America is the most successful and enduring experiment in
democracy in human history. It has survived foreign invasion and
terrorist attacks, world wars and a civil war, a great depression
and not so small recessions, presidential assassinations and
scandals, an adversary culture and even the mass media. It is the
most powerful, prosperous, and envied nation in the
What is the source of America's remarkable success? Its abundant
natural resources? Its hardworking, entrepreneurial, can-do people?
Its fortuitous location midway between Europe and Asia? Its
resilient national will?
Why do we Americans enjoy freedom, opportunity, and prosperity
as no other people in history have?
In The Roots of American Order, the historian Russell
Kirk provides a persuasive answer: America is not only the land of
the free and the home of the brave, but a place of ordered
The roots of our liberty run deep. They were planted, Kirk says,
nearly three thousand years ago by the Hebrews, who perceived "a
purposeful moral existence under God." The Greeks strengthened
the roots with their philosophical and political self-awareness,
and were followed by the Romans, who nurtured the roots with their
law and social awareness.
The roots intertwined with "the Christian understanding of human
duties and human hopes, of man redeemed," and were then joined by
medieval custom, learning, and valor.
The roots were enriched, finally, by two great experiments in
law and liberty that occurred in London, home of the British
Parliament, and in Philadelphia, birthplace of the Declaration of
Independence and the U.S. Constitution. Kirk's analysis thus might
be called a tale of five cities-Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, London,
Much more could be said about the philosophical contributions of
the Jews, the Greeks, and the Romans to the American experience,
but I will limit myself to discussthe roots of modern conservative
thought that undergird our nation and which for more than 50 years
have explicitly reinforced the idea of ordered liberty.
I will focus on two great champions of liberty and order: Edmund
Burke, the eloquent British parliamentarian of the late 18th
century who was a supporter of American rights even as he was an
implacable opponent of the French Revolution, and Russell Kirk, the
American master of letters whose seminal work The Conservative
Mind, published in 1953,"catalyzed a self-conscious,
unabashedly conservative movement" in America.
Two significant political thinkers who provided an intellectual
bridge in the 19th century: Alexis de Tocqueville, the French
historian and author of the classic work Democracy in
America, and Lord Acton, the British historian and eminent
apostle of liberty also merit consideration.
Although separated by almost 200 years, Burke and Kirk shared
much, including a deep respect for custom and tradition, an
abhorrence of ideology and radicalism, and a belief in the politics
and policies of prudence. Kirk's biography of Edmund Burke is
superb, and I have used it freely in this essay.
Born in Dublin in 1729, Edmund Burke was the son of a successful
but not wealthy lawyer. Reared as an Anglican, he was enrolled at
the age of fifteen at Trinity College. His was the usual education
of the time. His favorite English authors were Shakespeare,
Spenser, and Milton. Among the ancients he favored Virgil, Cicero,
Homer, and Juvenal.
In the spring of 1750, young Burke moved to London to study law
but eventually entered the profession of letters, publishing
several books over the next decade, including Philosophical
Inquiry into the Origins of the Sublime and Beautiful-an
indication of his far-ranging mind. In the Sublime and
Beautiful, Burke challenged the strict rationalism of the
Enlightenment. He knew that we cannot neglect the passions in the
arts or in politics. He aligned himself with the French philosopher
Pascal that "the Heart has reasons that the Reason cannot know."
Not yet 30, Burke found himself a literary celebrity. Sir James
Mackintosh compared Burke with Shakespeare, declaring, "His words
contain an ampler store of political and moral wisdom than can be
found in any other writing whatever."
Married in 1757 to Jane Mary Nugent, the daughter of a Catholic
physician, Burke now called London his home.
Burke took on the editorship of a new publication-which
continues to this day-The Annual Register, covering the
major political events and papers and unusual events of the year.
It was excellent training for Burke's political career, for he had
to "analyze the whole commercial, financial, constitutional, and
foreign interests of Great Britain and its empire."
