Campbell – An Economist’s Tribute to Russell Kirk

An Economist’s Tribute to Russell Kirk

By William F. Campbell

Russell Kirk loved to quote the one passage from Edmund Burke which has
found its way into the economist’s books of quotations: "The age of chivalry is
gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the
glory of Europe is extinguished for ever."

Would Russell have wished to be praised by an economist? This economist
shares Russell’s predilection for the glory of Europe and the Gods of the
Copybook Headings and I am definitely not a calculator; whether I am a
Sophist, I will leave it up to others more wise than myself to determine. But
whether he would like it or not, I come to praise Russell.

To be an economist does not necessarily disqualify one for the job of praising
others. The words esteem and estimation come from the Greek word, time, for
honor. There are clear grounds for esteeming Russell Kirk’s life and work. He
was a worthy in the tradition of Sir Walter Scott who wrote till the end in
defense of the good old cause of liberty and virtue.

But should we worship Russell? This sounds blasphemous, but as Orestes
Brownson reminded us, the Anglo-Saxon word, weorthscipe from which we
derive worship "means simply the state or condition of being worthy of honor,
or respect, or dignity, or excellence to someone–literally, to honor, it may be
God, the magistrate, or simply any man for his office, station, acquirements, or
virtues." Russell never held office or high station, but his acquirements and
virtues are enough to make him a worthy and more than his usual simple
obedient servant.

Russell might have been embarrassed by such adulation and would immediately
have pointed out that Brownson made all the necessary distinctions between
rendering supreme worship to God alone and the worship of finite human
things.

Perhaps the best way to praise Russell Kirk would be to describe the impact he
has had on my intellectual life. I was fortunate enough to be brought up in a
Christian libertarian home. The external indoctrination which my father inflicted
upon us in season and out of season was mainly economic and free market
rather than traditionalist conservatism. The latter was taken for granted in a
decent Midwestern home at that time, and it was the former which needed
explaining and justifying since economics was abstract and not simple. Every
Sunday after church, we would go to the Hawthorne Room in Indianapolis for
lunch. My father took the liberty of using the waiting time to read from the
Freeman and Human Events or even occasionally the poetry of E. Merrill
Root.

I also had the good fortune that my father’s law partner was Pierre Goodrich.
Although I had little personal contact with Pierre, when I graduated from
Shortridge high school, he took the idea of commencement literally. He gave me
a copy of Mises’ Human Action among other books.

I immediately was stumped by the word praxeology, but then I was probably
not the first who could not find it in a dictionary. I fell in love with Austrian
economics and the lucidity of Ludwig von Mises. Whatever small shred of
reason and analysis I still maintain is due in large part to Mises.

Balanced against these libertarian influences was a first edition of Russell Kirk’s
Conservative Mind which my father had lying around the house. The appeal of
Russell Kirk was different from the rigorous analysis of the Austrians. Here I
was captivated not by rational systems, but by Russell’s imagination and
beautiful prose style which showed that conservatives could have a heart and
soul as well as a mind.

Keeping all these disparate intellectual influences in balance has been the story
of my life, but as a general rule, economists and Russell Kirk usually observe a
respectful distance. There are intelligible, if not good, reasons for this. Most
modern economists are model builders and analyzers who pride themselves on
parading professionally without their moral clothes on. Russell, to my
knowledge, at least in public, was always fully clothed.

If economists–including here Mises and Hayek–like to parade without their
moral clothes on, some are better looking than others. Kirk knew that Ludwig
von Mises and F.A. Hayek were the Lady Godiva’s of the science. They did not
suffer from the hubris of the technocrats and knew the limitations of human
reason.

Both Mises and Hayek were in Kirk’s Conservative Mind. But, from the first to
the seventh edition it is significant that the number of bibliographical entries to
Mises dropped from three to one. Kirk knew well enough that when he dealt
with an F.A. Hayek or a Ludwig von Mises, he should be respectful of their
analytic powers. But he always kept his critical hat on. In both cases there was
libertarian or individualist baggage which he could not accept. Kirk’s model
economist was Wilhelm Roepke to which I shall return later.

