Every right is married to a duty; every freedom owns a corresponding responsibility; and there cannot be genuine freedom unless there is also genuine… - Russell Kirk

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Every right is married to a duty; every freedom owns a corresponding responsibility; and there cannot be genuine freedom unless there is also genuine order in the moral realm and the social realm. Order, in the moral realm, is the realization of a body of transcendent values — indeed a hierarchy of values — which give purpose to existence and motive to conduct. Order, in society, is the harmonious arrangement of classes and functions which guards justice and gives willing consent to law and insurers that we all shall be safe together. Although there cannot be freedom without order, in some sense there is always a conflict between the claims of order and the claims of freedom. We often express this conflict is the competition between the desire for liberty and the desire for security. Although modern technological revolution and modern mass–democracy have made this struggle more intense, there is nothing new about it in essence. President Washington remarked that 'individuals entering into a society must give up a share of their liberty to preserve the rest.' But doctrinaires of one ideology or another, in our time, continue to cry out for absolute security, absolute order, or for absolute freedom, power to assert the ego in defiance of all convention. At the moment, this fanatic debate may be particularly well discerned in the intemperate argument over academic freedom. I feel that in asserting freedom as an absolute, somehow divorced from order, we are repudiating our historical legacy of freedom and exposing ourselves to the danger of absolutism, whether that absolutism be what Tocqueville called 'democratic despotism' or what recently existed in Germany and now exists in Russia. 'To begin with unlimited freedom,' Dostoevski rights in The Devils, 'is to end without on limited despotism.

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About Russell Kirk

Russell Kirk (October 19 1918 – 29 April 1994) was an American political theorist, moralist, historian, social critic, literary critic, and fiction author known for his influence on 20th century American conservatism. His 1953 book, The Conservative Mind, gave shape to the amorphous post-World War II conservative movement. It traced the development of conservative thought in the Anglo-American tradition, giving special importance to the ideas of Edmund Burke. Kirk was also considered the chief proponent of traditionalist conservatism.

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Alternative Names: Russell Amos Kirk
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Liberty, prescriptive freedom as we Americans know it, cannot endure without order. Our constitutions were established that order might make true freedom possible. For all our American talk of private judgment, dissent, and individualism, still our national character has the stamp of a respectful order almost superstitious in its power: respect for the moral traditions inculcated by our religion, and for the prescriptive political forms which we, more than any other people in the world, have maintained little altered in this time when Whirl is King of most of the universe. I think that we would do a most terrible mischief to our freedoms if we ceased to respect our established order and began, instead, to run after an abstract Jacobin liberté — in this age of the triumph of technology, of all times.

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The twentieth-century conservative is concerned, first of all, for the regeneration of the spirit and character – with the perennial problem of the inner order of the soul, the restoration of the ethical understanding, and the religious sanction upon which any life worth living is founded. This is conservatism at its highest.

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