A plump, bespectacled gentleman who feigned disdain for technology, Kirk was something of a spiritualist with a penchant for the weird. One need not identify as a conservative to appreciate his polished charm and idiosyncrasies. He has avoided - as others haven’t - defining Kirk by his list of accomplishments and has pieced together a comprehensive, complex account of Kirk’s personality, motivations, and influences.īirzer offers five themes in Kirk’s work, and less so his private life, which Birzer only touches on: his intellectual heritage, his ideas of the transcendent, his Christian humanism, his fiction, and the reach and implications of his conservatism. Birzer is the first researcher to have been granted full access to Kirk’s letters, diaries, and draft manuscripts. Birzer, a professor at Hillsdale College who holds a chair named for Kirk, fills a need with his lucid and ambitious biography.

He did earn numerous adversaries, including Hayek and Frank Meyer, who in retrospect appear more like ambivalent friends, but the staying power of Kirk’s congeniality seems to have softened objections to his most resolute opinions.īradley J. In this regard, Kirk is the victim of his virtues: he was less polarizing, celebrated by followers and detractors alike for his measured temperament and learned judgments. Hayek, Eric Voegelin, and Leo Strauss - have received more attention. Fellow conservatives, many of them friends or colleagues of Kirk’s - like T. Their harsh, uncouth rhetoric stands in marked contrast to the writings of Russell Amos Kirk, a founding father of modern American conservatism.īooks on Kirk exist, but they’re few. The leading Republican candidates, including frontrunners Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, have resorted to showmanship and grandstanding to make their case for the party nomination. THE PRESIDENTIAL PRIMARIES are at last upon us.

Kirk the conservative mind