The Essential Russell Kirk: Selected Essays

About this book

As the author of The Conservative Mind and other seminal books Russell Kirk is usually thought of as one of the American conservative political movements most important progenitors. But as this collection demonstrates Kirk was perhaps at his best as an essayist. This volume also confirms that Kirks was principally a literary and historical conservatism that refused to fit the irreducible complexity of human experience to the requirements of any ideological straitjacket. With The Essential Russell Kirk literary critic George A. Panichas captures the breadth and depth of Kirks intellectual project by gathering together forty-four of the most masterful of Kirks essays along with a unique chronology told in Kirks own words and a substantial introduction that articulates the deep humanism that animated Kirks philosophy. The result is a carefully assembled volume that gives us a fuller picture of an extraordinary man and writer one whose labors had and continue to have remarkable repercussions on the American literary and political landscape.