This volume, tragically out of print now, is a wonderful treatment of the history, importance and interpretaion of the US constitution. Mr Kirk writes clearly and simple, but is nonetheless full of suprising anecdotes and quotations.

The book explores the question of what were the actual influences on the constitution (and what weren't), and how we ended up so different from France which went through a "revolution" at much te same time.

He also discusses in some detail the application of the various parts of the first ammendment, as well as other provisions, throughout american history. Particularly of note is his treatment of the Mobile, AL public school textbook case, a case in which he served as an expert witness.

The overall theme, amply demonstrated and hinted at by the title, is that the constitution of the US has acted as a conservative (or preserving) force on the way our government functions, and how this has helped preserve a somewhat consistent and peaceful way of life here.

Kirk's introduction to the life and politics of Burke is essential to understanding Edmund Burke in his time and ours. More of a Political biography than a general biography, it is still a book whose prose is very readable and understandable. A biography of a great man by a great man.

The late Milton Hindus, who followed Russell Kirk as editor of the Library of Conservative Thought, recognized that Burke and Rousseau had a feel for the main tendency of their times and wrote accordingly. I found this to be a useful way of looking sympathetically at two figures who occupied opposite ends of the bookshelf.

Kirk, too, had a feel for the main tendency and gave his age what it needed, noting where was excess and where there was need for balance. He wrote The Conservative Mind under the impression that conservatism had been on the retreat for many years. In making his case, he was not content merely to repeat what had been said, though the book is thoroughly documented; instead, his moral imagination moved conservatism forward. He articulated conservatism in a way that had not been done before, yet in a way in which its principles were familiar across a broad spectrum. Kirk shaped a nonideological world view that transcended politics. T. S. Eliot, perhaps, would have approved of the way in which Kirk's individual talent had absorbed tradition and moved beyond it.

Kirk was skeptical of manifestoes, wary of bibliolatry, and scornful of schemes of earthly perfection. His book was a defense and explanation of a certain type of character, almost an anthology of brief, intellectual biographies, which, like all good biographies, contained emphatic, even poetic, passages.

But rather than plunder private lives, he took a set of general principles and revealed their continuity in the work of diverse literary and political figures. He began with Burke and continued through Coleridge and Walter Scott; John Adams, John Randolph, and John Calhoun; Tocqueville and James Fenimore Cooper; Orestes Brownson and Nathaniel Hawthorne; Disraeli and Newman; Henry Adams, Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More; George Santayana and T. S. Eliot.

Kirk wrote that certain principles endured over time, having arisen from centuries of trial and error in human experience. They included: 1) belief in a transcendent order and natural law; 2) affection for variety and mystery over uniformity, egalitarianism, and utilitarianism; 3) recognition of natural hierarchies and talents over equality; 4) belief that freedom and property are connected; 5) preference for prescription, custom, and convention over rational or economic planning; and 6) awareness that change and reform are not identical. These principles helped form a conservative world view.

Although writing is a conservative act, most writers get their politics wrong, and most conservatives lack the artistic skills and the intellectual depth required to make a persuasive case. Conjuring images and metaphors, Kirk followed his own observation that men are moved far more often by their feelings and passions than by logic and reason. By demonstrating his point, rather than merely asserting it, he wove a symmetry between form and content.

Two thousands years ago, Cicero wrote that to remain ignorant of what came before one's own life was to remain a perpetual child. In his introduction, Kirk wrote that his intention was to remind people of their inheritance. I believe he succeeded.

The book is a sort of intellectual history, each chapter summarizing the thought of one to three conservative thinkers, more or less chronologically beginning with Edmund Burke and running through poets of the mid twentieth century (T.S. Eliot and Robert Frost, among others). The thinkers discussed include intellectuals, clergymen, politicians and poets, all thinking, working and writing in the Anglo-American sphere (most are in fact British or American, but the exceptions -- Tocqueville and Santayana -- wrote in America or for American audiences). A good working knowledge of British and American history from the French Revolution through World War II is therefore a helpful prerequisite to understanding many of these thinkers.

The summaries are interesting and informative as description. Many of them (the chapters on Burke and John Adams, for instance, or the section on John Henry Newman) make great introductions to figures whose work can't be read in comprehensive political treatises and many provide intriguing introductions to writers you have probably never heard of (Sir James Fitzjames Stephen) or to the thought of people whom you don't know as political thinkers (say, John Randolph or Arthur Balfour).

Among the wealth of description, a little prescription creeps in. Kirk's heroes don't "argue" -- they "know," they "perceive," they "realize," they "understand." Kirk is highly sympathetic with the ideas he summarizes, and it is no coincidence that his final chapter, on twentieth century poets, is called "Conservatives' Promise" and contains some of the most hopeful writing in the book. "If men of affairs can rise to the summons of the poets," he writes, "the norms of culture and politics may endure despite the follies of the time." He ends upbeat, with a call to action of sorts.

Not to be missed is Kirk's first chapter, "The Idea of Conservatism," in which he spells out the fundamental tenets which unite the belief of the writers whose work he describes, as well as their photographic negative, the tenets of radicalism.

The book dovetails perfectly with George Nash's _The Conservative Intellectual Movement in American after 1945_, which, of course, begins with Kirk himself and which carries on a similar discussion (though Nash omits from his narrative the British half and focuses on intellectual figures, to the exclusion of practical politicians like, say, Goldwater).

One of the important things about this book is that it examines conservative thinkers who weren't primarily known as politicians or political thinkers (e.g. Scott and Eliot). I appreciated Mr. Kirk's lucid examination of the keepers of the conservative flame. I also found it eye-opening as to the relationship between conservatives and what are known today as libertarians (exemplified by the struggles in the Republican party between its social-conservative wing and its supply-side, libertarian wing). The intellectual foundations of this conflict make a great deal of sense when laid bare by Mr. Kirk. His treatment of Burke is one of the finest I have seen and his study of southern thinkers prior to the Civil War deftly balances Hofstadter's in "The American Political Tradition".

Later, when reading a biography of Gladstone, I found that I understood the conflicts between himself and Disraeli (and, in some instances, members of his own party) with far more precision than I would have without this book as a background.

Finally, it should be read simply because people should be introduced to the heritage that informs their conservative impulses. Battles are often lost simply because people do not believe they have the intellectual high-ground - when, in fact, they do. This book is a new round of combat in the struggle of freedom - the struggle that is never lost, says Mr. Kirk, because it is never won. That's a refreshing and often needed perspective.

A fine piece of intellectual history and a resounding answer to Mill's quip that "the conservatives were the stupid party".

Kelly Whiting