Conservatism & the Politics of Prudence

o student of the thought or statesmanship of Edmund Burke can ignore the contribution of Russell Kirk to the renewal of Burkean wisdom in the twentieth century. As Kirk freely acknowledged, Burke was largely the source of Kirk's own political wisdom, and Kirk, from the early 1950s onward, did much to draw out the conservative resonances of Burke's thought and action. Kirk first wrote about Burke in the summer of 1950 in a Queen's Quarterly article tellingly called “How Dead is Edmund Burke?” Kirk very much believed that Burke was relevant to addressing modern discontents and that the Anglo-Irish statesman's wisdom and “moral imagination” (a Burkean phrase from Reflections on the Revolution in France much beloved by Kirk) could play a central role in renewing Western and Anglo-American civilization. This was at the beginning of the Burke revival marked by the scholarship and advocacy of Ross J. S. Hoffmann, Thomas Copeland, Francis Canavan, Peter Stanlis, and Robert Nisbet, among others. Kirk was at the center of this Burkean constellation even if he was less a Burke scholar than a learned and eloquent partisan of Burke's contribution to the sustenance and renewal of the conservative mind. Kirk's own writings on Burke are particularly sparkling and have their share of Burke-like aphorisms and bon mots. They are memorable and eminently quotable and are among the part of Kirk's work that will surely endure.