SOURCE: Gay, Peter. Review of The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Santayana, by Russell Kirk. Political Science Quarterly 68, no. 4 (December 1953): 586-88.

In the following review, Gay defends liberal politics as humane while attacking Kirk's brand of conservatism as flawed ideology.

When Lionel Trilling published The Liberal Imagination in 1950 he argued that American conservatism had no philosophy. “The conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse,” he wrote, “do not … express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” In this comprehensive survey of the Anglo-American conservative tradition since the French Revolution Mr. Kirk enters a vigorous dissent and attempts to show, instead, that “conservative ideas are struggling toward ascendancy in the United States” (p. 428).

Mr. Kirk appropriately begins his history [The Conservative Mind from Burke to Santayana] with Burke, to whom he devotes the longest chapter in the book. His narrative...