Portable Conservative Reader

by Various (Author); Kirk, Russell T. (Editor)

• ISBN13: 9780140150957
• ISBN10: 0140150951
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1996-02-01
• Publisher: Penguin Group USA

Summary

The Portable Conservative Reader illuminates the meaning of the conservative cause. In one of the most wide-ranging and thoughtful anthologies of conservative thought in the English and American traditions, Russell Kirk excavates conservatism's foundations. The breadth of conservative writing reveals that, at bottom, the conservative idea is not an economic theory nor a political program but a penetrating way of looking at the human condition. Here, Kirk brings together a diverse group of thinkers and material - including essays, poetry, and fiction - that articulate the conservative imagination, its veneration of tradition, prudence, variety, and the enduring fallibility and imperfectibility of mankind. These selections set forth basic premises and principles at work in the minds of Edmund Burke, Benjamin Disraeli, and T. S. Eliot in Britain, Alexander Hamilton, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Adams, and Irving Kristol in America, and many more who have elucidated this turn of mind. This balanced and surprising collection is a landmark study of the most potent political force of our time.

Table of Contents

Introduction	xi
Russell Kirk
Part One: The Tension of Order and Freedom	1	(48)
The Truth About Civil Liberty	3	(4)
Edmund Burke
Liberty and Power	7	(2)
Burke
Change and Conservation	9	(4)
Burke
Natural Rights and Real Rights	13	(7)
Burke
The Moral Imagination	20	(5)
Burke
Prejudice, Religion, and the Antagonist World	25	(10)
Burke
Preserving and Reforming	35	(5)
Burke
Who Speaks for the People?	40	(7)
Burke
Passion and Control	47	(2)
Burke
Part Two: American Liberty Under Law	49	(64)
The Prudent Constitutions of America	51	(13)
John Adams
Ideology and Ideocracy	64	(3)
John Adams
On Natural Aristocracy	67	(3)
John Adams
Safety in Union	70	(8)
Alexander Hamilton
The Spectacle of Revolutionary France	78	(6)
Alexander Hamilton
Conservative Forebodings	84	(29)
Fisher Ames
Part Three: The Reply of the Poets	113	(16)
France: an Ode	115	(3)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Idea of the Constitution	118	(2)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Sins of Manchester	120	(9)
Robert Southey
Part Four: Southern Conservatism	129	(52)
King Numbers	131	(24)
John Randolph
On the Veto Power	155	(26)
John C. Calhoun
Part Five: American Democratic Leveling	181	(28)
On Equality	183	(19)
James Fenimore Cooper
The New Social Morality	202	(7)
Alexis de Tocqueville
Part Six: Against Utilitarian Radicalism	209	(34)
A Radical War-Song	211	(3)
Thomas Babington Macaulay
All Sail and No Anchor	214	(4)
Thomas Babington Macaulay
Utilitarian Follies	218	(8)
Benjamin Disraeli
Who's to Blame?	226	(11)
John Henry Newman
Intellectual Conservatism	237	(6)
Walter Bagehot
Part Seven: Progress and Human Frailty	243	(50)
Earth's Holocaust	245	(22)
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Liberalism and Progress	267	(26)
Orestes Brownson
Part Eight: Legal and Historical Conservatism	293	(30)
The Mischief of Rousseau and Bentham	295	(14)
Henry Maine
Ruinous Taxation	309	(14)
W. E. H. Lecky
Part Nine: Conservative Impulses Amid American Materialism	323	(38)
Who Will Pay the Bills of Socialism?	325	(15)
Edwin Lawrence Godkin
Corrupt Washington	340	(10)
Henry Adams
The Revolt of Modern Democracy Against Standards of Duty	350	(11)
Brooks Adams
Part Ten: The Crumbling Country House	361	(24)
The Four Reformers	363	(1)
Robert Louis Stevenson
The Dissolution of Faith	364	(13)
W. H. Mallock
The Conservative Englishman	377	(3)
George Gissing
Toryism	380	(5)
George Saintsbury
Part Eleven: The Fabulists	385	(48)
The Informer	387	(26)
Joseph Conrad
The Mother Hive	413	(20)
Rudyard Kipling
Part Twelve: Critical Conservatism	433	(48)
Property and Law	435	(16)
Paul Elmer More
Burke and the Moral Imagination	451	(16)
Irving Babbitt
The Irony of Liberalism	467	(14)
George Santayana
Part Thirteen: Conservatism Between Two Wars	481	(26)
Religion and the Totalitarian State	483	(16)
Christopher Dawson
Marxist Literary Criticism	499	(8)
T. S. Eliot
Part Fourteen: A Bent World	507	(40)
The Poison of Subjectivism	509	(12)
C. S. Lewis
Some Day, in Old Charleston	521	(16)
Donald Davidson
What Must Be Developed?	537	(7)
James McAuley
The Planster's Vision	544	(3)
John Betjeman
Part Fifteen: Women's Conservative Vision	547	(18)
Choice and Toleration	549	(6)
Freya Stark
The Angry Man	555	(1)
Phyllis McGinley
The Woodpeckers and the Starlings	556	(9)
Jacquetta Hawkes
Part Sixteen: The Wisdom of Our Ancestors	565	(60)
On Being Conservative	567	(33)
Michael Oakeshott
The Great Liberal Death Wish	600	(25)
Malcolm Muggeridge
Part Seventeen: Resistance and Hope	625	(86)
Capitalism	627	(17)
Irving Kristol
The Restoration of Authority	644	(61)
Robert Nisbet
Cultural Debris: A Mordant Last Word	705	(6)
Russell Kirk
Bibliographical Suggestions	711	(2)
Index	713