Enemies of the Permanent Things

By Russell Kirk

In the 1960s, Russell Kirk lectured and debated on many college campuses, ably defending traditional ideas against various liberal and radical adversaries. Enemies of the Permanent Things, first published in 1969, is the most significant extended meditation on culture and politics to come out of the rough and tumble of those years. As such, it is an invaluable document, articulating the response of a critical witness to the radically anti-authoritarian turn taken by the intellectual elite in that destructive decade. 

Kirk defines “the permanent things” (a phrase borrowed from T. S. Eliot) as the unchanging norms of human nature. In a healthy society, Kirk argues, individuals will attempt to live by these permanent standards of moral action, and the laws of the land will give support to citizens as they make that attempt. Focusing on literature as well as on politics, Kirk sets forth and defends those inalterable truths of human life.

Conservatism is too often conservation of the wrong things: liberalism a relaxation of discipline; revolution a denial of the permanent things. (T. S. Eliot)

Russell Kirk (1918–1994) is acknowledged as the founder of the intellectual conservative movement in modern America. From his family home in rural Michigan, Kirk sent forth a multitude of writings on political philosophy, literature, education, and history. His bibliography includes nearly three thousand newspaper columns, hundreds of journal articles, and twenty-six books.

Benjamin G. Lockerd is Professor of English at Grand Valley State University, where he has received the Alumni Association’s Outstanding Educator Award. He is the author of Aethereal Rumours: T. S. Eliot’s Physics and Poetics and The Sacred Marriage: Psychic Integration in “The Faerie Queene,” and the editor of T. S. Eliot and Christian Tradition. Lockerd has served as President of the T. S. Eliot Society and is a Senior Fellow of the Russell Kirk Center.

Paperback: 360pp.

ISBN: 978-1944418151