If you want to read my review of The Conservative Mind please click here.
Excerpt:
Reading The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot by Russell Kirk was one big adventure for me, and for anyone interested in the conservative philosophy. Russell Kirk goes back all the way to British statesman Edmund Burke to determine what the conservative philosophy or theory exactly is, and then spends attention to other conservative in the following centuries such as John Adams (the entire Adams family and several generations of them at that), Hamilton, Disraeli, Santayana and many more. By looking at what these people thought about politics, the state, the role the government should play and humanity, Kirk tries to define conservatism and tries to explain how conservatives should approach politics and life, and of course the political problems of today. It takes some reading capacity on the side of the reader, and some background knowledge about some of history’s greatest political thinkers, but Kirk succeeds with grace in his goal to provide conservatives with some intellectual backing.
When one tries to explain to someone what American and British conservatism believes in and stands for, one cannot ignore the giant Edmund Burke. Burke was a statesman and a political thinker… without a clearly defined political theory. Instead of writing one book describing his political theory, Burke wrote several shorter essays in which he deals with a specific problem (such as the Revolution in France and America’s Revolutionary War), but by reading these individual essays, and combining the thoughts expressed by Burke in them with each other, one can understand and describe Burke’s political philosophy and build on it. What Burke’s philosophy basically boils down to is that society – or the state – is a contract or bond between the living, those yet to be born and the dead. Society – and thus the state – is, according to Burke, not an accident but a slowly grown partnership, ordained by Providence.
As Kirk summarizes (p. 33) Burke’s theory, “Every state is the creation of Providence, whether or not its religion is Christianity. Christianity is the highest of religions; but every sincere creed is a recognition of divine purpose in the universe, and all mundane order is dependent upon reverence for the religious creed which a people have inherited from their fathers.” As such, “Burke’s detestation of Hastings” redoubled. Hastings was the Governor-General who “had ridden rough-shod over native religious tradition and ceremonial in India.”
Burke’s conviction that the state is ordained by Providence led him to oppose Imperial expansion (and especially the notion that the British should bring their form of government to other peoples). If the system of a state is ordained by Providence it makes no sense to try to change it (neither by Revolution as such, nor by conquering countries and overthrowing the existing regime). If we look at the world today, we can therefore only conclude that Burkean conservatives should oppose the, for instance, Iraq War and other projects to bring Western style democracy to a part of the world not used to it, or perhaps better said, where such a form of government did not naturally grow.
There is much, much more, please head on over to Monsters and Critics to read it (and leave a comment, either there or here).
In the review I chose not to touch on the following, but I wanted to raise this point in the blogpost (before reading this part of the post, please read the entire review):
– Although Kirk explains quite well what the role of religion has historically been in society, and why it is important that religion continues to play an important role in said society, I could not help but notice that Kirk does not truly provide us with a way to actually do this. In other words, how can religion continue to be important, how can it continue to be the glue that holds society together? Besides that, isn’t it already too late in Europe at least? Europe has already been de-churched. Can it truly be reversed (the situation in America is different)?
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