The “Midwestern Libertarian Conservatism” of Russell Kirk
A pleasant surprise came in the mail today with the payment for my University Bookman article on Ralph Adams Cram: a copy of the Heritage Foundation’s July 10, 2007 Heritage Lectures newsletter, which reprints a June 22 talk on Russell Kirk by George H. Nash. Most conservatives — the literate ones, anyway — know of Kirk’s Anglophile sensibility. But Nash also drew attention to his earlier, Jeffersonian roots:
In the summer of 1941, Kirk found himself working at Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village. Even before his experiences at the Ford company, Kirk had developed a distaste for big business, big labor, and big government. His year or so at Ford did nothing to change his attitude. Indeed, his dislike of bureaucracy and what he called federal “parasites” was, if anything, increasing. He denounced the military draft as “slavery.” He published his first scholarly article, in which he advocated a return to “Jeffersonian principles.” All in all, his was the Midwestern libertarian conservatism of Senator Robert Taft.
Sure, but Kirk left all that behind after he went to St. Andrews, right? Not quite–not entirely:
It is sometimes said that as men become old, they revert ot the political mindset of their youth. In the final decade of his life, Kirk, it seems to me, returned more overtly–at least in his politics–to the noninterventionist, Taftite, bedrock conservatism of his boyhood. He did so, in part, under the stress of the growing quarrel between the so-called neoconservatives and their traditionalist right-wing critics, the most militant of whom took the label of paleoconservatives.
“Paleoconservative” is a fine label, I suppose, but I think Nash said it better the first time: “Midwestern libertarian conservatism” is about the finest label of all.
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May 28th, 2008 at 5:06 am
Kirk’s disdain across the middle decades of his ascendancy, from roughly 1950 through 1990, for what he saw as the individualist, rationalist, economist, atomist and Manchesterite tendencies within that nineteenth-century liberalism whose modern heir we call libertarianism, is on abundant display, though I’m less familiar with his outlook post-1990. I remember reading, while working the front desk at Laissez-Faire Books in Manhattan in autumn 1984, Kirk’s introduction to the 1983 Hallberg reprint of Nock’s Jefferson (retitled Mr. Jefferson by Hallberg). In that introduction, I recall Kirk taking Nock’s mid-1920s “Progressive” tendencies in political economy, heavily dependent on the quasi-Marxian Beardian analyses of the 1910s, quite sharply to task as a reductionist cousin even to rationalist libertarianism, while finding the more patrician, tobacco-cured cultural aspects of Nock’s gifts as refined Jeffersonian cameo artist sweeter after his taste, presaging Nock’s post-1932 turn towards Cram-style pessimist reaction. I can remember as well, as preserved in that high-water mark of libertarian journalism, the bound volume of the full-run archive (1961-1968; Liberty Fund) of The New Individualist Review, especially its earliest years, the pronounced mutual hostility chronicled within between Kirk and the journal’s prime grad-student editors, such as Ronald Hamowy and Ralph Raico, the latter of whom came to ally with the Mises Institute wing of the libertarian movement. This was not surprising, given that two of the journal’s three faculty advisers were future Nobelists F.A. Hayek and Milton Friedman, with the third, Richard Weaver from the English department, presumably more amenable to Kirkian thought, more an outlier as revealed in the overwhelmingly classical liberal roster of both editors and regular writers. The presumed statist implications of Kirk’s organic, communitarian dispositions as shackles on full contractarian liberties, and his penchant for such C19 reformers as Orestes Brownson, took heavy fire in the NIR (though Hamowy’s impassioned swordplay in the correspondence columns with a puckish young swashbuckler called WFB crowded the marquee a bit), with abundant quotes from Kirk, and cognate passages from the usual “vital center” liberals as reinforcement. Just tonight I dug up, free through Google Books, the informative introduction by Paul Gottfried to the Transaction reissue of Robert Nisbet’s Sociology as an Art Form (pp. xi-xvi),
tinyurl.com/59wdtw
in which is drawn the clash between the communitarian import of such Nock-influenced thinkers as Kirk and Nisbet on the one hand, and the contractarian-rationalist libertarians on the other. The former, Gottfried notes, saw in the presumed social atomism and abstracted individualism of the latter the sort of acids of modernity that had worn down the enamel of traditional social cohesion, enabling the very tooth decay of centralising collectivism of which they were ostensibly the sworn and bitter enemies.
Though my copies of the Jefferson book and the NIR volume are buried, I think those with ready access to either will find much to amplify the above, and do check out the Gottfried intro to the Nisbet, which is only about five pages.
I know Dan and many of you may yawn over the ancient history above, and that the post-1990 Kirk may have shifted about in ways recalling Nock’s own final decade of disillusion, if we can call it so. Nash’s own pages on Nock and Kirk in his indispensable work The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America: Since 1945, whose much-cracked 1979 paperback edition I have long used as my Enchiridion here, provide the foundation for us all here, and he would know far more about Kirk’s fine-grained development than any of us. It’s just that hearing “Russell Kirk” and “libertarian” fused in the same phrase set off alarm bells in one who cut his political teeth as far back as the Carter years, and whose high-school encounters then with Rothbard and Hazlitt make him a bit wary of the sort of revisionism which might stretch the libertarian fold beyond the evidence encountered to date. Having said that, I look forward to reading the Nash linked herein, and look forward to further amplification.
