SOURCE: Ransom, John Crowe. “Empirics in Politics.” In Poems and Essays, pp. 135-45. New York: Vintage Books, 1955.

In the following essay, originally published in 1953, Ransom categorizes Kirk as a religious humanist before finding that Kirk's and other conservatives' attitudes are impractical for the second half of the twentieth century.

About thirty political theorists figure in Mr. Kirk's big book [The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Santayana]. He picked them as the most distinguished examples of the conservative mind, and it was to be expected that they would be very unequal in the degrees of their distinction. Mr. Kirk himself is no common conservative, but a 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 almost as he would have them; the number is surprising. Practically...