Russell Amos Kirk was an American political theorist, moralist, historian, social critic, and literary critic, known for his influence on 20th-century American conservatism.
24 Facts About Russell Kirk
2.
Russell Kirk was an accomplished author of Gothic and ghost story fiction.
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Russell Kirk is often considered one of the most significant conservative men of letters of the twentieth century.
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Russell Kirk was the son of Russell Andrew Kirk, a railroad engineer, and Marjorie Pierce Kirk.
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Russell Kirk resigned in 1959, after having become disenchanted with the rapid growth in student number and emphasis on intercollegiate athletics and technical training at the expense of the traditional liberal arts.
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Russell Kirk frequently published in two American conservative journals he helped found, National Review in 1955 and Modern Age in 1957.
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In 1963, Russell Kirk converted to Catholicism and married Annette Courtemanche; they had four daughters.
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Russell Kirk declined to drive, calling cars "mechanical Jacobins", and would have nothing to do with television and what he called "electronic computers".
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Russell Kirk did not always maintain a stereotypically "conservative" voting record.
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The Portable Conservative Reader, which Russell Kirk edited, contains sample writings by most of the above.
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Russello argues that Kirk adapted what 19th-century American Catholic thinker Orestes Brownson called "territorial democracy" to articulate a version of federalism that was based on premises that differ in part from those of the founders and other conservatives.
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Russell Kirk further believed that territorial democracy could reconcile the tension between treating the states as mere provinces of the central government, and as autonomous political units independent of Washington.
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Finally, territorial democracy allowed Russell Kirk to set out a theory of individual rights grounded in the particular historical circumstances of the United States, while rejecting a universal conception of such rights.
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Russell Kirk identified these ideals as the perfectibility of man, hostility towards tradition, rapid change in economic and political systems, and the secularization of government.
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Russell Kirk grounded his Burkean conservatism in tradition, political philosophy, belles lettres, and the strong religious faith of his later years, rather than libertarianism and free market economic reasoning.
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Russell Kirk, therefore, questioned the "fusionism" between libertarians and traditional conservatives that marked much of post-World War II conservatism in the United States.
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Late in life, Russell Kirk grew disenchanted with American neoconservatives as well.
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Toward the end of his life, Russell Kirk was highly critical of Republican militarism.
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President Bush, Russell Kirk said, had embarked upon "a radical course of intervention in the region of the Persian Gulf".
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Russell Kirk wrote other admired and much-anthologized works that are variously classified as horror, fantasy, science fiction, and political satire.
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Russell Kirk stated in 1984 that the purpose of his stories as:.
22.
Dr Jackman appears to be a prototype of Russell Kirk's best known character, Mandred Arcane, with the only difference being the former has no values while the latter does.
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Russell Kirk has Arcane write his pseudo-memoir in a consciously Victorian style to underline that he does not belong in the 1960s.
24.
In 1967, Russell Kirk published a short story "Belgrummo's Hell" about a clever art thief who unwisely tries to rob the estate of the ancient Scottish warlock, Lord Belgrummo, who is later revealed to be Arcane's father.