Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Russell Kirk outlines ten principles of conservative thought, summarizes ten vital conservative books, and offers brief accounts of ten eminent, internationally important conservatives. This book, written by the founder of modern conservatism in America, reflects several decades of learning, travel, and practical politics.
Synopsis
Throughout his career, whether as a man of letters, professor, soldier, journalist, novelist, or world traveler, Russell Kirk found himself in the thick of the intellectual controversies of his age. In The Politics of Prudence, his twenty-ninth book (and the last to be published during his lifetime), Kirk endeavors to defend a truly conservative "prudential politics," as opposed to the "ideological politics" now often advanced by self-identified conservatives and those with whom they are allied, including libertarians and neoconservatives. Kirk lays out, in separate chapters, ten principles, events, thinkers, and books that have defined and shaped the American conservative mind and heart. He also examines the difficulties posed for conservatives by increasing political and economic centralization, imprudent foreign policy, educational decline, and other symptoms of cultural decay. This new edition of The Politics of Prudence includes an illuminating introduction by Mark C. Henrie.