Empirics in Politics

The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Santayana by Russell Kirk. Regnery. $6.50.

Thirty or so statesmen and political theorists figure in Mr. Kirk’s big book; he picked them as the most distinguished examples of the conservative mind. Mr. Kirk himself is no common conservative, but a very high-minded religious humanist, and it seems that he would like to recover to conservatism the whole body of doctrine as Burke delivered it to the moderns. Perhaps half of these figures are equipped pretty well as he would have them; the number is surprising. Practically all are British or American. For the fact must be as Mr. Kirk states it: among all the nations the English-speaking ones have had the best-conserved polities, and it is their statesmen who should know how this comes about. Exceptional in the series are only Tocqueville the Frenchman, who made himself conversant with both these polities, and was of a congenial temperament; and Spanish Santayana, who lived many years at Cambridge, Mass., without coming any nearer to liking our heretical American mores. Mr. Kirk presents his figures by a good method, letting them speak for themselves in part, then resuming them and rounding them off; his own language may seem a little too resonant sometimes, but perhaps is not more so than that of the originals.