During World War II, he served in the American armed forces and corresponded with a libertarian writer, Isabel Paterson, who helped to shape his early political thought.
He resigned in 1959, after having become disenchanted with the rapid growth in student number and emphasis on intercollegiate athletics and technical training at the expense of the traditional liberal arts.
[16] The Conservative Mind,[17] the published version of Kirk's doctoral dissertation, contributed materially to the 20th century Burke revival.
Biographer Bradley J. Birzer argues that for all his importance in inspiring the modern conservative movement, not many of his followers agreed with his unusual approach to the history of conservatism.
As summarized by reviewer Drew Maciag: Harry Jaffa (a student of Leo Strauss) wrote: "Kirk was a poor Burke scholar.
Burke's attack on metaphysical reasoning related only to modern philosophy's attempt to eliminate skeptical doubt from its premises and hence from its conclusions.
"[19] Gerald J. Russello argues that Kirk adapted what 19th-century American Catholic thinker Orestes Brownson called "territorial democracy" to articulate a version of federalism that was based on premises that differ in part from those of the founders and other conservatives.
Kirk further believed that territorial democracy could reconcile the tension between treating the states as mere provinces of the central government, and as autonomous political units independent of Washington.
[20] In addition to bringing public attention to Anglo-American conservative principles, Kirk described his perception of liberal ideals in the first chapter.
Kirk identified these ideals as the perfectibility of man, hostility towards tradition, rapid change in economic and political systems, and the secularization of government.
"[24][failed verification] Defunct Newspapers Journals TV channels Websites Other Congressional caucuses Economics Gun rights Identity politics Nativist Religion Watchdog groups Youth/student groups Social media Miscellaneous Other Kirk grounded his Burkean conservatism in tradition, political philosophy, belles lettres, and the strong religious faith of his later years, rather than libertarianism and free-market economic reasoning.
He called the libertarian movement "an ideological clique forever splitting into sects still smaller and odder, but rarely conjugating."
[25] Kirk, therefore, questioned the "fusionism" between libertarians and traditional conservatives that marked much of post-World War II conservatism in the United States.
[26] Kirk also argued that libertarians "bear no authority, temporal or spiritual" and do not "venerate ancient beliefs and customs, or the natural world, or [their] country, or the immortal spark in [their] fellow men.
[30] In a column in The National Review on March 9, 1965, entitled "'One Man, One Vote' in South Africa," Kirk wrote that the U.S. Supreme Court's jurisprudence on voting "will work mischief—much injuring, rather than fulfilling, the responsible democracy for which Tocqueville hoped," but in the case of South Africa "this degradation of the democratic dogma, if applied, would bring anarchy and the collapse of civilization.
"[35] Samuel T. Francis called Kirk's "Tel Aviv" remark "a wisecrack about the slavishly pro-Israel sympathies among neoconservatives.
"[36][37] Excerpts from Kirk's lectures at The Heritage Foundation (1992):[38] Presidents Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson were enthusiasts for American domination of the world.
[40] Beyond his scholarly achievements, Kirk was talented both as an oral storyteller and as an author of genre fiction, most notably in his telling of consummate ghost stories in the classic tradition of Sheridan Le Fanu, M. R. James, Oliver Onions, and H. Russell Wakefield.
He also wrote other admired and much-anthologized works that are variously classified as horror, fantasy, science fiction, and political satire.
These earned him plaudits from fellow creative writers as varied and distinguished as T. S. Eliot, Robert Aickman, Madeleine L'Engle, and Ray Bradbury.
Though modest in quantity—it encompasses three novels and 22 short stories—Kirk's body of fiction was written amid a busy career as prolific nonfiction writer, editor, and speaker.
Kirk stated in 1984 that the purpose of his stories as: The political ferocity of our age is sufficiently dismaying: men of letters need not conjure up horrors worse than those suffered during the past decade by the Cambodians and Ugandans, Afghans and Ethiopians.
Here the plot is concerned with an American assigned by his employer to a bleak locale in rural Scotland—the same country where Kirk had attended graduate school.
[41] The story of Old House of Fear concerns an young American, Hugh Logan, a World War II veteran who is both brave and sensitive, sent to buy Carnglass, a remote island in the Hebrides.
[41] The leader of the spies is Dr. Jackman, an evil genius and nihilist intent upon wrecking a world that failed to acknowledge his greatness and whom reviewers noted was a much more vividly drawn character than the hero Logan.
[43] The novel concludes with Arcane's own definition of a true "Timeless Moment" which he states: "it comes from faith, from hope, from charity; from having your work in the world; from the happiness of the people you love; or simply as a gift of grace".