Word: kirks
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Neither Kirk nor any other expounder of conservatism can blueprint the conservative mind or doctrine. Blueprints belong to the radicals, the Utopians, the innovators who drew the plans for new societies in the solitudes of their own minds. The history of conservative thought is found unpackaged, warm with the lives of men, glimpsed by the poets and novelists, hammered out by practical politicians who turned from immediate experience to distill the principles of experience...
...Kirk tells his story of the conservative stream with the warmth that belongs to it. Even Americans who do not agree may feel the warmth-and feel, perhaps, the wonder of conservative intuition and prophecy, speaking resonantly across the disappointing decades...
Summer Flies. Where did the conservative stream rise? Before history, when experience, as custom, prejudice, and social institution, began to pass from one generation to another. Kirk does not explore the stream's upper reaches. His subject is conservatism in the modern world, the century and a half dominated by the ideas of the French Revolution, and the infinite, infinitely various get of those ideas...
...Kirk begins with Edmund Burke, founder of a great line of British-American conservatives. Son of a Dublin lawyer, devout Anglican, party manager of the Whigs, Burke lived in an England torn and undermined by the philosophy of the French Revolution much as the U.S. in the '305 was torn and undermined by the philosophy of the Communist Revolution. In press, Parliament and public opinion, Burke saw signs that Britain was in danger from the doctrines across the Channel. If his fears now seem exaggerated, that impression is perhaps Burke's greatest achievement. "He succeeded," says Kirk...
...change. But change, said Burke, flows from the law of Providence; it should come as the result of "a need generally felt," and not by ukase based upon abstract theorizing. Conservatives can accept change as a matter of expediency, free of doctrinaire compulsion, because conservatives understand ultimate ends. "Conservatism," Kirk writes, "never is more admirable than when it accepts changes that it disapproves, with good grace, for the sake of a general conciliation, and the impetuous Burke, of all men, did most to establish that principle...