Kirk’s conservatism was scholastic, literary, philosophical, poetic, and noninterventionist. He clashed with the libertarians, never embraced Joseph McCarthy, held National Review at arm’s length, broke with the neoconservatives over the Gulf War in 1990, and supported Patrick J. Buchanan in the 1992 Republican primary. Throughout his remarkable literary output of more than 20 books of nonfiction, three novels, hundreds of articles and book reviews, and some 3,000 syndicated columns—all while founding Modern Age (1957) and The University Bookman (1960)—Kirk championed the “permanent things” against ideological thinking on both the left and the right. His life’s work points to a path not taken by the conservative movement—one worth reexamining in this moment of uncertainty and flux.

Eliot Cohen: The Republican party abandons conservatism

Born on October 19, 1918, and raised in Plymouth, Michigan, Kirk studied at Michigan State and received his master’s degree from Duke University before serving in the Army from 1942 to 1946. Military service reinforced the traditionalist instincts of this shy and bookish young man: He deplored war and bureaucracy, and was horrified when the United States dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When he left the Army, he returned to Michigan and moved to Piety Hill, the home of his great-grandparents in rural Mecosta, where he lived for the duration of his life. Kirk traveled often, however, and doctoral studies took him to the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

It was from St. Andrews that Kirk wrote to the Chicago publisher Henry Regnery in the summer of 1952. Regnery, a co-founder of the anti-Roosevelt newspaper Human Events, had published Buckley’s controversial debut, God and Man at Yale, the previous year. He was on the lookout for critics of New Deal liberalism and secular humanism.

And then one presented himself. “In my previous letter to you, I mentioned the possibility that I might send the manuscript of my Conservatives’ Rout to you,” wrote the 34-year-old Kirk, “and now I am doing just that.” Alfred A. Knopf, to whom Kirk first sent the manuscript, had requested he cut it in half. “I intend to do nothing of the sort.” Kirk was not the kind of author who ceded editorial control lightly. He intended for the reader to encounter his book as he had written it. “It is my contribution to our endeavor to conserve the spiritual and intellectual and political tradition of our civilization; and if we are to rescue the modern mind, we must do it very soon.” (The University Press of Kentucky recently published an excellent collection of Kirk’s letters, edited by James Person.)

By the time his 500-page book was published in 1953, Kirk had changed its title to The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Santayana. T. S. Eliot replaced George Santayana in the subtitle beginning with the third edition, in 1960. The Conservative Mind was a critical and commercial success, turning its author into an intellectual celebrity. It also gave both a name and a philosophical and literary genealogy to a reemergent political persuasion: conservatism. “This study is a prolonged essay in definition,” Kirk says on the first page. “What is the essence of British and American conservatism?”