Kirk, Russell. The Politics of Prudence. Regnery Press, 2023.
Russell Kirk (1918-1994) was the father of American intellectual conservatism. His best known book, The Conservative Mind, is a tour de force that synthesizes a panoply of statesmen and authors such as John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Disraeli, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Alexis de Tocqueville, and T.S. Eliot. The Politics of Prudence is a different sort of book. It is a collection of seventeen lectures that Kirk delivered at the Heritage Foundation and one at Hillsdale College. The third edition, recently published by Regnery Press, includes a new introduction by Michael Federici.
The Politics of Prudence is a book that classical educators ought to read, for the overlap between Kirk’s conservatism and the convictions of classical educators is substantial. Several of the book’s chapters are convenient lists of tens: ten conservative principles, ten significant events in conservatism, ten conservative books, and ten exemplary conservatives. In that same spirit, I offer ten “Kirkian principles” derived from The Politics of Prudence from which classical educators can draw wisdom.
Ideology is the enemy. A core principle of Kirk’s conservatism is his opposition to ideology in all its forms. The ideologue is one who “thinks of politics as a revolutionary instrument for transforming society and even transforming human nature” (1). Importantly, then, conservatism is not simply a better ideology. It is an anti-ideology. The ideologue reduces the world down to a neat theory or facile schema in which the complexities of human persons and their relation to one another become lost in a rush of false urgency and activism. Kirk would want classical educators to have no patience for such visionary utopianism. Instead, the purpose of education is and ought to remain the steady cultivation of wisdom and virtue. “What we need to impart,” Kirk argues, “is political prudence, not political belligerence” (9). For Kirk, education must not become an ideological weapon deployed to enact a ruthless social revolution. The primary revolution that Kirk is interested in is the revolution of the mind from ignorance to wisdom and from vice to virtue.
Man is imperfectible. A key aspect of Kirk’s antipathy for ideology is his belief in human frailty. If utopian ideologues foolishly seek to conform human nature to their purportedly altruistic vision of a future paradise, then Kirkian conservatives believe that man, while noble, endowed with reason and made in the divine image, is nonetheless fallible and liable to serious errors in thought, word, and deed. Kirk would thus urge classical educators always to remember that we are on this side of paradise. Politics, he would remind us, is “the art of the possible” (1). Hence, complete solutions to human problems, if they exist at all, are rare, difficult to discover, and even more difficult to put into practice. More often, we must choose from among options that only somewhat remedy our brokenness or, conversely, further exacerbate it. Choosing the former over the latter is all we can reasonably hope for in this vale of tears.
Transcendence is real and necessary for the good of the temporal order. One of the reasons why the ideologue’s idealism is so urgent is that he has only the temporal order in view. “The ideologue,” writes Kirk, “promises salvation in this world, hotly declaring that there exists no other realm of being” (5). Likewise, postmodern secularists have hollowed out the world by cutting it off from the divine, and they have flattened it by denying our capacity to know reality. All opinions are thus believed to be equally valid, and any debate becomes an exercise in bare rhetoric. One of Kirk’s favorite authors, T.S. Eliot, puts the situation thus: “The term ‘democracy’ . . . does not contain enough positive content to stand alone against the forces that you dislike–it can easily be transformed by them. If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God) you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin” (90). By contrast, conservatives believe in “an enduring moral order,” an eternal reality beyond the temporal and to which the soul and the commonwealth ought to align (19).
The permanent things are to be trusted over the latest fads. With age comes the wisdom of experience. Though much wisdom has been eroded by time, time also reveals what is lasting and true about human nature and society. Kirk acknowledges that we receive many of our faults from our predecessors, but we also receive from our predecessors nearly all the goods that we enjoy. Gratitude, then, is the proper attitude toward the past, humble hope the proper disposition toward the future. Cultural and institutional change must therefore be implemented with care and caution: “Change is essential to the body social, the conservative reasons, just as it is essential to the human body. A body that has ceased to renew itself has begun to die. But if that body is to be vigorous, the change must occur in a regular manner, harmonizing with the form and nature of that body; otherwise change produces a monstrous growth, a cancer, which devours its host” (27).
