The Ten Conservative Principles of Russell Kirk

Heritage ^ | March 20, 1986 | Russell Kirk

[detective]

Russell Kirk was a prolific author, essayist, lecturer, and critic best known for The Conservative Mind (1953). Kirk made conservatism intellectually respectable in the modern era and christened the conservative movement with its name. In the following speech, delivered at the Heritage Foundation in 1987, Kirk enumerates ten principles of conservatism. The list, which he did not intend to be exhaustive, emphasizes an attitude—not a “fixed doctrine”—toward tradition, private institutions, and prudence which he calls “the negation of ideology.”

[detective]

This is an article from 1986 but it is very relevant today. Russell Kirk and his fellow intellectuals did more than anyone to define what is now called modern conservatism.

All Republican candidates today claim to be conservative. They argue over who is a true conservative.

Read through Mr. Kirk's principles and see who you think is truly conservative.

[KC Burke]

Read through Mr. Kirk's principles and see who you think is truly conservative.

Having posted these here two or three times in the last 18 years, I would say they are conservative. No lesser lights than Reagan and Limbaugh cite Kirk as one of the guiding lights to the existence of modern conservatism.

We can all nit pick what to stress and how to express it but this is the Guy that Buckley chose for his back page in the first decade of his mag, this is the guy that told Nixon to read Elliot's Christianity and Culture.

[TBP]

Thank you. I had the pleasure of getting to know Dr. Kirk at Hillsdale, adn he is one of the finest minds our movement has produced. Bill Buckley once said that “no sensible conservative movement will proceed without the advice of Russell Kirk.”

[TigerClaws]

I don’t want to conserve the status quo.

I want to go back.

That makes me a reactionary. Right ?

[KC Burke]

That makes me a reactionary. Right?

Right, but in agreeing I would not agree that conservatives want to "conserve the status quo" nor would Kirk.

[don-o]

mark

This could be a great thread. I want to think a bit and post later

Thanks.

[iowamark]

Kirk’s ten principles in the speech are very general. I would define American conservative principles as three:

Judeo-Christian worldview
Limited Constitutional government
Free Enterprise economy

In 2016, we can see that many/most Americans have rejected all three of these principles.

[tophat9000]

I would say points 6,7, 8 are excellent summations of my primary personal core ideas and principles that have developed over the years...

[The_Reader_David]

Thanks for posting this.

It seems to me that to truly be a conservative in the American political context one must stand in the tradition not only of the American Founders, but of Edmund Burke, Lord Acton and Russell Kirk. One might hold by some view of ideals of the American Founding and end up a Jacobin (Patrick Henry more or less did) or a libertarian. One might be very eager to see “America great again” but have no regard for the past, the rooting in the long tradition of Western Civilization upon which the American Founding depended, and end up being an American patriot or an American nationalist but not a conservative.

[loveliberty2]

In reading today's posts on the Trump/National Review matter, my mind had gone back to reflect on what Dr. Russell Kirk's thoughts might be, given our current national dilemma.

Before reading your post, Kirk's ten principles web site address was copied into my computer for posting here. Amazingly, two minds had gone to the same conclusion that Kirk's wisdom is needed now.

Dr. Kirk, that gentle genius whose understanding brought "The Conservative Mind" to us at a time when it was sorely needed, is worth consulting now, during a time when the term "conservative" is interpreted to mean so many things by so many people that it is practically meaningless.

Perhaps the "ten principles" identified by Kirk may be helpful.

[AndyJackson]

Good post worthy of reflection. It is timely because I deleted before posting an angry screed decrying the ugly face of FR conservatism. But if Russell Kirk is the face of conservatism, then what is going on here is not conservatism but a certain kind of ideological radicalism perhaps different in kind from cultists or communists, but no different in degree.

[IronJack]

Summarized, they are:

1) The conservative believes that there exists an enduring moral order.

2) The conservative adheres to custom, convention, and continuity.

3) Conservatives believe in what may be called the principle of prescription

4) Conservatives are guided by their principle of prudence.

