BOO KS
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THE CONSERVATISM OF DESPAIR
A PROGRAM FOR CONSERVATIVES. By Russell Kirk. Regnery. $4.00.
This latest product from the busy pen of Mr. Kirk will help
observers make a more accurate appraisal of the "new" conservatism.
There are several questions to answer: first, is the conservative tag an
accurate description of the movemcnt? OrweII had said a conservative is
"a thing that does not exist nowadays," and Mr. Kirk himself had been
puzzled by the failure of TriIIing and others to recognize a conserva–
tive recrudescence. Second, if the movement is "conservatism," is it a
reincarnation of the great tradition or is it a creature of quite another
kind, masquerading in the vestments of the dead? Third, assuming the
genus, what is the species? There is an obvious difference in kind be–
tween the mind of de J ouvenel, for example, and the writings of Mr.
Kirk.
There are, I suggest, three types of conservative thought, and this
book represents the third stage in its dialectic. The first stage, primitive
conservatism, is siJcnt; rooted in agrarian life and shielded in an arca–
num of power, it does not argue. Issues implying the deliberation of ends
do not arise; "policy" is restricted to limited choices of means. In the
second stage, I think, conservatism reaches its zenith. In its great debate
with radical and liberal thought, it rigorously criticizes the ends and
techniques of policy-makers and constructs a policy of its own. In this
stage there is a conservative
mind.
The next stage, tertiary conservatism,
lives on the inteIIectual capital of the previous stage, but in its heart is
a conservatism of despair: despair of policy itself, of argument, of ideas.
Destitute of thought, it substitutes propaganda for ideas in order to stay
alive; wearing a double mask, it is an ideology pretending to oppose
ideology. Its polemic shifts from policy to attitudes. In its despair it
nurses an atrabilious hatred of sanguine commitments. Thus the con–
servative mind mutates into the conservative spleen.
Mr. Kirk represents splenetic conservatism-he is an ideologue who
hates "ideologists"-but he vacillates between the tertiary and secondary
stages. The antinomies of his position result from a conflict between the
impulse of despair and his dependence on the mind of the great tradi–
tion. He cannot maneuver for long without leaping into the arms of
Babbitt and More. His previous book was an interpretation of the second
stage and left us hoping for another volume carrying the argument on
the same level. But it seems the author had invested his scholarly capital
and is content to live on the interest.
There is a lot of cantankerous energy in the present book, but the
polemic is strident and impotent; it never grapples with real enemies but
