Life Is Worth Living

Symposium: The Conservative Mind at 60In the final chapter of his final book, The Sword of Imagination, Russell Kirk writes that during his 75 years, filled with more honors and blessings than the most celebrated among us experience, he had sought three ends: To...

The Joyful Conservative

Symposium: The Conservative Mind at 60In her Heritage Foundation Lecture titled “The Conservative Heart: Life with Russell Kirk,” Annette Kirk recounts an episode that occurred partway through her nearly thirty-year marriage. It seems that one of Kirk’s college-age...

Liberty Forum on The Conservative Mind

We are delighted to see that Liberty Fund’s Liberty Forum has hosted a symposium to commemorate the 60th anniversary of Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind. It features an essay by Gerald J. Russello on “Russell Kirk’s Unwritten Constitutionalism” with responses by...

The Conservative Mind at Sixty

Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind was published sixty years ago this summer. The University Bookman has asked a distinguished group of writers and scholars to comment on the book and its continuing importance to American intellectual debate. When Kirk published his...

A Problem of Definition

Symposium: The Conservative Mind at 60Russell Kirk’s careful delineations in the earliest pages of The Conservative Mind make clear his awareness of a fundamental problem when we consider conservatism. It is a slippery phenomenon. Edmund Burke was a conservative, but...

The Deeper Roots of Social Order

Symposium: The Conservative Mind at 60Sixty years after its publication, The Conservative Mind could easily be dismissed as an irrelevant artifact of a failed political movement. The “conservative movement” has utterly failed to stop or even slow the leftward tilt of...

An Excursion into the Broader World

Symposium: The Conservative Mind at 60 It is easy to sum up the historical significance of The Conservative Mind. With eloquence and conviction Russell Kirk demonstrated that reflective conservatism is neither a smokescreen for selfishness nor the ritual incantation...

The Needs of Modernity’s Orphans

Symposium: The Conservative Mind at 60At the time Russell Kirk wrote The Conservative Mind there was already considerable confusion as to just what conservatism meant. America’s political parties and movements, dating back to the Revolution, always adopted the names...

The Use and Abuse of Samuel Johnson

The Interpretation of Samuel Johnson. Jonathan Clark & Howard Erskine-Hill, editors. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Hardcover, 264 pages, $85. The Politics of Samuel Johnson. Jonathan Clark & Howard Erskine-Hill, editors. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Hardcover, 256...

From Practice to Theory

It Didn’t Have to Be This Way: Why Boom and Bust Is Unnecessary—and How the Austrian School of Economics Breaks the Cycle by Harry C. Veryser. ISI Books, 2013. Hardcover, 318 pages, $29. It is rare for an American manufacturing executive operating in the domestic...