Enemies of the Permanent Things

Enemies of the Permanent Things

In the 1960s, Russell Kirk lectured and debated on many college campuses, ably defending traditional ideas against various liberal and radical adversaries. Enemies of the Permanent Things, first published in 1969, is the most significant extended meditation on culture and politics to come out of the rough and tumble of those years. It is an invaluable document, articulating the response of a critical witness to the radically anti-authoritarian turn taken by the intellectual elite in that destructive decade.

“‘Reading of great lives does something to make decent lives,’ writes Russell Kirk in Enemies of the Permanent Things, an unjustly neglected gem among his works. His invaluable distinction between norms and the too-often-misused word values is but one of the treasures to be found within this eminently quotable volume.” ~James E. Person Jr., author of Russell Kirk: A Critical Biography of a Conservative Mind (1999)