While editing the annual volume brought Burke prestige, it could
not pay his way. And so, with a wife and children and household
expenses, he was drawn into politics and the Rockingham faction of
the Whig party. It was a natural alliance, as the Whigs were lovers
of freedom and private property.
In July 1765, the Marquis of Rockingham became prime minister
and almost immediately appointed Burke as his private secretary. In
December of the same year Burke was elected to the House of Commons
and began a career in Parliament that lasted 29 years. He became a
national and international figure by his opposition to King George
III's colonial policies in America and India and his passionate
condemnation of the French Revolution. Wherever it occurred, "the
denial of justice roused Burke to greatness."
Burke's Speech on American Taxation, his Speech on
Conciliation, and A Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol
were eloquent but unsuccessful attempts to persuade George III, the
Parliament, and the public of the folly of England's policy toward
the colonies and the danger of forcing Americans into accepting
that policy. Burke became convinced that the colonies were lost to
Britain, and he was among the first to endorse our independence. At
the same time, he remained a firm believer in and supporter of the
institution of the British monarchy, although not of each
In the Bristol Sheriffs letter, Burke set forth his philosophy
regarding the obligations of a representative to his constituents-a
philosophy, lamentably, that is little practiced in the modern U.S.
Congress. Burke said that the wishes of constituents should
certainly carry weight with their Member of Parliament, but:
His own unbiased opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened
conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, or any set of men
living. These he does not derive from your pleasure-no, nor from
the law and the constitution. They are a trust from Providence, for
the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your representative
owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays,
instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.
Burke's reference to Providence provides another clue to Burkean
conservatism. "The principles of true politics," Burke said, "are
those of morality enlarged." Burke's politics are a branch of
ethics which separates him sharply from Machiavelli and the modern
idea that power is supreme in politics. Burke's basic political
principles are based on the classical and Christian natural law,
derived from God and perceived by good men through "right
One is tempted to say that for Edmund Burke religion is the only
thing. Throughout his most famous work, Reflections on the
Revolution in France, Burke argues that religion lies at the
center of civilized society, that without religion, there can be no
order or even comfort in society, only chaos. "Religion is the
of civil society," Burke writes in Reflections, "and the
source of all good and all comfort."
History too is central to Burke's thinking because history
reveals the divine purposes for man in the temporal order. Burke
believed that history taught those in public office the cardinal
virtue of temperance and encouraged them to be restrained in their
use of power. History provided explicit warnings from the days of
ancient Rome to the present against those seeking radical change
through revolution-a theme that Acton would immortalize almost a
Burke concurred with other political thinkers that "society is
indeed a contract," but unlike Hobbes and Rousseau, he believed it
was a contract between God and man and between all the generations
of history-the past, present, and unborn generations.
Burke's life was one long attempt to forestall revolution. He
foresaw the American Revolution but was unable to prevent its
coming. He predicted that Ireland would go the way of America if
reforms were not promptly made, and so it happened. He prophesied
that the French Revolution "would rend Europe limb from limb until
subdued by force and a master," and that too came to pass. He did
not share the smug optimism of the Enlightenment that all change
was good and tradition was a thing lightly cast aside. He was for gradual change rooted in
the institutions of society.
Appalled by the blood that flowed from the guillotine and
through the streets of Paris, Burke resolved that Britain would
"not share in France's folly and that the whole of the civilized
world must be awakened" to the menace of Jacobinism. He attacked, in particular, the
fallacy of the "Rights of Man" proposed by the French
revolutionaries because he saw in this abstract notion a desire to
be freed of all duties. But as Nobel Laureate F. A. Hayek put it
nearly two centuries later, "Liberty and responsibility are
Unlike England's "Glorious Revolution" of 1688, which was more
reform than revolution, Burke insisted that the French Revolution
of 1789 would uproot human society and lead first to anarchy and
then to dictatorship. The French Revolution, he said, was
"metaphysical madness" based upon a terrible misunderstanding of
At first, his warnings had little impact on Parliament-Charles
James Fox, a fellow leader of the Whigs, considered the French
deposing of Louis XVI and the resulting "people's democracy" a
"triumph of progress and liberty." Burke decided to go directly to
the people with his concerns and wrote one of the most brilliant
works of English political philosophy, Reflections on the
Revolution in France.
