The Conservative Mind:  From Burke to Eliot, Seventh Revised Edition,        by Russell Kirk

Regnery : Washington, DC  2001

This  monumental exposition  of  Western, and especially Anglo-American intellectual development is not a primer to conservative thought. I honestly do not know what a reader lacking a reasonably thorough grounding in Western civilization would make of this "prolonged essay".  I am a reasonably well-educated man with lifelong amateur  pretensions in political economy, and even so I found it most helpful to have dictionary and web access near at hand. I made frequent use of both in mining Kirk's dense, rich and lovely prose.  It is  a relief to me that only now, in the sixth decade of my life, were Russell Kirk and I met,  for it is only now that I am able ( in a rudimentary and barely adequate measure) to read and understand.

This book is not a conservative bible. It is not a book that every true conservative must read, although it is one that a competent activist will have, or ought to. Contemporary readers of all political stripes will, I think, be startled more than once, and made the wiser for it. Nor is The Conservative Mind a manifesto, although Kirk's place in the history of the contemporary American conservative movement is primordial. Kirk does not, first of all, argue for the conservative view, rather, he renders an account of how and why conservatives think as they do, and have. And always will. 

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