Bradley J. Birzer has published an encyclopedic biography of the paleoconservative icon Russell Kirk, which together with all its endnotes comes to almost 600 pages. The work includes just anything one might care to know about the late-great resident of Mecosta, Michigan, and since I’ve already reviewed Birzer’s impressive study elsewhere, it might be proper to focus here on a particular aspect of his book that would interest readers of this website.  Birzer includes short but fascinating comments on the relation between Kirk and Murray Rothbard, and at least some of the memos quoted about Murray’s early attitude toward Kirk were made available through the assistance of David Gordon. As those who reads this website must know and as Birzer tells us, in 1992 Russel and Murray met (together with me and other invited guests) to “strategize” about the presidential bid of Pat Buchanan. At the meeting the two erstwhile opponents got along splendidly, and one might never have known that they had once been furiously flailing away at each other.  Whereas Rothbard in the 1950s and even later accused Kirk and others of his persuasion of “blatantly attacking liberty” and polluting antistatism “with wicked doctrine,” Kirk returned the compliment by identifying Rothbard with everything he detested about libertarian philosophy.  As Birzer points out, Rothbard had “epitomized for Kirk the libertarian “who can bear no authority temporal or spiritual” and who often descended into “sexual eccentricity.”

There is a feature of Kirk’s work that the isolationist Right objected to; and it may be necessary to understand it in the context of his other views. Kirk was an impassioned Anglophile and his magnum opus The Conservative Mind (1953) celebrates a specifically “Anglo-American conservatism.” Kirk’s stress on America’s English inheritance and his indifference to or dislike for continental political thought (particularly of the German variety) have led some to believe that he belonged to the pro-English, read, interventionist, side in international relations. But in Kirk’s case there was no carry-over from his cultural predilection to his political choices. He leaned consistently toward the non-interventionist side in foreign wars and was profoundly hostile to the neoconservatives, who still whoop it up fitfully for Churchill and the “Anglosphere.”

There are two positions taken by Kirk that Birzer does not mention but which I recall clearly from conversations. Kirk seemed to have taken the side of the Argentines against the neocon heroine Margaret Thatcher. (He may have been understandably reacting to the hysteria in the American media, and especially in the neocon press, against the “Latin fascist” Leopoldo Galtieri and the sudden feigned popularity of the English monarchy at the time of the Falkland Island conflict.) Also Kirk was sympathetic to the Scottish nationalists before they became transparently leftist. His remarks about these matters confirmed for me how little Kirk’s Anglophilia determined his political stands. He was always personally gracious to Leo Strauss and, according to Birzer, helped found Modern Age in 1956 as a forum for the ideas of Strauss as well as for those of others on the right. But as a Christian humanist heavily marked by ancient Stoicism and as an instinctive non-interventionist in foreign affairs, Kirk had little in common with Strauss, and even less with Strauss’s disciples. Since good turns rarely go unpunished, those same disciples freely insulted Kirk as a dimwit and used their positions on the council of the National Endowment for the Humanities during the Reagan years to prevent Kirk from being named a Jefferson Day lecturer. Perhaps to his disadvantage, as I learned from Birzer’s biography, it was Kirk who recommended to Reagan the ill-fated Southern conservative literary scholar M. E. Bradford for the directorship of the National Endowment for the Humanities. The conservative wars that thereafter broke out, as Birzer  notes, “continue to this day.”

The post The Conservative-Libertarian Wars appeared first on LewRockwell.

Bradley J. Birzer has published an encyclopedic biography of the paleoconservative icon Russell Kirk, which together with all its endnotes comes to almost 600 pages. The work includes just anything one might care to know about the late-great resident of Mecosta, Michigan, and since I’ve already reviewed Birzer’s impressive study elsewhere, it might be proper to focus here on a particular aspect of his book that would interest readers of this website.  Birzer includes short but fascinating comments on the relation between Kirk and Murray Rothbard, and at least some of the memos quoted about Murray’s early attitude toward Kirk were made available through the assistance of David Gordon. As those who reads this website must know and as Birzer tells us, in 1992 Russel and Murray met (together with me and other invited guests) to “strategize” about the presidential bid of Pat Buchanan. At the meeting the two erstwhile opponents got along splendidly, and one might never have known that they had once been furiously flailing away at each other.  Whereas Rothbard in the 1950s and even later accused Kirk and others of his persuasion of “blatantly attacking liberty” and polluting antistatism “with wicked doctrine,” Kirk returned the compliment by identifying Rothbard with everything he detested about libertarian philosophy.  As Birzer points out, Rothbard had “epitomized for Kirk the libertarian “who can bear no authority temporal or spiritual” and who often descended into “sexual eccentricity.”

There is a feature of Kirk’s work that the isolationist Right objected to; and it may be necessary to understand it in the context of his other views. Kirk was an impassioned Anglophile and his magnum opus The Conservative Mind (1953) celebrates a specifically “Anglo-American conservatism.” Kirk’s stress on America’s English inheritance and his indifference to or dislike for continental political thought (particularly of the German variety) have led some to believe that he belonged to the pro-English, read, interventionist, side in international relations. But in Kirk’s case there was no carry-over from his cultural predilection to his political choices. He leaned consistently toward the non-interventionist side in foreign wars and was profoundly hostile to the neoconservatives, who still whoop it up fitfully for Churchill and the “Anglosphere.”

There are two positions taken by Kirk that Birzer does not mention but which I recall clearly from conversations. Kirk seemed to have taken the side of the Argentines against the neocon heroine Margaret Thatcher. (He may have been understandably reacting to the hysteria in the American media, and especially in the neocon press, against the “Latin fascist” Leopoldo Galtieri and the sudden feigned popularity of the English monarchy at the time of the Falkland Island conflict.) Also Kirk was sympathetic to the Scottish nationalists before they became transparently leftist. His remarks about these matters confirmed for me how little Kirk’s Anglophilia determined his political stands. He was always personally gracious to Leo Strauss and, according to Birzer, helped found Modern Age in 1956 as a forum for the ideas of Strauss as well as for those of others on the right. But as a Christian humanist heavily marked by ancient Stoicism and as an instinctive non-interventionist in foreign affairs, Kirk had little in common with Strauss, and even less with Strauss’s disciples. Since good turns rarely go unpunished, those same disciples freely insulted Kirk as a dimwit and used their positions on the council of the National Endowment for the Humanities during the Reagan years to prevent Kirk from being named a Jefferson Day lecturer. Perhaps to his disadvantage, as I learned from Birzer’s biography, it was Kirk who recommended to Reagan the ill-fated Southern conservative literary scholar M. E. Bradford for the directorship of the National Endowment for the Humanities. The conservative wars that thereafter broke out, as Birzer  notes, “continue to this day.”

The post The Conservative-Libertarian Wars appeared first on LewRockwell.