While the French revolutionaries talked incessantly of abstract
rights, Burke described what he called "the real rights of man"
beginning with the right of men to live in a civil society based on
the rule law.
"Whatever each man can separately do, without trespassing upon
others," he wrote, "he has a right to do for himself, and he has
right to a fair portion of all which society, with all its
combinations of skill and force, can do in his favour." In this
partnership, Burke said, "all men have equal rights but not to
He insisted that liberty must be prudently measured. "The
restraints on men, as well as their liberties, are to be reckoned
among their rights."
Nowhere is the yawning chasm between the modern conservative and
the modern liberal more apparent than in a discussion of "rights."
The modern liberal is the proud successor to the Jacobins' notion
of abstract rights, finding new ones every day in their vain
pursuit of perfectibility and Utopia. The modern conservative
stands with Burke, holding that the real rights of man are rooted
in custom, tradition, and faith-that reform is essential, but that
wholesale change is catastrophic.
The essential difference between Burke and the French
revolutionaries was theological. Burke possessed a Christian
understanding of human nature which Danton, Robespierre, and the
other Jacobins rejected. To the revolutionaries, Christianity was
superstition and an enemy. To Burke, it was "man's greatest good
and established order to be the fundamental of civilization." It provided the civilizing
underpinning of society, regardless of the individual's particular
In contrast, the French revolutionary leader Danton sought
constant ferment and spoke of a "cauldron" in which every impurity
of society would be "burnt out." But Burke declared that the just
society was not a bubbling cauldron but a spiritual corporation,
formed by a covenant between man and his God.
A frequent charge against Burke was that after decades of
defending the oppressed-in America, Ireland, India, and England-he
"betrayed his love of liberty and justice" by defending the old
regime in France (even Tocqueville taxes Burke for being too
sympathetic to the French monarchy). But there was no difference in
principle between Burke's defense of the American colonies and his
attacks on the French revolutionaries. In each instance, he adhered
to moral natural law and prudence as the best strategy to resist
political tyranny (the rule of man vs. the rule of law) and
injustice-and this was true whether speaking of kings or
Whatever the differences between Burke and Tocqueville about the
vices and virtues of the French monarchy, they were agreed on the
importance of religion, custom, and law to the maintenance of an
orderly and civil society.
How then to summarize the conservatism of Edmund Burke and his
influence on American conservative thought? Burke stood for
preservation of the British constitution, with its traditional
division of powers, as "the system most friendly to liberty and
order" in all Europe. And in Russell Kirk's words, Burke stood for
the preservation of the "larger constitution of civilization."
In Burke's writings and speeches can be found reliance upon
tradition and custom for public and private guidance; conviction
that men are equal in the sight of God but nowhere else; devotion
to personal freedom and private property; and opposition to
As Burke wrote: "By the unprincipled facility of changing the
state as often, and as much, and in as many ways, as there are
floating fancies or fashions, the whole and continuity of the
commonwealth would be broken. No one generation could link with
another. Men would become little better than the flies of a
The above beliefs articulated by Burke form a significant part
of the intellectual foundation of modern American conservatism.
Equally applicable in this century, recently released from the
threat of Communism, are Burke's stern warnings against a fanatical
elite that demands conformity to its ideology. "To them [the French
revolutionaries]," he wrote, "the will, the wish, the want, the
liberty, the toil, the blood of individuals is nothing.
Individuality is left out of their scheme of government. The state
is all in all."
Burke's ideas, Kirk writes, "did more than establish islands in
the sea of radical thought; they provided the defenses [the
definition] of conservatism, on a great scale, that still stand and
are not liable to fall in our time."
Alexis de Tocqueville
In the early 1830s, some four decades after Edmund Burke's
death, a young French lawyer and aristocrat, Alexis de Tocqueville,
visited America. From his one-year visit there issued a remarkable
book, Democracy in America, which Harvard Professor Harvey
Mansfield describes as "at once the best book ever written on
democracy and the best book ever written on America."
