The Postmodern Imagination of Russell Kirk
By Gerald J. Russello
Reviewed by Mark Wegierski
Russell Kirk (1918-1994) is one of the most prominent American conservative thinkers in the post-World War II era. It should be remembered that just after the war, the entire “right-wing option” stood as discredited in the eyes of most people in the Western democracies, although very many traditionalists, conservatives, and nationalists in Europe had fiercely opposed Nazi Germany. What was called Eastern Europe (including Poland, which had been the first to fight Hitler) was handed over to Stalin and his henchmen. All those societies, which would have remained traditional by democratic choice, were consigned to be devoured by Stalin’s terror-apparatus.
In the United States, immediately after the war, Theodore Adorno produced his studies of the authoritarian personality, which essentially considered conservatism as a mental aberration required to be removed from society by public education and if it were to be discovered in an individual, by semi-coercive “therapy.”That the American conservatives of the 1950s were able to achieve what they did may in itself be quite amazing. Leading the revolt against the supremely confident liberal intellectuals of the day, was Russell Kirk’s book, The Conservative Mind, published in 1953. The title itself must have caused tittering among the cognoscenti.
Gerald J. Russello’s book is a very interesting look at the thought and life of Russell Kirk. The book explicates to a new audience the main lineaments of the thought of Russell Kirk, and also explores its putative affinities as well as divergences with so-called postmodern thought.
http://www.takimag.com/site/article/postmodern_not_hypermodern_russell_kirk/