Kirk’s The Conservative Mind crystallized six canons defining postwar American conservatism.

Evidence

Kirk arrived at “six canons of conservative thought”: belief in “a transcendent order”; affection for “proliferating variety”; defense of the maintenance of “orders and classes”; a conviction “that freedom and property are closely linked”; a preference for custom, convention, and prescription over “abstract designs”; and support for a “prudent” as opposed to a “hasty” approach to social change. At the suggestion of Whittaker Chambers, Time devoted the entire review section of its 6 July issue to the book, concluding that Kirk’s philosophy would prove to be of “interest that is not mainly antiquarian” to readers confronting the “shadow of lost illusions” in the wake of two world wars. The crisis of modernity had created space for a philosophy that was founded on its rejection. — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 359

Categorization

• DEFINE: The six canons serve as a compact definitional framework for Kirk’s traditionalist/Burkean conservatism versus the market liberalism of MPS figures.
• XREF: Connects to The Defeat of the Spanish Armada and other works on how a crisis creates space for reactionary philosophies founded on rejecting modernity.
• SEED: Angle: the 1950s conservative ‘crisis of modernity’ framing vs. MPS optimism about markets — how rival answers to the same diagnosis diverged.