It is an extended essay on the natural rise of democracy in
America and those things that threaten it, including a tyranny of
the majority, excessive materialism, and an "insatiable" desire for
The same equality that permits each citizen to conceive vast
hopes, Tocqueville writes, "renders all citizens individually
weak." At each step up the ladder they find "immense obstacles that
they had not at first perceived." While it is possible to conceive
of a degree of freedom that might satisfy people entirely, he says,
"men will never found an equality that is enough for them."
For Tocqueville, there are three reasons for a nation's success:
its material circumstances, its laws, and its "mores," that is, its
moral habits and customs. The young Frenchman found that America
had no special advantages as regards its circumstances.
As to its laws, he notes that the federal form of government
gives America "the power of a great republic and the security of a
small one." Local institutions operate to moderate the potential
despotism of democracy and give people "both a taste for freedom
and the skill to be free." Among such institutions are local
government, a free press, an independent judiciary, and respect for
individual rights. Judicial power in particular checks and directs
the movements of the majority, helping to correct "the aberrations
Echoing Burke's belief in the civilizing role of religion,
Tocqueville says that the central reason for the success of
American democracy, as compared with the failure of other
democracies, is America's moral habits.
"For the Americans," Tocqueville writes, "the ideas of
Christianity and liberty are so completely mingled that it is
almost impossible to get them to conceive of one without the
other." For them, Christianity is not a set of "sterile beliefs
bequeathed by the past" but beliefs "living in the depths of the
American society might have sunk into an "irresponsible
individualism," Russell Kirk argues, had it not been held together
by the "cement of Christian teaching." Tocqueville understood that
without virtuous customs and prudential laws, the people become
Alexander Hamilton's "great beast."
Tocqueville is often cited for another antidote to radical
individualism-the capability of Americans to associate with one
another voluntarily (akin to Burke's "little platoons" of society)
in accordance with their own will and reason, instead of relying on
what Mansfield calls "a centralized, 'schoolmaster' government to
take care of them," or what Margaret Thatcher has
called "the nanny state."
By his investigations into American life, his acquaintance with
England and the writings of Burke and others, his political career
(he served in the Chamber of Deputies), and his unassuming
erudition, Tocqueville was certainly qualified to comment on
society and government. That he was eminently qualified to do so is
borne out by comments such as that of Lord Acton, who said: "Of all
writers, [Tocqueville] is the most widely acceptable, and the
hardest to find fault with. He is always wise, always right and as
just as Aristides."
The same might be said of the 19th century English historian
John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, the first Baron, famous for the
maxim, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts
absolutely." With these somber words, the historian Gertrude
Himmelfarb says, Acton places himself in the tradition of political
and philosophical pessimism, even as Tocqueville marveled at the
optimistic future for America.
But what saved Acton from unrelieved pessimism was his refusal
to succumb to philosophical or historical determinism. He believed,
with Edmund Burke, that man was a free agent capable of choosing
the good. The forces of evil were "constant and variable," Acton
wrote, but so were "the truth and the Higher Purpose."
Lord Acton was a man of the 19th century, who was born three
years before Queen Victoria ascended to the throne and died the
year after her death in 1902. He was a devout Roman Catholic
(although an opponent of the doctrine of papal infallibility), a
pessimist, and a moralist-a combination with little appeal in the
early decades of the 20th century, when optimism and materialism
were riding high.
However, with the coming of Nazism and Communism, writes
Himmelfarb, hard truths about politics and power received new
attention. Acton's epigrams denouncing racism and statism appeared
increasingly in editorials, dissertations, and speeches. Thus,
those who had become skeptical of a liberalism, secular and
optimistic, discovered in Acton a philosophy "religious in temper,
able to cope with the facts of human sin and corruption."