Intellectualism is suspicious. The sources of conservatism are “custom, convention, and continuity” and not “theoretical writings” (47). Our most beloved institutions, Kirk points out, “did not spring full-grown out of somebody’s book,” and it is the “practical statesman” and not the “visionary recluse” who turns ideas into realities (48). Classical educators are fond of the Great Books, but for Kirk “the wisdom of the species is not comprehended in any seven-foot shelf of books” (50). Rather, it is found in the continuity of customs and conventions that form a culture across time. Intellectuals, who are often so prone to the errors of ideology, must be regarded with suspicion in proportion to their abstraction from these lived realities.
Education properly aims at a “philosophic habit of mind” not merely at “critical thinking.” If intellectualism is suspicious, then that does not entail that learning or wisdom is. Kirk is critical of ideological forms of pseudo-knowledge, not of knowledge itself. T.S. Eliot is again helpful in describing the problem with modern education: “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” he asks. In response, Kirk advocates a mode of education that disciplines the intellect so that students do not become one of Orwell’s “streamlined men” who “think in slogans and talk in bullets” (188). By contrast, a graduate from a classical school should understand that “the virtues and the vices are real, and that the individual is not free to toy with the sins as he may choose” (260). Kirk thus sees education as the transmission of “a body of truth: that is, a pattern of meanings, perceived through certain disciplines of the intellect” (260). This is far different from the modern view of education, which aims at an amoral training in specific skills, even when those skills are technical-intellectual ones like reading, writing, or “critical thinking.”
Intellectual variety, not uniformity. The mark of an educated man, Aristotle reminds us, is the ability to entertain an idea without accepting it. Nothing could be further from the lockstep uniformity required by proponents of ideology. Kirk prefers “the proliferating intricacy of long-established social institutions and modes of life” in contrast to the “narrowing uniformity and deadening egalitarianism of radical systems” (22). Classical educators, like Kirkian conservatives, “share a state of mind or a body of sentiments” even while they “do not necessarily all agree on prudential concerns” (51). This is to be expected, and classical educators should enjoy rather than lament intellectual variety among their compatriots.
Freedom for is at least as important as freedom from. Freedom means more than freedom from undue coercion, though it does include that. It means ordered liberty for the purpose of pursuing the highest and noblest ends of life. Such liberty is opposed to license. That is why classical educators focus on the cultivation of intellectual and moral virtues. As Edmund Burke (one of Kirk’s favorite authors) reminds us, “Men of intemperate minds are never free. Their passions form their fetters.” Freedom begins in the human heart and is achieved through proper formation.
Leadership is the exercise of prudence. Because persons are free and because ideologies are dangerous, the virtue proper to leadership is prudence. Prudence, Kirk reminds us, “means to be judicious, cautious, sagacious” (10). This is the virtue “most needed in the statesman” (195) because it judges any public measure “by its long-run consequences” (177). Prudence thus “moves slowly,” while the devil “always hurries” (22). In the domain of education, a school leader does not merely apply bureaucratic processes, nor does s/he merely implement programs or managerial theories. Leading means the inefficient work of cultivating persons, not the industrial boilerplating of persons to suit the parameters of a predetermined vision. Such was the way of the ideologues of the French Revolution, not the way of prudence.
Subsidiarity is preferable to centralization. Kirk is keenly aware of what Tocqueville called “democratic despotism,” an unwitting conspiracy between a multitude seeking to procure “petty and paltry pleasures” and a centralized parental power that “spares them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living” (235). In a democracy, the people’s intemperance is thus the greatest threat to political freedom. So too is the unchecked growth of the Behemoth State. Classical schools rightly resist the over-centralization of Behemoth school districts and other centralized modes of organization. They believe, with Kirk that “there is one sure way to make a deadly enemy,” and that is to propose to anybody, “Submit yourself to me, and I will improve your condition by relieving you from the burden of your own identity and by reconstituting your substance in my image” (225-6). Rather, prudence dictates that schools are better off when authority is decentralized, remaining with those closest to the issues at hand.
Kirk’s eloquence and wisdom shines through each page of this important book, in which he articulates how conservatives understand a wide array of topics such as morality, education, leadership, social change, foreign policy, and religion. The Politics of Prudence articulates several helpful principles that I have attempted to distill here, principles that can serve the classical education movement well, if we choose to follow them.
Paul Weinhold has been a teacher and leader in classical education movement for the last twenty years. He is Director of Continuing Education for Great Hearts America and Founder of ClassicalEd Review.