Russell Kirk as a Political Theorist

The Imaginative Conservative ^ | 11/1/12 | John East

[don-o]

In Kirk's view the main Roots of modern political theory are found in the spirit of the Renaissance and in the mind of the Enlightenment. He connects the former with "the theological and moral confusion from which our society has suffered since the sixteenth century."[7] More specifically, Kirk explains, "In some ages - the period we call the Renaissance conspicuous among these - the overweening ego claims too much."[8] The problem is essentially one of pride, the most ancient and cardinal of vices and evils: "Man was only a little lower than the angels...having it within his power to become godlike. How marvellous and splendid a creature is man!"[9]

The Renaissance was the great beginning surge of the spirit and the temper of the modern age. The earlier age of faith was viewed as primitive, confining, and inhibiting. Man was now free to expand fully his great creative potential in art, literature, and learning. Ushered in was a new era in which the "revival" and "rebirth" of man's creative genius would know no bounds, knowledge would build up, as the possibility for earthly New Jerusalems appeared on the intellectual horizon. Kirk observes: "In politics, the father of this modern denial of a higher will...is Machiavelli.[10] The subtle and ingenious mind of the Florentine, divorcing politics from traditional ethics and moral considerations, proclaimed that "all armed prophets have conquered and unarmed ones failed." Politics is exclusively a natural phenomenon; power is an end in and of itself; and the age of nationalism and ideology commences.

The hubris of the Renaissance was raised to higher levels of intensity with the coming of the Enlightenment and the ensuing modern age of the ideologue and ideology. By the Enlightenment, Kirk writes, "is meant the strong intellectual tendency toward doctrines of progress, rationality, secularism, and political reform. The Enlightenment's center was France."[11] Noting "the strutting Rationalism of the Enlightenment," he observes that its prime characteristic was its unyielding confidence that "man's private intellectual faculties...could....dissolve all mysteries and solve all problems."[12]

snip

What is ideology? Ideology and political theory are opposites. Political theory is rooted in understanding based upon experience and learning and is open to new knowledge; ideology is "the belief that this world of ours may be converted into the Terrestrial Paradise through the operation of positive law and positive planning."[16] In a word, it is utopian: "Ideology is meant to reconstruct and perfect society and human nature."[I7] The mind of the ideologue is closed. As Karl Marx, the quintessential ideologue, proclaims, the goal is to change the world, not to interpret it. The ideologue does not seek to attune himself to the givens of being as understood through experience and learning; rather, he seeks to impose upon mankind his view of what the perfected good life should be. Action, not reflection and thought, is required.

Ideology is scientistic in its method and egalitarian in its results. "Scientism," writes Kirk, is the belief "that human nature and human society may be improved infinitely–nay, perfected–by the application of the techniques of the physical and biological sciences to the governance of men."[18] In short, "Science with a Roman S should supplant God."[19] Scientism, says Kirk, is "the employment of methods allegedly scientific to make society into one uniform, equalitarian tableland."[20] The ideologue is disdainful of diversity, variety, complexity, intricacy, subtlety, and nuance in human society; he seeks to treat men as things and to arrange and order them according to abstract patterns spun from the minds of radical innovators and visionaries.

Although the exponents of modern ideology are legion, Kirk lays heavy responsibility on Jeremy Bentham and Karl Marx.

[don-o]

Perhaps of interest for sorting out what Conservatism is and what concepts are outside of it.

[IronJack]

Russell Kirk, along with Edmund Burke, are the godfathers of modern conservatism. Read “The Conservative Mind” for a brilliant, well-reasoned manifesto of the conservative ideology.

[aquila48]

In a nutshell... conservatives accept reality and adept to it, Ideologues deny reality and invent their own.

This has accelerated recently with the popularization of “post modernism” (deconstruction) in the academia - where nothing is taken as real, where truth is subjective, where logic itself is found illogical, where right and wrong is how it makes you feel. This has started to spread to the wider society with the advent of multicult, same sex marriage, BLM, etc.

We’ll be going through some dark times but at the end Reality will get its revenge.

[Publius]

Kirk-and-Burke ping.

[FourPeas]

Thank you.