I first came upon Russell Kirk thirty years ago when I was foraging among political philosophers for some help in understanding why I was rejecting the liberalism that only recently had seemed to me so obvious, sensible, and right. Kirk gave me little satisfaction. He’s an essayist, not a theorist, a man of letters by his own description, not a builder of systems. I was a graduate student at the time, and I had yet to read deeply in John Henry Newman, making me susceptible to the lure of theory and system. As a consequence, Kirk’s reliance on aphorism, image, and episode led me to dismiss him as a journalistic, occasional writer rather than consider him a philosophical heavyweight.

I have not changed my judgment of what sort of writer Kirk was. In his wonderfully quirky memoir, The Sword of Imagination, he describes himself as a literary knight errant, slaying dragons, hacking orcs, and freeing beautiful maidens as best he could for over a half-century. What has changed is my sense of what drives politics. As Richard Weaver wrote in the first sentence of the first chapter of Ideas Have Consequences, “Every man participating in a culture has three levels of conscious reflection: his specific ideas about things, his general beliefs or convictions, and his metaphysical dream of the world.” By Weaver’s reckoning, the distempers of our time flow from the poverty of our dreams. In this Kirk agreed, which is why he devoted himself