Combining postmodern, conservative philosophies

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THE POSTMODERN IMAGINATION OF RUSSELL KIRK

By Gerald J. Russello

University of Missouri Press, $44.95, 264 pages

REVIEWED BY KEVIN HOLTSBERRY

Russell Kirk occupies a paradoxical place in the history of modern American conservatism. Nearly everyone agrees Kirk was a critical force in the right's resurgence after World War II. His most famous work, "The Conservative Mind," helped to spark and define this resurgence while its six canons of conservative thought remain a touchstone of what it means to be conservative.

But Kirk is also in danger of becoming an empty historical gesture, a reference made out of habit. Despite his prolific career — Kirk probably wrote more than any other conservative figure save William F. Buckley Jr. — mainstream conservatives rarely engage his ideas today. He seems to have left few clear followers or doctrines to carry his influence forward.

In his informative and thought provoking new book, "The Postmodern Imagination of Russell Kirk," Gerald J. Russello seeks to better understand Kirk's unique conservatism and to situate it within both the wider American Right and the intellectual currents of the time. He asks the question: Is Kirk still relevant?

Provocatively, Mr. Russello answers this question by viewing Kirk through the lens of postmodernism. Mr. Russello notes that conservatives have long had a "contentious relationship" with postmodernism. To the mainstream right the term has become a symbol of all that is wrong with contemporary culture: "relativism, amorality, lack of respect for tradition, and a slavish devotion to innovation."

But according to Mr. Russello, Kirk was "one of the first conservatives thinkers to see in postmodernism an opportunity for conservatism to reassert itself amidst the collapse of modernity." The failure of modernity and the resulting erosion of the then-regnant liberalism presented this opportunity: