Russell Kirk would end up being one the most influential traditionalist philosophers of our time.  His great contribution was tracing a conservative tradition since the American founding (The Conservative Mind) and that America was the direct heir of the great lineage of Western Civilization thought and ‘ancient’ cities, including Jerusalem, Athens, Rome and London (Roots of American Order).  In this session, Dr. Deneen spends time showing how Kirk impacted American Conservatism by teaching us, “A way of seeing the world, more than an applied program for the world.”

For more than forty years, Russell Kirk was in the thick of the intellectual controversies of his time. He is the author of some thirty-two books, hundreds of periodical essays, and many short stories. Both Time and Newsweek have described him as one of America’s leading thinkers, and The New York Times acknowledged the scale of his influence when in 1998 it wrote that Kirk’s 1953 book The Conservative Mind “gave American conservatives an identity and a genealogy and catalyzed the postwar movement.”

He is the only American to hold the highest arts degree (earned) of the senior Scottish university—doctor of letters of St. Andrews. He received his bachelor’s degree from Michigan State University and his master’s degree from Duke University. He received honorary doctorates from twelve American universities and colleges.  He was a Guggenheim Fellow, a senior fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, a Constitutional Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a Fulbright Lecturer in Scotland.