De Regno Christi

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1. on October 16, 2009 at 5:30 pm | Reply Iohannes

   Thanks, it is delightful article to read. Do you think Kirk’s characterizations are altogether correct? I liked The Conservative Mind and appreciate Kirk’s wide ranging thought, but I worry he sometimes gets off-kilter on the details. For instance, Kirk sounds a bit too harsh towards Locke, who would be surprised at the charge of having dismissed God. To be sure, Locke opens with his device of a state of nature; however, he also says over and over again that God made the world and gave it in common to the children of men. Locke’s political principles are inadequate, I agree, but his standpoint is hardly as secular as later generations took it to be. (The real fault lies in his philosophy of religion, which seems disastrous, but that’s another matter.) Another questionable detail is Kirk’s handling of Mises. Others have pointed out that the garden story as Kirk tells it differs from Roepke’s own published account, which was not set in Geneva and left the parties unnamed. A footnote in Kirk’s autobiography speculates that Roepke altered his version to mask Mises’ identity; but it seems at least as likely that Kirk, describing an exchange that happened long ago, may simply have recollected it inaccurately. Mises, after all, was an arch-subjectivist. That outlook has serious weaknesses, but an obsession with material efficiency for its own sake is not really one of them. Anyhow, I do not mean to put down Kirk, still less to exalt Locke and Mises. The mention of Newman in the article is apt. He and Kirk both use broad strokes to paint what, seen as a whole, are compelling pictures.