Matt Continetti's The Right has led me to go back to the cultural conservatives of the mid-20th
century, namely Richard Weaver, Robert Nisbet and Russell Kirk. Kirk presents the tradition of
Anglo-American conservatism, going back to the time of Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville.
He then alternates between what's going on in England and what's going on in America with
regard to conservative principles, looking at figures like Calhoun, Disraeli, Orestes Brownson
and John Henry Newman. A key point in this book is the importance of "The Adams Family".
While conservatives usually look to Alexander Hamilton, he was more about northern industry
and big business. Adams was more of a cultural conservative, and Kirk views John Adams as
the American version of Edmund Burke, not on the same level, but similar. John Quincy Adams,
Henry Adams and Charles Adams were all great thinkers, and were correctly pessimistic that
their long-prominent family in America was declining in influence with each generation.
If I understand correctly, the book originally ended with George Santayana, but Kirk added
a reflection on T.S. Eliot and conservative poets like Yeats and Robert Frost, among others.
This terribly eloquent final chapter may well bring you to tears of beauty, and I'd like to quote
from it at length, from pages 492 to 497.
As Eliot wrote in his essay on Francis Herbert Bradley, "If we take the widest and wisest view
of a cause, there is no such thing as a Lost Cause, because there is no such thing as a Gained
Cause. We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface
to our successors' victory, though that victory itself may be temporary; we fight rather to keep
something alive than in the expectation that it will triumph". In every period, some will endeavor
to pull down the permanent things, and others will defend them manfully.
No less than politicians do, great poets move nations, even though the generality of men may not
know the poets' names. When the chief poet and critic of the century sets his hand to "redeeming
the time: so that the Faith may be preserved alive through the dark ages before us; to renew and
rebuild civilization, and save the World from suicide"-why, it is conceivable that he may undo Marx
and Freud, not to mention captains and kings.
Certainly some poets have been radicals: there is the Promethean defiance of Shelley. Just past
the summit of the romantics' revolutionary enthusiasm, Shelley was answered by Coleridge,
Wordsworth, Southey and Scott; while even Byron thought Shelley's first principles nonsensical.
Every age is out of joint, in the sense that man and society never are what they ought to be; and
the poet senses that he is born to set the time right-not, however, by leading a march to some New
Jerusalem, but by rallying in his art to the permanent things.
The emphasis of Milton upon ordered liberty; the politics of Dryden, anticipating Burke's; the Tory
principles of Swift and Pope; the doctrines of ordination and subordination, so strong in Johnson;
the conservative Christian humanism of Coleridge; Yeats' passionate attachment to tradition and
continuity-these are so many instances of the point.
A Tory poet, Kipling, prophesied that the gods of the copybook headings with fire and slaughter
would return; and so have they come among us again, and they smite with increasing fury. A chastened
generation looks for the principles of order. The skies grow dark, and sober counsels obtain a hearing;
as Chesterton wrote in The Ballad of the White Horse-
The wise men know what wicked things
Are written on the sky,
They trim sad lamps, they touch sad strings,
Hearing the heavy purple wings,
Where the forgotten seraph kings
still plot how God shall die.
Yet such champions of orthodoxy as Chesterton go gaily in the dark. Not to the romantic liberal
enthusiast, nor to the glowering proletarian poet, nor to the versifying nihilist, can a chastened
generation turn. They must look, instead, to the poetic defenders of normality, though for a time
such poets lay under a cloud.
Nothing is but thinking makes it so. If men of affairs can rise to the summons of the poets, the norms
of culture and politics may endure despite the follies of the time. The individual is foolish; but the
species is wise; and so the thinking conservative appeals to what Chesterton called "the democracy
of the dead". Against the hubris of the ruthless innovator, the conservative of imagination pronounces
Cupid's curse:
They that do change old love for new,
Pray gods they change for worse.
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Reviews with images
good book and good service
This is a classic book on Conservatism and feel happy to get a copy of it from amazon and the seller. A nice experience of purchasing.
Top reviews from other countries
Donna Edmunds
This is a PRIMER, not the full text!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 21, 2014Amazon Customer
Important to balance democracy and aristocracy in government.
Reviewed in Canada on February 22, 2021