Russell Kirk continued to play a role in my family beyond the reading of his
books. The personal influence of Russell was mediated in my family through the
impact of Don Lipsett and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. Then as well as
now, they were adept at balancing the demands of the traditionalists and
libertarian impulses that comprise the effective conservative movement. A
tribute to Don’s skill is the fact that he could have a close personal relationship
with both a Russell Kirk and a Milton Friedman.

At this time in the 1950s my father met Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, and
Henry Regnery. After my father died, I came across a couple of undated index
cards which he used to introduce a talk by Russell Kirk at a conservative forum
in Indianapolis organized by Don Lipsett when he was the Midwestern Director
of ISI. As my father worked into the introduction of Russell, he told a story of
his attempt to verify the rumor that Archduke Otto von Hapsburg considered
Russell the world’s greatest living scholar. He wrote a cable to his and my dear
friend, Erik Ritter von Kuehnelt-Leddihn. The cable read, "Otto Von Hapsburg
has stated that Russell Kirk is the greatest living scholar in this country. Is this
true?" The response came back, "The answer is ‘NO’. You people have an
adopted son from Austria who is in 1st place. Modesty prevents me from
naming him. But my friend Russell Kirk is in 2nd place–this is good because he
will try harder. Herr Erik." The story may be apocryphal, but it reveals my
father’s wonderful sense of humor; it could be true of Herr Erik. Whether Herr
Erik or Russell Kirk get the laurel for scholarship, I will leave in the lap of the
Gods.

Aside from many specific intellectual friends that I met in The Conservative
Mind, I knew, reluctantly, at that time that I could never be a pure libertarian. I
say, reluctantly, because even as a graduate student in philosophy at the
University of Minnesota in the early 60s I knew that I was attracted to the
positive-normative distinction (really, the fact-value distinction, but I did not
know it at the time) for some good and some not-so-good reasons. The good
reasons might have been something like an austere dedication to scientific
method and rigor, no sentimentality or sloppy thinking for me. That was part of
my Mises’ heritage.

The bad reasons, which I suspect were more important than the good reasons,
was that I liked the relativistic implications of the positive-normative distinction
as it was misused by the economists. It was not that I was so great or notorious
a sinner, but I knew that if I wanted to be one, I could avoid all discussion of
the tough issues if they ever came up. How easy it is to avoid conflict by
pontificating–"Oh, well, that’s just your opinion." Since everyone else wanted to
play the same game, it worked. It never occurred to me that one could give
good grounds for some opinions and not others. It took strong doses of Leo
Strauss and Eric Voegelin to intellectually wean me from philosophy parading as
methodology. But if it had not been for the imaginative moral vision transmitted
to me by Kirk in the Conservative Mind, I would never have made it to the
political philosophers.

The wholeness and completeness of real human beings living in a particular
culture and at a particular time was Kirk’s forte. He was fond of quoting Burke’s
"I must see the things; I must see the men." He did not worship at the shrine of
the God of Abstraction. The naked public square would have been seen by him
as the prelude to the austere public squares of the French Revolution with only
the guillotine to adorn them.

G.K. Chesterton, one of Russell’s heroes, once said of Leonardo da Vinci,
"Leonardo could take it to pieces but also put it together again." The
economists have the virtue of the analytic half of Leonardo but not the second
synthetic half. Russell’s strong suit was keeping it altogether.

The spirit of synthesis allowed him consistently to favor free markets, private
property, competition, and at the same time to champion virtue. He did not
absolutize the institutions of the marketplace or find them self-justifying. Some
have found Kirk to be fuzzy and it is true that he did not aspire to a more
geometrico style. But I never found Kirk inconsistent or logically contradictory.
He was nuanced and textured as they say in literary circles. It is probably more
precise to say that his concerns were not economic postulates of self-interest or
utility maximization which are favored by economists, but moral-laden goods
such as character and public decency.

What might a conservative political economy look like which would incorporate
these more expansive goods for human beings? One of the phrases from Burke
that has stayed with me over my scholarly life is the "unbought grace of life."
Kirk was always reminding economists that there were things in this world
which could not be bought or sold. There were limits to the economic calculus
or the triumph of the will. Markets are not the determinants of true value or the
good, but only of things which are merchandisable.

