Russell Kirk – författare

Är jag hoppfull i dag? Det bästa man kan säga om den konservatives åtagande omkring fyra decennier senare är detta: Civilisationens väv hänger fortfarande ihop på sina håll i världen.

RUSSELL KIRK (19181994) var politisk teoretiker och författare. Hans bok The Conservative Mind (1953) anses ha bidragit till konservatismens renässans i USA. Tio konservativa principer & Tio konservativa händelser ingår i en serie essäer om liberalism och konservatism.

Orginalens titlar: Ten conservative Principles & The Conservative Cause: Ten Events

Översättning: Roland Poirier Martinsson

Båda texterna hölls ursprungligen som föredrag vid Heritage Foundation i Washington, D.C., 1986 respektive 1987. De återpublicerades i omarbetad version i The Politics of Prudence(ISI Books, 1993). 

Tio konservativa principer & tio konservativa händelser ingår i en serie essäer om liberalism och konservatism.

In a series of eleven essays, Kirk relates several issues to a common question: “Is the American Republic descending into decadence, or are the American people entering upon a renewal of belief and hope?” In doing so, he covers a wide range of subjects that beg answers and action, including “The American Mission,” “The Illusion of Human Rights,” “Prospects for American Education,” and “Can Virtue be Taught?” Kirk’s views are trenchant, well supported, and far from commonplace. For instance, he takes a dim view of today’s information age, but is not without hope: “It is not inevitable that the computer should supplant the poet.”

In this, the liveliest and most accessible one-volume life of Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk has ingeniously combined the public and the private man into a living whole. He lucidly unfolds Burke''s philosophy and offers a fresh assessment of Burke, a statesman enjoying even greater influence today than in his own time.

Kirk defines four great struggles in the life of Burke: his work for conciliation with the American colonies; his involvement in cutting down the domestic power of George III; his prosecution of Warren Hastings, the governor general of India; and his resistance to Jacobinism, the French Revolution''s "armed doctrine." In each of these great phases of his public life, Burke fought with passionate eloquence and relentless logic for his ideals of justice, ideals that continue to appeal today.

First published in 1953, this magnificent work will be remembered in ages to come as one of our century''s most important legacies. The then-young Kirk wrote this during a time when liberalism was heralded as the only political and intellectual tradition in America. There is no doubt that this book is responsible to a large degree for the rise of conservatism as a viable and credible creed.

Kirk defines "the conservative mind" by examining such brilliant men as Edmund Burke, James Fenimore Cooper, Alexis de Tocqueville, John Quincy Adams, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Benjamin Disraeli, Cardinal Newman, George Santayana, and finally, T. S. Eliot. Vigorously written, the book represents conservatism as an ideology born of sound intellectual traditions.