Russell Kirk

Russell Amos Kirk (October 19, 1918 – April 29, 1994) was an American political philosopher, moralist, historian, social critic, literary critic, lecturer, author, and novelist who influenced 20th-century American conservatism. In 1953, he authored The Conservative Mind, which outlined and traced the development of socio-conservative thought in the works of Anglo-American tradition, such as those of Edmund Burke. The book helped establish the intellectual framework for a religious and humanistic understanding of conservatism in the postwar era. Kirk was the chief proponent of traditionalist conservatism. Scholars have identified Kirk as an important twentieth-century proponent of Christian humanism, placing him in conversation with figures such as T. S. Eliot, Christopher Dawson, and Romano Guardini. He was also an accomplished author of Gothic and ghost story fiction. In 1953, Clinton Rossiter said that thanks to Kirk, "the so-called 'new conservatism' of the postwar period takes on new substance and meaning". In 2013, Alfred Regnery called The Conservative Mind "the catalyst that began the transformation of a band of disparate conservative critics into the political, cultural, and intellectual force that it is today."