Russell Kirk's Ten Principles Are the Best Short Course in Conservatism

You are going to be handed a proposal this year. Maybe it arrives as a bill in the state legislature, a ballot measure, a school board plan, or a candidate's promise to fix everything by Labor Day. Somebody on your side will love it. Somebody on the other side will hate it. And you will have about ninety seconds at the dinner table to decide what you think.

What do you reach for? Most people reach for their party. That is understandable, and it is how people end up defending things they never examined. I want to give you something better: a short list of questions, written by a man who spent his life studying the people who built the conservative tradition. The man is Russell Kirk. The list is the best short course in conservatism I know. It fits on an index card.

The man and the book

Russell Kirk (1918 to 1994) was a writer from Michigan who earned a doctorate at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. His doctoral work became The Conservative Mind, published in 1953. The subtitle of the first edition ran from Burke to Santayana; later editions extended it to T.S. Eliot. The book argued that there was a continuous line of thought, running from Edmund Burke through John Adams, Alexis de Tocqueville and other writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that deserved to be called conservatism, even though nobody before him had assembled it.

That was a bigger deal than it sounds. In 1953 many American intellectuals assumed there was no serious conservative tradition at all, only a mood or an economic interest. Kirk handed the right a lineage. He told its members they were heirs to a long argument, not the stragglers of a lost one. If you want the first link in that chain, Edmund Burke and the Case for Changing Things Slowly and Carefully covers it.

Kirk later put his principles in short form, most famously in a list of ten that appears in his writing in the 1990s. He said that conservatism is not an ideology, a fixed set of dogmas, but a way of looking at the world, and that these ten ideas run through the writers he admired. The wording differs a little between versions and so does the order, so treat what follows as a faithful summary and go to Kirk himself for the exact phrasing.

The ten, one at a time

Here they are, in the order I find easiest to use. For each I give the principle, then the question it asks of a proposal.

1. A belief in a transcendent order. Kirk held that society is governed by moral truths that do not depend on any election or any ruler. Right and wrong are not invented by committees. The question: Does this proposal respect moral limits that were here before it, or does it treat everything as negotiable?
2. Affection for the variety and mystery of traditional life. Kirk preferred the rich, untidy diversity of real communities to the neat uniformity that planners love. The question: Does this proposal flatten differences between towns, families and traditions in the name of efficiency?
3. Custom and continuity. Habits, manners and long-standing arrangements carry knowledge that no one can fully write down. The question: What does the existing way of doing this know that the new way might not?
4. Prescription. This is the belief that long-established rights and practices have a presumption in their favour, because they have been tested by many generations. The question: How old is the thing being changed, and has it served people well?
5. Prudence. Kirk, like Burke, counted prudence as the first virtue of statesmanship: judging a measure by its likely consequences, not by its intentions. The question: What are the likely effects in a year, in ten years, in a generation?
6. Imperfectibility. Human beings are flawed, and no law will make them angels. The question: Does this proposal assume people or officials will behave better than they ever have?
7. Freedom and property are closely linked. Kirk believed that when the state controls property, it comes to control everything else. The question: Does this proposal widen or narrow the area in which a family can decide for itself?
8. Voluntary community. Kirk loved the church, the club, the family business and the local association, and he distrusted compulsory collectivism. The question: Does this proposal strengthen the small associations that do the real work, or does it replace them with an agency?
9. Prudent restraints upon power and upon human passions. Both the state and the crowd need checks. The question: Who can say no to this, and what stops the power from being abused when the wrong person holds it?
10. Permanence and change must be reconciled. A society that clings to everything dies of rigidity, and one that discards everything dies of chaos. The question: Is this a repair that keeps the best of the past, or a demolition?

That is the whole card. Notice what is not on it: not a single policy. Not a word about tax rates, immigration levels or the size of the military. Kirk's principles cannot tell you what to think about any particular bill. They tell you how to think about it.

A worked example, three ways

Let me put the list to work on three hypothetical proposals. These are invented cases. Nothing here refers to a real bill, and you should apply the same test to the real ones in your own state.

Proposal one: a statewide rewrite of every school curriculum

Imagine a state legislature that wants to replace every local school's reading list and lesson plans with a single approved version, to be adopted within one school year.

• Prudence asks what happens if the new version is wrong. It would be wrong everywhere at once.
• Variety asks whether a farm town and a city neighbourhood really need the same text.
• Voluntary community asks where the parents are. The question is whether the plan treats the school board and the PTA as partners or as obstacles.
• Permanence and change asks whether anything can be adopted gradually, with a pilot.

Whatever its merits, a Kirkian would slow this proposal down. Note that the same test would apply if the plan came from the right as much as from the left.

Proposal two: a town repeals a zoning rule that blocks new housing

Now imagine a town council proposes to repeal a rule that blocks homebuilders from building anything but single-family houses on large lots.

