Adam Sandonato
Russell Kirk is best described as a cheerful malcontent: ever aware that we are peering over the brink into a gulf of dissolution, yet filled with wonder and gratitude at the fact that “you and I are moral beings meant to accomplish something good, in a small way or a big, in this temporal world.”
A world that damns tradition, lauds equality, and welcomes change; a world that has clutched Rousseau, swallowed him down, and demanded prophets yet more radical; a world scarred by industrialism, standardized by the common man, consolidated by government; a world harrowed by war, trembling between the colossi of East and West, and peering over the brink into a gulf of dissolution. So Burke would see us, and know he had failed.1
Russell Kirk wrote these words in 1950 in an attempt to answer the question, “How dead is Edmund Burke?” Looking over the ruins of the first half of the twentieth century, Kirk saw little, if any, remnant of the principles for which Burke stood in his own day. By the close of the eighteenth century, any widespread adherence to custom, prescription, and ordered liberty in the West had been swept away by what Burke called “armed doctrine”2—the twin forces of revolution and ideology. Even by the point of his own death, Burke knew he had failed. He spent the majority of his parliamentary career in the opposition; worse still, the acquittal of Warren Hastings in 1795 put a dismal end to Burke’s longest fought battle in the House of Commons. He died two years later.
As a politician, Burke certainly failed. Yet, as Kirk writes,
Burke was more than a defeated politician. He was the founder of modern conservative thought; and most of what genuine conservatism survives among us, in the English-speaking world, is the shadow of Burke’s creation; » Read More
https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2024/10/russell-kirk-lives-on-adam-sandonato.html