Wilhelm Roepke was Kirk’s favorite economist precisely because he did his
economics within the full light of this limitation. In fact, Kirk was responsible for
the title Humane Economy used for the translation of one of Roepke’s more
important books, the title of which if literally translated would have been,
Beyond Supply and Demand.

Roepke was the only economist of the 20th century who was a Leonardo da
Vinci in the Chestertonian sense discussed earlier. He could take the economy
or society to pieces with rigorous analysis, but also put it back together again.
He never lost the firm foothold in moral philosophy and common sense
distinctions which Russell considered so important. Russell reviewed Roepke’s
work in a very provocative article comparing Roepke to Mises, Hayek, and
W.A. Orton–"The New Humanism of Political Economy" in The South
Atlantic Quarterly, 1953.

Russell continued to refer to Roepke in later essays, publications, and
speeches, including an address which he gave to the Heritage Foundation in
1989. Recently, in fact, Russell was invaluable in helping Ralph Ancil found the
Wilhelm Roepke Institute to promote and promulgate the ideas of a humane
political economy.

But Russell was not content to admire an occasional economist from afar. He
went so far as to write an elementary economics textbook. Of all things–for
Kirk to have writen a really good economics textbook is most shocking to the
economist! There are probably not more than one or two economists who have
read Kirk’s Economics: Work and Prosperity which is one or two more than are
alleged to have read Smith’s Wealth of Nations from cover to cover. But it is a
good first book in economics which even professional economists can read to
their advantage. Characteristically Kirk reflects on the moral foundations of a
market economy and capitalism. He explicitly deals with moral themes which
economics is only beginning to address such as emulation versus envy, trust,
and integrity. He stresses the importance of intelligence and not just dessicated
formal rationality of well-ordered preference maps–this reflects the thinking of
William Mallock.

In this single volume he introduces the student to an intelligent discussion of
American economic history by using the Pilgrims at Plymouth, the story of the
du Pont family, and Henry Ford whom he personally met and worked for at
Dearborn, Michigan. At the same time the student gets a subtle introduction to
Hesiod, Aesop, Midas, St. Paul, and the virtues of the Dutch.

Having provided a short sketch of the legacy of Russell Kirk for economists,
the question arises, how do we extend it? What is the unfinished business from
the agenda of Russell Kirk. From The Conservative Mind I developed a healthy
respect for Edmund Burke to whom political economists have never done
justice. On the scholarly side, I now see that my proper life’s work ahead of me
includes a careful study of Burke’s political economy. I only wish that Russell
could have been alive to guide me through these troubled waters.

One of Russell’s few criticisms of Burke revolved around Burke’s seeming
approval of the enclosure movement. Exploration of such issues as the property
rights issues could nicely draw together Chesterton, Cobbett, Burke, and the
Southern Agrarians. The key element in this strange melange of radicals,
democrats, and natural aristocrats is respect for the common sense intelligence
of men and women rooted in the soil and/or small businesses.

The best exemplary of a Kirkian approach in the social sciences is the approach
of intelligent anthropologists like Grace Goodell. In fact, her tribute to Russell
Kirk at the Dearborn meetings of the Philadelphia Society was the most riveting
presentation to this observer because it took the spirit of Kirk’s work, the
respect for the dignity and worth of ordinary persons, and applied it to new and
uncharted areas for most conservatives.

But whatever work scholars do intellectually, they must simultaneously adopt
the organizational spirit of the Russell Kirk enterprise. Alternatives to the current
academic behemoth must be created in small cells as the Kirks have done in
Mecosta. He has touched so many lives for good by the influence of his
seminars. But there must be more cells and nodes of growth in these United
States where the truth is pursued, preserved, and propagated. We have lost
Russell’s direct personal impact which was an enormous influence on young
scholars, but we have not lost the authority of his example.

He took arms against seas of troubles and never wavered in his fight against
injustice and stupidity. He enlisted the energy of his wife, family, and countless
friends to carry on the fight and carry on they will. It is our duty to keep the
flame of Mecosta lit.