May 28th, 2008 at 5:55 pm
Thanks for the comments, Scott. I put Nash’s description of Kirk in my headline because I knew it would be provocative.
I first read Kirk’s introduction to Nock’s Jefferson a few years ago. I too was struck by its rather negative and dismissive tone: as Scott says, Kirk makes much of the supposedly leftist character of the Charles Beard influence upon Nock. The introduction is important for another reason, too, in that it gives us Kirk’s own reflections on his Jeffersonian phase. Kirk emphasizes that he has moved beyond that youthful indiscretion. (I don’t have a copy of the book in front of me at the moment, so I apologize for not offering any quotes.)
Kirk took pains at that point to distance himself from the libertarian/Jeffersonian side of the Nock, and his disagreements with later libertarians were unfeigned - and indeed acrimonious. He leveled harsher invective against libertarians than he ever did against neocons — though it must be said that when he began to criticize the neos in the late ’80s and early ’90s, he at the same time softened his anti-libertarian views somewhat. Again, I don’t have the book in front of me at the moment, but there’s an essay in The Politics of Prudence in which Kirk outlines several points on which he thinks the libertarians are correct, including their anti-militarism and their belief in decentralization.
(After Googling around a bit, I find that the essay I’m thinking of, “A Dispassionate Assessment of Libertarians,” is on-line here. These are the passages I had in mind: “most of the libertarians believe in the humane scale: they vehemently oppose what my old friend Wilhelm Roepke called ‘the cult of the colossal’” and “so far as the libertarians set their faces against a policy of American domination worldwide - why, I am with them.” Kirk does elaborate a Cold War line about the latter, but it’s clear where his post-Cold War sympathies — the essay/talk dates to 1988 — would lie.)
At the risk of scandalizing doctrinaire traditionalists and apriori-uber-alles libertarians, I think that these areas of Kirk-libertarian agreement are a heck of a lot more significant than their disagreement over “rationalism.” I would also suggest that the root of Kirk’s feeling in these matters — i.e., his commitment to decentralism and quasi-noninterventionism — lies in his Jeffersonian personal history.
I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest that Kirk was always a crypto-Jeffersonian or crypto-libertarian; I don’t think that’s true at all. Moreover, the “Midwestern libertarian conservatism” of the Old Right is not the same thing as the more Europeanized, rationalistic libertarianism of the Cold War era. Hostility to the latter doesn’t necessarily imply a total repudiation of the former. “Midwestern libertarian conservatism” is an inevitably clumsy description of a particular historical/regional school of thought or kind of character. At the risk of committing what Mises called polylogism, libertarianism is not always and everywhere the same — at least, what goes by the name libertarianism is not always and everywhere the same. If Cold War libertarianism had come to be dominated by Midwesterners rather than European emigres and New York intellectuals (like Friedman and Rothbard), Kirk might have been more apt to call himself a libertarian.
In saying this, I don’t want to create the impression that I personally find the “foreign” character of Cold War libertarianism to be a good reason to reject it — I don’t agree with that at all, and a New Yorker like Murray Rothbard is closer to my heart than many a Midwestern statist. I don’t think regionalism was an overwhelming consideration for Kirk, either — but I do think it played a part in his vehement rejection of Cold War libertarianism.
(Kirk’s Anglophilia — what Midwestern Old Rightists used to call “Anglomania” — doesn’t pose too much of a problem for my interpretation. It’s significant that Kirk’s thought was Anglicized rather than Europeanized or Germanized; as Paul Gottfried and others have pointed out, Kirk intensely disliked German historicism and German thinking in general. Perhaps if Cold War libertarianism had had more of an Anglomaniacal bent than a Continentalist one, Kirk would have been more comfortable with it.)
I should work out my thoughts on these matters in a proper essay — Kirk as libertarian is a provocative enough idea, and regional libertarianism is perhaps rather provocative as well. Economic law is universal, and the logic of political philosophy may be, but in different regions at different times, different culturally-flavored variations of “libertarianism” or “conservatism” (or any other -ism) may shape the tastes of people like Kirk.
May 28th, 2008 at 7:04 pm
Kirk was opposed to bigness for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was his personal experience with big corporations and big unions. To be honest I think this is also why Kirk was as a rule so anti-ideological, which in turn was why he really had problems with libertarianism.
Let us not forget Kirk once voted for Norman Thomas, a man who had this to say about his old AFC colleagues during the Korean War..”[they have a] curious reasoning that probably we should not have gone to war in Korea at all but that now we should have a war with China which somehow we can win by atomic bombs and Chiang’s troops.” I suspect Kirk, Cold Warrior or not, was some what suspicious about the same trends, trends that were common in the “Eastern” wing and while not non-existant in Middle America, were certainly muted.