Word: kirks
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...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...
What of the rights of man, which Burke's erstwhile friend, Tom Paine, was proclaiming from Paris? Burke's answer, Kirk observes, is pertinent to an age which seriously debates the preposterous extremes of the United Nations' Universal
...never wholly so. The ostensible home of U.S. conservatism moved to the rural South, there to meet its worst defeat. Calhoun had spoken in principle for all minorities, but in practice he spoke for the slaveholding interest. In dealing with the tragic union of U.S. conservatism and slavery, Russeil Kirk, a bold writer, does not firmly grasp his nettle. He sidles away, with a glancing blow at the abolitionist innovators. He had a better case than he makes...
...Kirk's six canons suggest an appraisal of his book couched appropriately in conservative understatement: it has an interest that is not mainly antiquarian...