The Conservative Mind

by Kirk, Russell

• ISBN13: 9780895261717
• ISBN10: 0895261715
• Edition: 7th
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-10-01
• Publisher: INGRAM

Summary

The book that launched the modern American conservative movement, now available in trade paperback.

Author Biography

Russell Kirk (1918-1994), historian of ideas, critic, essayist, editor and novelist, was the author of thirty-two books. Among them are The Roots of American Order, America's British Culture, The Politic of Prudence, Eliot and His Age, Enemies of the Permanent Things, Edmund Burke, Redeeming the Time, John Randolph of Roanoke, and six works of fiction. His memoirs, The Sword of Imagination, were published posthumously. He received twelve honorary doctorates from American universities and many awards, including the Presidential Citizens Medal. The Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal, founded in 1995 and based in Mecosta, Michigan, continues his work to defend "the permanent things" today. 

Table of Contents

The Making of The Conservative Mind	i
Foreword to the Seventh Revised Editon	xiii
The Idea of Conservativism	3	(9)
Burke and the Politics of Prescription	12	(59)
Burke's career	12	(11)
The readical systems	23	(5)
Providence and veneration	28	(9)
Prejudice and prescription	37	(10)
The rights of civil social man	47	(11)
Equality and aristocracy	58	(6)
The principle of order	64	(7)
John Adams and Liberty under Law	71	(43)
Federalists and Republicans	71	(4)
Alexander Hamilton	75	(5)
Fisher Ames' vaticinations	80	(6)
John Adams as psychologist	86	(7)
The aristocracy of nature	93	(5)
American constitutions	98	(12)
Marshall and the metamorphosis of federalism	110	(4)
Romantics and Utilitarians	114	(36)
Benthamism and Walter Scott	114	(10)
Canning and enlightened conservatism	124	(9)
Coleridge and conservative ideas	133	(13)
The triumph of abstraction	146	(4)
Southern Conservatism: Randolph and Calhoun	150	(35)
Southern impulses	150	(5)
Randolph on the peril of positive legislation	155	(13)
The rights of minorities: Calhoun	168	(13)
The valor of the South	181	(4)
Liberal Conservatives: Macaulay, Cooper, Tocqueville	185	(40)
Burke's influence upon liberalism	185	(3)
Macaulay on democracy	188	(9)
Fenimore Cooper and a gentleman's America	197	(7)
Tocqueville on democratic despotism	204	(12)
Democratic prudence	216	(9)
Transitional Conservatism: New England Sketches	225	(35)
Industrialism as a leveller	225	(6)
John Quincy Adams and progress: his aspirations and his failure	231	(9)
The illusions of transcendentalism	240	(5)
Brownson on the conservative power of Catholicism	245	(5)
Nathaniel Hawthorne: society and sin	250	(10)
Conservatism with Imagination: Disraeli and Newman	260	(38)
Marx's materialism; and the fruits of liberalism	260	(6)
Disraeli and Tory loyalties	266	(13)
Newman: the sources of knowledge and the idea of education	279	(15)
The age of discussion: Bagehot	294	(4)
Legal and Historical Conservatism: a Time of Foreboding	298	(39)
Liberalism and collectivism: John Stuart Mill, Comte, and positivism	298	(6)
Stephen on the ends of life and politics	304	(11)
Maine: status and contract	315	(12)
Lecky: illiberal democracy	327	(10)
Conservatism Frustrated: America, 1865-1918	337	(38)
The Gilded Age	337	(4)
James Russell Lowell's perplexities	341	(7)
Godkin on democratic opinion	348	(8)
Henry Adams on the degradation of the democratic dogma	356	(10)
Brooks Adams and a world of terrible energies	366	(9)
English Conservatism Adrift: the Twentieth Century	375	(40)
The end of aristocratic politics: 1906	375	(5)
George Gissing and the Nether World	380	(7)
Arthur Balfour: his spiritual conservatism; and the tide of socialism	387	(9)
The books of W. H. Mallock: a conservative synthesis	396	(14)
A dreary conservatism between wars	410	(5)
Critical Conservatism: Babbitt, More, Santayana	415	(42)
Pragmatism: the fumbling of America	415	(4)
Irving Babbitt's humanism: the higher will in a democracy	419	(13)
Paul Elmer More on justice and faith	432	(11)
George Santayana buries liberalism	443	(10)
America in search of ideas	453	(4)
Conservatives' Promise	457	(46)
Radicalism's sickness	457	(9)
The new elite	466	(9)
Scholar confronts intellectual	475	(16)
The conservative as poet	491	(12)
Notes	503	(12)
Bibliography	515	(10)
Index	525