5) Conservatives pay attention to the principle of variety.

6) Conservatives are chastened by their principle of imperfectability.

7) Conservatives are persuaded that freedom and property are closely linked.

8) Conservatives uphold voluntary community, quite as they oppose involuntary collectivism.

9) The conservative perceives the need for prudent restraints upon power and upon human passions.

10) The thinking conservative understands that permanence and change must be recognized and reconciled in a vigorous society.

[AndyJackson]

Thanks for the link. Kirk's introduction is worth reiterating here:

Being neither a religion nor an ideology, the body of opinion termed conservatism possesses no Holy Writ and no Das Kapital to provide dogmata . So far as it is possible to determine what conservatives believe, the first principles of the conservative persuasion are derived from what leading conservative writers and public men have professed during the past two centuries. After some introductory remarks on this general theme, I will proceed to list ten such conservative principles.

Perhaps it would be well, most of the time, to use this word “conservative” as an adjective chiefly. For there exists no Model Conservative, and conservatism is the negation of ideology: it is a state of mind, a type of character, a way of looking at the civil social order.

So, according to Kirk, if the argument is ideological, then it is not conservatism, which will help to pull the rug out from a number of the more doctrinaire posters here who would banish folks from the temple for lack of ideological purity.

[don-o]

It is timely because I deleted before posting an angry screed decrying the ugly face of FR conservatism.

Have no doubt that there are many of us in that exact place.

[roamer_1]

thx for the ping... I’ll be back

[roamer_1]

So, according to Kirk, if the argument is ideological, then it is not conservatism, which will help to pull the rug out from a number of the more doctrinaire posters here who would banish folks from the temple for lack of ideological purity.

Not exactly - there are some ideologies that are indeed necessary. Some taken for granted by tradition, some set in stone by common sense. For instance, our traditions and laws are inexorably bound to the Judeo-Christian Ethic. To supplant that moral sense with something else (liberalism's sense of moral relativity, or Mohammedanism's Sharia, as examples) intrinsically must damage the whole - at it's very root - and in that, cannot be Conservatism - Or at least, not the American sense of it.

[DoughtyOne]

Please VOTE in the Free Republic Caucus 01/24/2016.

Thank you.

[Ge0ffrey]

Thanks for your timely re-post.

[KC Burke]

It is tempting to try and closeout discussion and win an argument here by finding a trump card (no pun intended) and saying that this formula, amulet or lodestone shows that this person or that person is the true conservative as opposed to another and deserves our vote.

However, that way of doing the analysis would not be conservative, we would instead be ideological, a position Kirk despised. We would do better to ask ourselves, each of us, how can I be conservative and true to my principles. Kirk himself used Bismarck’s words a number of times in talking of politics as the art of the possible. Is the stronger but less pure of the candidates going to make things possible that wouldn’t be done without him?

As someone pointed out up-thread, sometimes we want to be reactionary, we just want to get back to how things were and that is separate and apart from our conservative tendencies on a good day.

We are impatient to get the right choice not because Cruz or Trump are so flawed, Instead we are impatient because we are watching our Republic be destroyed and that makes for bitterness.

[PoloSec]

Thank you for this thread.

I often refer to conservationism as standing on three pillars, they are the three pillars which we find as the fabric of our founding documents the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and its Bill of Rights.

The pillars are common sense, reason and logic these three pillars can be further described in a single word WISDOM! We conservatives are suppose to be thinkers not emotional rabid Pit Bulls, that is the territory of the enemies of our Constitutional Free Republic those who would willingly with the help of the ignorant rip our Republic to shreds.

As Franklin said the Republic is ours if we can KEEP IT. There is a great deal more to our founding documents than the current issues of the day, while those issues may be pressing are we willing to disregard our constitution, to sacrifice all for the profession of safety and security while the fabric our nation wastes away. For me conservatism is a singular concept... conserve, preserve, protect and defend those principles and values that are represented in those same founding documents.