In The Conservative Mind (1953) Russell Kirk delineated six “principles” or “canons” of conservative thought. First among these was “belief in a transcendent order, or body of natural law, which rules society as well as consciences.” The life of the political community is not a mere artifact, and human rights and duties cannot be disposed at our convenience; rather, we are responsible to the divine. And this responsibility has public consequences. Kirk went on to argue that conservatives believe “political problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems,” and thus, technical or procedural fixes offer no lasting solutions.

In the introduction to his anthology, The Portable Conservative Reader, nearly thirty years later (1982) Kirk again placed a “transcendent” orientation as the first of conservative principles, observing that “conservatives generally believe . . . there exists a transcendent moral order, to which we ought to try to conform the ways of society.” He contrasted this view with liberal utilitarianism and with a philosophical radicalism that detests “theological postulates” and that attempts to conceptualize human society as just so much matter in motion. For Kirk, any genuinely conservative mind had to it a religious cast, a sense of piety, a concern, as it were, for the rights of God—though he demurred from doctrinal disputes.

More recently, however, Professor Jerry Muller, in a widely reviewed “anthology with an argument” entitled Conservatism (1997), takes a far different tack. Implicitly in his selection of texts and explicitly in his carefully argued introduction, Muller reinterprets the tradition in such a way as to leave little room for any genuinely religious dimension to conservatism “properly understood.” As with religion, so too with the other mytho-poetic elements that many have associated with the conservative mind. All “romantic” nostalgia for “lost causes” championed by such “literary” conservatives as Kirk appears as an aberration to Muller. In contrast to Kirk’s transcendent view, holding first place among Muller’s conservative principles is the prudent defense of existing human institutions based on a profound sense of the limits of reason, an “epistemic modesty” directed equally against grand ideological schemes—and against every form of religious “enthusiasm.” Conservatives, according to Muller, properly hold religion at arm’s length, and they view the prophet and the saint with suspicion.

Realizing that his view is not immediately perspicuous, Muller works to distinguish thinkers he calls “the orthodox” from those who are properly conservatives. This distinction is made in hopes of excluding the orthodox, who are often mistakenly identified as the truest conservatives. According to Muller, the orthodox are those who come to the defense of threatened institutions because they believe such institutions correspond to the divine will. The Catholic legitimist monarchist of the nineteenth century and the evangelical defender of the nuclear family in America today would both be orthodox rather than conservative. Conservatives, in contrast, defend threatened institutions merely because they have shown themselves to serve some human purpose—this must be so, else how could they have survived over generations?—and because conservatives doubt that the innovators who set out to dismantle settled institutions fully grasp the complexities of a functioning society, and so likely fail to see the “latent functions” which such institutions serve. The only conservative certainty, in Muller’s view, is that any progressive innovation will bring in its wake unintended, and often harmful, consequences.

In short, whereas according to Kirk the antithesis of conservatism is liberal utilitarianism, according to Muller the very essence of conservatism is “historical utilitarianism.” Moreover, whereas Kirk’s conservatism tends toward a critique of the Enlightenment as such, Muller argues that conservatism is best understood as a current within Enlightenment. True conservatism for Muller is a “critique of liberal or progressive arguments . . . on the enlightened grounds of the search for human happiness, based on the use of reason.” Whereas from Kirk’s perspective, the secular, social-scientific mindset of many contemporary “neo-conservatives” can only be understood as derivatively conservative, from Muller’s perspective these very qualities render neoconservatism the truest inheritor of the conservative tradition in America today. It matters a great deal, then, whether one writes on a conservative mind “from Burke to Eliot” (as Kirk does) or on a conservatism “from Hume to the Present” (as Muller does). Is the embattled Christian Edmund Burke (1729–1797) the true father of conservatism, or must we acknowledge as a godfather the notorious atheist David Hume (1711–1776)?

Faced with such a stark contrast, someone of a conciliatory disposition might argue that Kirk and Muller are merely focusing their attention on two complementary aspects of conservatism. Kirk is attending to the religious dimension of much conservative reflection, whereas Muller is developing the “epistemic modesty” which characterizes most conservative theories. Anyone familiar with the tradition can recognize elements of both these tendencies jostling about in the writings of thinkers widely identified (and self-identified) as conservatives. The difference between Kirk and Muller must then be a matter merely of emphasis.

But such an attempted reconciliation cannot, in the end, be sustained. Faith in God or a transcendent ordering principle in the universe would seem, as it were, the height of epistemic immodesty: to claim to know God’s will is no small thing. On the other hand, to cling rather desperately to fragile and flawed human institutions out of nervous concern about the human propensity to lose our way seems warranted only in the absence of faith in any transcendent support for what we have come to know as justice and the human good.