conservative statesmanship that would fulfill Brownson's idea of America's mission and preserve the meaning of the American Revolution for another generation.
RECOVERING THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
Throughout his career, Kirk was fully aware of the world-historical task facing American conservatives. The Conservative Mind was published in 1953, during the early stages of the Cold War struggle against Soviet communism abroad and against the backdrop of a triumphant New Deal democracy that seemed to have smashed traditional constitutionalism at home. In a short book published just four years later, though, he insisted that the great body of the people understood this task for themselves:
To save the rest of the world from...decadence [and a] collectivistic life-in-death, is a part of the American cause....Americans know they themselves cannot be secure unless the civilization of which they are a part is secure....Their cause, they feel, is the cause of true human nature, of enlightened order, regular justice, and liberty under law....For this cause they have made some sacrifices; they will make more.
Kirk became a writer and a teacher for the same reasons Lincoln became a statesman — to remind the American people of this great inheritance. "The ruin or the recovery of America's constitutions, and the general future of American politics, will be determined more by choices than by circumstances," he wrote in "The Constitution and the Antagonist World." "To shape the American political future through prudent and courageous choices is yet within the realm of possibility." Those kinds of choices, Kirk believed, are made possible only by serious reflection on the nature of patriotism and a strong memory of the American republic's origins.
Among the intellectuals of the conservative movement, though, Kirk was distinctive for his insistence on an imaginative as opposed to a theoretical conservatism. In a 1955 essay titled "What are American Traditions?" he wrote that traditions
are not abstractions; they are particular beliefs and customs closely related to private life and faith. The American Republic has its traditions, and so has the Cambodian Kingdom; but traditions are not created by political authority, and ought not to be debased into party slogans.
The "chirping sectaries" among the libertarians, the advocates of a strangely godless "civil religion," and the paranoid "political fantastics" sought to reduce movement conservatism to an ideology. But Kirk stood strongly against them, always independent of the temptations of these "terrible simplifiers." He sought to conserve the American people's actual way of life, not remake it according to a speculative theory.
Kirk was able to speak to the American people precisely because his dedication to the American Revolution was not ideological. His ideas deeply influenced the presidential campaigns of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan by giving them an idiom through which to express a truly civilizational defense of freedom. By preserving the memory of the American founding, he taught American conservatives to affirm everything that makes our country great.
Sadly, it seems that many in the movement today are abandoning this commitment to the Revolution. The ascendant post-liberals denigrate the founders and their Constitution. Resurgent liberals seek to shore up the argument for a free society but tend to over-theorize and under-imagine. Both parties appear to have lost touch with the way great thinkers such as Kirk understood the founding.
But Kirk would never have counseled pessimism in the face of this abandonment of principle. "Two hundred years after the ferment which produced the Declaration and Constitution, America's order is in ferment still," he wrote in The Roots of American Order, "but in a ferment of renewal, for change is the means of our preservation." This is the key to the riddle of preserving a revolutionary foundation: By remembering the sources of our order, conservatives can adapt their timeless principles to meet the crises of the times and defend the "permanent things."
A student of his from Hillsdale College, the late Stephen Masty, once recalled how Kirk mused on the universal truth at the heart of the permanent things. "Different times demand different actions. Had I been born in Ancient Egypt, I may well have agitated for change, even radical change," he said while they drove through the Michigan backroads. "But modern times require shoring up the Old Moral Order. They compel us to preserve our traditions as best we can."
The American Revolution was not simply an assertion of political independence, nor the birth of a new and terrible ideology, but a return to that old moral order Kirk loved. The enduring principles of the founding, rooted in the centuries-long continuity of civilization, are our surest guide to defending a way of life that is yet a living tradition. As a man of letters, Kirk nobly advanced the memory of this inheritance. It is up to today's conservatives to stay dedicated to the great task remaining before us.
