SOURCE: Attarian, John. “Russell Kirk's Political Economy.” Modern Age 40, no. 1 (winter 1998): 87-97.

In the following essay, Attarian discusses Kirk's economic theories and examines the influence of Kirk's Christian faith upon those theories.

As American conservatism sifts its soul regarding political economy, scrutiny of the economic thought of Dr. Russell Kirk, who more than anyone else gave post-war conservatism coherence and intellectual respectability, is appropriate and timely. Kirk's economics, and its treatment by modern conservatives, afford an invaluable perspective on this controversy.

Kirk believed that economics has been overstressed. “The true contest in our time is not between economies merely, but between opposing concepts of human nature.”¹ Are we embodied souls created by a transcendent God, whose purpose it is to struggle upward toward Heaven? Or are we creatures of matter, rational animals, pleasure-seeking and pain-shunning, with utility maximization as our life's goal? Kirk affirmed the former; economic utopians...