For all his erudition-he was said to have more than 20,000 books
in his private library-Acton never produced a single volume for
publication. His life-long intellectual task-the History of
Liberty-was "the greatest book that never was written." But long
before nationalism and "democratic despotism"-to use Tocqueville's
phrase-had begun to haunt the world, Acton predicted they would
some day "threaten our civilization."
Which brings us to the last of this quartet of
conservative thinkers, the redoubtable Russell Kirk.
In his introduction to The Liberal Imagination, published
in 1950,the liberal critic Lionel Trilling wrote that "liberalism
is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition"
in America. The conservative impulse, he said, was not thoughtful
at all, but made up of at best "irritable mental gestures which
seem to resemble ideas."
Trilling was not alone in his dismissal of conservatism. In
The Liberal Tradition in America, Louis Hartz explained that
by conservatism what was really meant was European feudalism,
something altogether foreign to the American experience.
In Conservatism in America, Clinton Rossiter concluded
that because America was "a progressive country with a liberal
tradition," conservatism was simply "irrelevant."
We cannot blame Trilling, Hartz, and Rossiter for their profound
misunderstanding of conservatism. At the time of their writing-the
early 1950s-there was only a small band of disparate conservative
writers and thinkers whose philosophical differences seemed to
outweigh their similarities.
The writers included Friedrich A. Hayek, a classical liberal
economist born in Austria; Richard Weaver, a Southern agrarian who
taught English at the University of Chicago; and Whittaker
Chambers, an ex-Soviet spy turned fervent anticommunist.
Traditional conservatives, classical liberals, and
anticommunists all agreed that the central values of civilization
were in danger. The place of the individual and the voluntary group
had been seriously undermined by the growing power of governments.
Freedom of thought and expression were threatened by power-seeking
minorities. All these developments had been fostered by a
philosophical view that denied all absolute moral standards,
questioned the rule of law, and contributed to a disbelief in
private property and the competitive market.
What intellectual theme could unite the different strains of
conservatism? Hayek provided part of the answer in The Road to
Serfdom (1944) with his stern admonitions about economic
planning leading to dictatorship. His knowledge of the totalitarian
nature of socialism led him to conclude that man does not and
cannot know everything, and when he acts as if he does, disaster
follows. In April 1945, hundreds of thousands of Americans were
introduced to Hayek when a slightly abridged version was published
in Reader's Digest. The book went on to sell more than one
million copies worldwide.
In Ideas Have Consequences, Professor Richard Weaver
traced the moral dissolution of the West to the rise of nominalism,
rationalism, and materialism under the Enlightenment. Weaver was a
man of contradictions. On the one hand, he believed that mankind
had begun the "slide down the slippery slope" away from the
transcendental in the 14th century. He also believed that man "will
prevail over the dark forces of time" by "persuasive speech in the
service of truth."
In Witness, Whittaker Chambers declared that the nation
and the world faced a transcendent crisis not of politics or power
but of faith. Ever the pessimist, Chambers believed that he was
leaving the winning side (Communism) for the losing side, but that
"it is better to die on the losing side than to live under
It was at this critical moment that a young, unknown scholar
published an intellectual history of Anglo-American conservative
thought since the late 1700s that permanently changed the public
perception of conservatism and laid the groundwork that would
transform the American political debate.
Russell Kirk was only 34 and a lowly instructor of history at
Michigan State College in the spring of 1953 when his seminal work,
The Conservative Mind, was published. Many liberals joked
that the title was an oxymoron, but they stopped smiling when they
read Kirk's "eloquent, defiant, impassioned cri de coeur for
His book was a 450-page overview of the most important
Anglo-American conservative writers and political leaders since the
American Revolution. It was also a scathing indictment of every
liberal nostrum from human perfectibility to economic
The Conservative Mindbegins not with a whimper but with a
"The stupid party": this is John Stuart Mill's description of
conservatives. Like certain other summary dicta which
nineteenth-century liberals thought to be forever triumphant, his
judgment needs review in our age of disintegrating liberal and
The passage stunned complacent liberals who had concluded that
conservatism could express itself only in "irritable mental
gestures," and it brought up short gloomy conservatives like
Whittaker Chambers, who declared that in becoming a man of the
Right he had joined the losing side. Not so Russell Kirk, a
passionate young American scholar, who had discovered a great truth
and wished to communicate his discovery to the world.