• Property and freedom favour it. A landowner would get to use his land without asking permission for a use that harms nobody.
• Custom and continuity raise a caution. Neighbours who bought their houses relying on the old rule have a reasonable claim to a hearing.
• Prescription is not decisive here, since an old rule is not necessarily a good rule, but it is a reason to give notice and to phase in the change.

This shows something important. Kirk's list is not a machine that returns "no" to every change. A Kirkian could easily support this proposal, and then insist on doing it carefully. zoning may be the biggest price control you never got to vote on makes the property-rights case for exactly this kind of reform.

Proposal three: a federal program to take over a service families now handle themselves

Imagine a bill to create a national program that would provide, for free, a service that families, churches and neighbourhood groups now provide in a hundred different ways.

• Voluntary community asks what happens to the existing helpers. Will they be displaced?
• Imperfectibility asks who will run it and what happens when they get it wrong.
• Restraints on power asks about the budget, the rulemaking and the way the program can grow without a new vote.
• Prudence asks what the program will cost and who will pay.

A Kirkian would want every one of those answered before supporting the bill. It is the same intuition behind Ten Questions to Ask Before You Support Any New Government Program, and it is why The Family Is the Original Welfare State and the Cheapest One makes such a persuasive case that the first helper should be the one closest to the need.

The principle most conservatives skip

Kirk's formulations included one that modern American conservatives tend to pass over quietly. In his longer lists he included the conviction that a civilized society requires orders and classes, meaning that natural distinctions exist among people and that a society that tries to erase all of them ends up in tyranny.

Read in a European context, in the shadow of Burke's England, that made some sense. In America, with its Declaration that all men are created equal, it sits awkwardly. Most American conservatives hold to equality before the law and equality of opportunity, and I think they are right to. If you encounter that principle on a list of Kirk's canons, understand that it is the one that most needs translating. The better American version is probably the one in Equal Opportunity, Unequal Results and Why That Difference Is Freedom: equal rights, unequal outcomes, and a society that does not try to flatten the second to enforce the first.

I raise it because an honest reader of Kirk should not pretend the list is perfectly American. It is a British and European tradition applied to American soil, and the application takes judgment.

What Kirk was reacting against

It helps to know what he was arguing with, because a list of principles always has an opponent in mind. In the 1940s and early 1950s, the confident style in American intellectual life was a belief in planning and in the scientific management of society. The Depression and the war had convinced many serious people that experts with enough authority could fix almost anything. Kirk's claim was that the experts were forgetting something: that societies are not machines, and that the habits, loyalties and beliefs that hold them together are easy to break and hard to rebuild.

He was equally wary of the opposite error, an ideology of the right that treated the market as the answer to every question. That put him at odds with some of the free-market writers who shared the stage at the time, and the tension between the traditionalists and the libertarians is the subject of Fusionism Was the Deal That Made the Modern Right Possible. Kirk's insistence that property and liberty are linked, but that liberty also needs virtue, customs and communities to survive, is exactly the position at issue. If you read his list as a set of guard rails against both the planner and the doctrine that the market alone will hold a society together, you will have it about right.

The objection

Now the best case against using Kirk's list as a guide. It goes like this:

"These principles are so general that they can justify anything. 'Prudence' can defend a delay of fifty years. 'Custom' can defend any wrong that has been around long enough. And Kirk's style, with its talk of transcendent order and mystery, is too vague to settle a hard policy question. At bottom it is a mood, not a method."

I take that seriously. Here is my reply, in three parts.

1. A framework is meant to organize questions, not give answers. Nobody expects the Bill of Rights to tell you whether to pass a particular bill. It tells you the limits. Kirk's list does something similar for judgment.
2. The principles pull against each other, and that is a feature. Prescription says be careful. Permanence and change says move when you must. A thoughtful reader has to weigh them, and that weighing is what prudence means.
3. The list is a screen, not a verdict. A proposal that passes all ten questions has earned a serious hearing. One that fails several should carry a heavy burden. That is a more useful tool than a slogan.

How to use the card

Print the ten questions. Keep them in the glovebox, on the refrigerator, in your phone's notes. Then use them the next time someone hands you a plan. The order I would go in is: prudence first, because it forces you to think about consequences; then power, since someone will hold it who is not you; then community, to see who is displaced; and finally permanence, to see whether the change can be undone.

If you want more tools of the same kind, Chesterton's Fence Is the Best Argument Against Rushed Reform and Twelve Questions About Conservatism Your Family Will Ask You, Answered make good companions, and Five Strands of the American Right Compared in One Table shows where Kirk's strand sits among its cousins.

The bottom line

• Conservatism is a way of judging, not a list of positions. Kirk's ten principles are questions you can ask of any proposal, from either party.
• Keep the index card. Prudence, power, community and permanence are the four to run first.
• The list does not say no to everything. It says to do the necessary things carefully, and to defend the small associations that hold a society together.
• Translate with care. Some of Kirk's canons come from a European tradition, and the idea about classes needs an American footing in equal rights.
• Read the book. The Conservative Mind is long, but Kirk's short essays on his principles can be read in a single evening.