Combining postmodern, conservative philosophies

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:

“First, for Kirk modernity was characterized most significantly by what he believed was an excessive reliance on a straightened form of rationalism to solve fundamentally moral problems arising from humanity’s fallen nature. Liberalism — with its focus on ‘rational’ solutions to social problems, reliance on trained experts, and mechanistic view of human imagination — is the political expression of modernity. Second, Kirk saw the liberal order as failing for want of imagination, and he saw emerging from it a new age that had discarded both liberal rationality and the premodern tradition represented in the writings of Burke.”

Kirk shared with many postmodern critics an antipathy to modernity and its dogmas. And he saw that this rigid system was giving way to something new. Kirk sought to step into this gap with a moral imagination that would guide society in a conservative direction.

This perspective explains the style and tone of Kirk’s work:

“Dialectic, the logical analysis of the human condition according to abstract notions of the individual or society, that is characteristic of most forms of liberal modernism, presents, according to its critics, only a ‘thin’ theory of life. In contrast, Kirk’s writing was almost defiantly imaginative, frustrating even his admirers for not being sufficiently ‘analytic.’ He concentrated on the formation of images and the cultivation of imagination, for ‘[w]hether to throw away yesterday”s nonsense to embrace tomorrow’s nonsense, or whether we find our way out superficiality into real meaning must depend in part upon the images which we discover or shape.’”

The difficulty was that traditional conservatism was caught in a philosophical bind by the nature of modernity. So much of custom and tradition is not easily defensible on purely rational or utilitarian grounds. Conservatives thus find themselves constantly on the defensive and yielding too much philosophical ground to the liberalism they are seeking to defeat.

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