Enemies of the Permanent Things: Observations of Abnormity in Literature and Politics - Softcover

Kirk, Russell

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0893854530 ISBN 13: 9780893854539

Publisher: Open Court, 1999

Synopsis

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. 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.

About this title

About the Author

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 3,000 newspaper columns, hundreds of journal articles, and 26 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.

Review

"Reading of great lives does something to make decent lives," writes Russell Kirk in Enemies of the Permanent Things, an unjustly neglected gem among his works. Herein the author offers a collection of accessible explications of philosophy and imagination interconnecting a series of pen portraits of key twentieth-century authors: J. R. R. Tolkien, Ray Bradbury, George Orwell, T. S. Eliot, Eric Voegelin, and many other upholders of normative thought and literature. Kirk skilfully demonstrates how their works stand at swords-point with the dreary "champions of decadence and deliquescence, the enemies of the permanent things" in modern letters. His invaluable distinction between norms and the too-often-misused word values is but one of the treasures to be found within this eminently quotable volume. ~James E. Person Jr., author of Russell Kirk: A Critical Biography of a Conservative Mind (1999)

"In Enemies of the Permanent Things, Russell Kirk, redoubtable champion of the “moral imagination,” challenges the nihilists who contend that morality is relative, that human nature is merely “socially constructed,” and that western civilization is but the flawed product of a ceaseless will to power. Drawing upon his prodigious knowledge of arts, letters, and political philosophy, he excoriates modern ideologues who strive to impose a heaven of their own devising on earth and open instead the gates to a tyrannical hell. For Kirk the road to cultural renewal lies in preserving the core of western civilization: Christianity ("including its origins in Judah and Israel"), “ordered liberty,” and the canonical books of western literature. In Enemies he persuasively argues that the supreme purpose of great literature is ethical: the formation of “normative consciousness” and transmission of “normative knowledge” essential to civilized living. Kirk’s book was both wise and timely when published nearly fifty years ago. It is still wise—and even more timely—now." ~George H. Nash, author of The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 and other books

Edition details

• Publisher: Open Court
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0893854530
• ISBN 13: 9780893854539
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 311