Russell Kirk’s Revolution of Memory (Michael Lucchese, Summer 2025, National Affairs)
Memory is a vital element of what Kirk called the “moral imagination.” He took the phrase from the Anglo-Irish statesman Edmund Burke, who used it to signify, in Kirk’s words, “that power of ethical perception which strides beyond the barriers of private experience and momentary events,” and an apprehension “of right order in the soul and right order in the commonwealth.” Moral imagination is communicated through institutions — such as schools, churches, and families — as well as through the great literature of the West. It allows us to understand “the dignity of human nature”; it is a sense of the permanent things that gives order to our liberty.
Most revolutions, according to Kirk, seek to topple this moral imagination and replace it with ideology. This was the fanaticism, a kind of “inverted religion,” that defined the French Revolution and other modern totalitarianisms. Inspired by abstract theories about human nature’s perfectibility, ideologues violently reject traditional order and seek to reconstitute society according to a warped political geometry. They isolate certain real goods — liberté, égalité, fraternité — and pursue a radical agenda to promote them at the expense of all others, and even to remake the world.
Wary as he was of ideology, Kirk could defend the American founding because he understood that our Revolution did not have these characteristics. As he put it in one essay, the founders advanced a “Whig revolution” that aimed at a “recovery of what was being lost,” not a “Jacobin revolution [that] meant destruction of the fabric of society.” Revolution, for the Americans, was a return to the traditions of self-government and the particular rights of place that had developed over long centuries — rights that the imperial Parliament of the 1770s had violated.