What had Kirk discovered?
Modern American conservatism rests securely on the words and
deeds of a gallery of conservative giants beginning with the
founder of the "true school of conservative principle"-Edmund
Burke. Burke was not a lonely voice in the wilderness but only the
first of a remarkable group of writers and political leaders,
including John Cardinal Newman, Sir Walter Scott, and Benjamin
Disraeli in Great Britain; Alexis de Tocqueville in France; the
remarkable Adams family-John, John Quincy, and Henry-Nathaniel
Hawthorne, and Orestes Brownson in America.
These were not second-rate scribblers and political hacks but
men of distinction and purpose who made a profound difference in
the thinking of their countries by their exposition of and
commitment to first principles. Kirk says that the essence of
conservatism lies in six canons:
- A divine intent rules society as well as conscience-"political
problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems."
- Traditional life is filled with variety and mystery, while most
radical systems are characterized by a narrowing uniformity.
- Civilized society requires orders and classes-"the only true
equality is moral equality."
- Property and freedom are inseparably connected.
- Man must control his will and his appetite, knowing that he is
governed more by emotion than reason.
- "Change and reform are not identical"-society must alter
Before the liberals had caught their breath, the New York
Times favorably reviewed The Conservative Mind,as did
Time, which devoted its entire book section to it. For
weeks, the New York Times listed the work in its column of
recommendations. Forty-seven of the first 50 major reviews in
publications ranging from the Saturday Review to the Yale
Review were laudatory.
No American conservative had ever before received such glowing
notices from the intellectual mainstream. The political philosopher
Robert Nisbet wrote Kirk that with one book, he had done the
impossible: he had broken "the cake of intellectual opposition to
the conservative tradition in the United States." In so doing, he
had made American conservatism intellectually respectable, and even
As the conservative historian George Nash has said, other
conservatives like Richard Weaver and Whittaker Chambers had
constructed "genealogies of evil men and pernicious thoughts; here,
at long last, was a genealogy of good men and valuable thoughts."
In the last chapter of The Conservative Mind, Russell
Kirk separates himself from the doomsayers by arguing that the
principal interests of true conservatism and old-style libertarian
democracy were coinciding. Confronted by arrogant collectivists and
the eager architects of the New Deal and its successors, Kirk
writes, American conservatives will "defend constitutional
democracy as a repository of tradition and order," while
intelligent democrats will "espouse conservative philosophy as the
only secure system of ideas with which to confront the planners of
the new order."
Kirk points out that even Harvard Professor Arthur M.
Schlesinger, Jr., a Jackson-FDR Democrat, admitted the pressing
need for an intelligent American conservatism. Which is what
Russell Kirk provides in The Conservative Mind.
There was another critical contribution of the author: Kirk was
proud to be a conservative. The true conservative, he insists, is
not the cruel caricature of a "dull, boorish, bigoted and
avaricious being" presented by most liberal and radical journalists
The true conservative, Kirk says, could be many different
people: a "resolute and strong-minded" clergyman; a farmer who
"holds fast" to the wisdom of his ancestors; a truck driver in the
very heart of the metropolis; a proprietor with an ancient name
endeavoring to moderate inevitable change by "prudence and good
nature"; an old-fashioned manufacturer, diligent, shrewd, and just;
a physician who knows human nature too well to talk of social
perfectibility; a lawyer who understands we cannot divorce
ourselves from history; a schoolmaster who knows there is no reward
without labor. The true conservative is a man of the future rooted
in the past.
All of these true conservatives, Kirk says, prefer the old and
the tried to the novel and the dubious, and in whatever they do,
endeavor to safeguard the institutions and the wisdom of the past,
not slavishly but prudently.
