Russell Kirk's Revolution of Memory
As the American republic approaches the 250th anniversary of her birth, conservatives face a serious paradox: How can we ever hope to preserve a revolutionary foundation? After all, men like Edmund Burke and Klemens von Metternich developed European conservatism as a reaction against the French Revolution. By contrast, Leo Strauss wrote in Liberalism Ancient and Modern, "this country came into being through a revolution, a violent change or break with the past." He thought it was therefore amusing yet appropriate that "[o]ne of the most conservative groups here calls itself Daughters of the American Revolution." Is American conservatism, then, a contradiction in terms? Is the republic just another force of boundless modernity, hurling the world into perpetual revolution?
To solve this riddle, Mark Henrie turned, in an essay recently republished by Modern Age, to the founding father of the American conservative movement: Russell Kirk. The Sage of Mecosta, he argued, "eschew[ed] 'abstractions'" and rejected the idea that the American founders bequeathed to their descendants any kind of ideology. Instead, Kirk preferred to focus on the deep rootedness of American politics and culture in the Western tradition, stressing the continuity of civilization rather than any revolutionary rupture.
While this assessment of Kirk's devotion to the particular is worthwhile, even vital, in an age of ideology, it also somewhat understates his deep and abiding appreciation for the American founding. In The Conservative Mind, for instance, Kirk declared that the United States Constitution is "the most sagacious conservative document in the history of Western civilization," and praised "the fathers of the American Republic" for "devis[ing] an instrument of government unparalleled as a conservative power for ordered liberty." Far from altogether rejecting the notion that the American founding brought forth a new dedication to liberty in the world, he held that the particulars of the nation's revolutionary birth present a path to universal truth.
The American founding could play this role in Kirk's thought because he understood it as a revolution of memory. Although he rejected a Whiggish theory of history as perpetual progress, he nonetheless saw the creation of the American republic as a culminating moment for Western civilization. The War for Independence and its consequences were a crisis that caused the founders to remember their great inheritance, and search out new modes and orders to preserve it. Conservatives in our time likewise face a crisis; Kirk's scholarship can guide us to our own revolution of memory.
Read more in National Affairs.
