A Conservatism of Reflection

I find Russell Kirk delightful. But he is delightful because he is precisely what he urges other people not to be.

Two rhetorical strains that run through his advocacy of conservatism, are a professed dislike of reasoned consistency in principle and a stated prejudice against cultivating individualism as such. But his collection of columns and magazine essays, Confessions of a Bohemian Tory, reveals him as a comrade-in-arms of the reasonably consistent ¡Frank Meyer (whom he erroneously dismisses as an “ideologue”) and as an individualist almost to the point of eccentricity in the grand old English style.

JC

About the Author

John Chamberlain

John Chamberlain (1903–1995) was an American writer.

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I find Russell Kirk delightful. But he is delightful because he is precisely what he urges other people not to be.

Two rhetorical strains that run through his advocacy of conservatism, are a professed dislike of reasoned consistency in principle and a stated prejudice against cultivating individualism as such. But his collection of columns and magazine essays, Confessions of a Bohemian Tory, reveals him as a comrade-in-arms of the reasonably consistent ¡Frank Meyer (whom he erroneously dismisses as an “ideologue”) and as an individualist almost to the point of eccentricity in the grand old English style.