If we had to pick the thinkers more responsible than any other
for planting the intellectual roots of modern conservative thought,
I believe we would select Edmund Burke and Russell Kirk, each of
whom presented "a profound critique" of their contemporary society
and "a vivid image" of how that society might better itself. They were separated by almost two
hundred years but united in their adherence to the priceless
principle of ordered liberty. This unites them, and this provides
the basis for the conservative tradition.
In conclusion, the gulf between winning the battle of
ideas-which I believe conservatives have won with the help of
Burke, Tocqueville, Acton, Kirk, and others-and translating those
ideas into laws that genuinely diminish government's power and
influence while expanding the choices available to the individual
is a very wide one-much wider than we conservatives initially
In his splendid history of the Mont Pelerin Society, Oxford
Professor Max Hartwell points out:
In the history of ideas there are identifiable periods in which
an idea about how society should be organized is clearly
articulated and circulated and acquires legitimacy and acceptance.
The idea is then embodied in laws that control and condition the
actions of populations….
"Rhetoric is not enough," Hartwell emphasizes. "Only when ideas
are accepted and also become laws does the world change."
Thus it is possible to win the war of ideas but fail to change
the way the world works. Let me be clear: I believe absolutely in
the power of ideas, in their potential hegemony. To quote Richard
Weaver, "Ideas have consequences."
But ideas are not self-implementing or self-sustaining: they
must be linked to action. Translating even the best of ideas into
policies and laws that reverse the statist domination we have had
in America for the last 70 years is certainly a daunting but not an
Viewing our challenges from the shoulders of these giant
thinkers, I believe with all my heart and mind and soul that it can
be done and that it is being done across this great land of
Edwin J. Feulner,
Ph.D., is President of The Heritage Foundation.
 Russell Kirk, The Roots of
American Order (LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1974), p. 672.
 George Nash, The Conservative
Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 (Wilmington, Del.:
ISI Books, 1996), p. 67.
 Russell Kirk, Edmund Burke, A
Genius Reconsidered (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House,
1967), p. 33.
 Peter J. Stanlis, "Burkian
Conservatism," in American Conservatism: An
Encyclopedia, edited by Bruce Frohnen, Jeremy Beer and Jeffrey
O. Nelson (Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2006), p. 107.
 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the
Revolution in France, edited by Thomas H. D. Mahoney
(Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Educational Publishing, 1952), p.
 Kirk, Edmund Burke, p. 131.
 Friedrich A. Hayek, The Constitution
of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), p.
 Kirk, Edmund Burke, p. 153.
 Edmund Burke, On Taste, On the
Sublime and Beautiful, Reflections on the French Revolution, and A
Letter to a Noble Lord, edited by Charles W. Elliot, LL.D. (New
York: P.F. Collier & Son Corporation, 1968), p. 390.
 Kirk, Edmund Burke, p. 152.
 Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old
Regime and the Revolution, translated by John Bonner (New York:
Harper & Brothers, 1856), pp. 16, 248.
 Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind
From Burke to Santayana (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1953),
 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in
America, translated, edited, and annotated with an introduction
by Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop(Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2000), p. xvii.
 Kirk, The Roots of American
Order, p. 447.
 Kirk, The Conservative Mind, p.
 Mansfield and Winthrop in their
introduction to Tocqueville, Democracy in America, p.
 Gertrude Himmelfarb, Lord Action: A
Study in Conscience and Politics (San Francisco: ICS Press,
1993), p. 239.
 Matthew Spalding, "Preface," in Lee
Edwards, A Brief History of the Modern American Conservative
Movement (Washington, D.C.: The Heritage Foundation, 2004), p.
 Edwin J. Feulner, Jr., The March of
Freedom: Modern Classics in Conservative Thought (Washington,
D.C.: The Heritage Foundation: 2003), p. 398.
 Nash, The Conservative Intellectual
Movement in America Since 1945, p. 65.
 Kirk, The Conservative Mind, p.
 David Frum, "The Legacy of Russell
Kirk," The New Criterion, December 1994, p. 16.
 R. M. Hartwell, A History of the
Mont Pelerin Society (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, Inc., 1995),