As the Republicans gather in Madison Square Garden to select their nominee and to lay out their policies for the next four years, the ideas of Russell Kirk (1918-94) are part of the platform, even if his name is not in the speeches. Since the war in Iraq began, interest has increased in the intellectual underpinnings of the Bush administration’s conservatism. Much attention has been paid to neoconservatives and their supposed mentor, political philosopher Leo Strauss. But without Kirk, American conservatism would not exist in its current form.

Kirk’s “The Conservative Mind” (1953) continues to be a must-read for young conservatives, and most of his books, on subjects ranging from T.S. Eliot to the Constitution to several volumes of ghost stories, remain in print. Kirk has even gone mainstream: CSPAN featured Kirk in its acclaimed “American Writers” series as a founder of conservatism, and paired him with National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr. – an ironic honor, in light of Kirk’s dislike of “Demon TV.” In 1989, President Reagan awarded Kirk the Presidential Citizens Medal in appreciation of his work.

Kirk is an unlikely hero for any political party. No speechmaker, he was once called “as communicative as a turtle.” He had little interest in political life and consistently rejected offers to hold national political posts. He wrote his 30-odd books, as well as hundreds of essays, reviews, and a regular National Review column, from a converted toy factory in rural Michigan, near the town of Plymouth, where he grew up as the son of a railroad engineer. When he wasn’t at home writing, Kirk preferred Scotland, which he discovered as a graduate student at St. Andrews University, after receiving a graduate degree in history from Duke. Despite his shunning of the political and literary limelight, Kirk had an enormous impact on the political history of the United States. David Frum has written that Kirk “pulled together a series of only partially related ideas and events into a coherent narrative. … Kirk did not record the past; he created it.”

His family history, which dates back to the 17th century in America, is the source of that talent. Kirk’s grandfather Frank Pierce, sober, industrious, quietly courageous, and a small-town bank president, supplied a model of the virtuous citizen who lives according to traditional norms. Kirk’s spiritualist relatives, who lived at the family property called Piety Hill, where Kirk too later lived, gave him a love for the occult and a belief in a realm beyond the rational. In recognition of this mixed inheritance, Kirk called himself a “bohemian tory.” “Tory and bohemian go not ill together: it is quite possible to abide by the norms of civilized existence … and yet to set at defiance the soft securities and sham conventionalities of twentieth century sociability.”

When Kirk, then a young history instructor at Michigan State, began writing in the early 1950s, there was no FOX News, no conservative talk-radio, no Heritage or Cato Foundations, much less conservative “Red State” dominance. The supremacy of liberalism seemed so obvious in 1950 that, in “The Liberal Imagination,” Lionel Trilling famously wrote that liberalism was “not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition” in America. Scholars like Richard Hofstadter assured the chattering classes that conservatives were cranks afflicted with “status anxiety,” and would soon disappear. Yet a decade later, a flourishing conservative movement assumed control of the Republican Party and nominated Barry Goldwater in 1964 – and won Reagan the presidency in 1980.

That cultural and intellectual sea change was heralded in the pages of Time and the New York Times Book Review, both of which praised “The Conservative Mind,” which Kirk had written as his doctoral dissertation. It was a battle-cry for all refugees from progress, everyone dissatisfied with liberalism. Beginning with the great Irish statesman Edmund Burke, Kirk traced a tradition of cultural critique through John Adams, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Benjamin Disraeli, as well as Irving Babbitt, George Santayana, and T.S. Eliot. He identified six basic “canons” of conservatism, including a belief in custom and tradition, a strong defense of private property, devotion to the “variety and mystery” of human existence, and the conviction that there exist transcendent norms. Kirk called these the “Permanent Things.” The book, along with “Prospects for Conservatism” (1954) and the later “Roots of American Order” (1974), provided the language and genealogy to which conservatives still turn.

As the books and articles poured out, Kirk (having resigned from Michigan State to work full time as a writer) led an assault on the entire liberal tradition. He debated the leading lights of modern liberalism, such as Tom Haydn, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and Michael Harrington. He wrote and lectured on modern education, big government, big business, politicized art, popular culture, and “the architecture of boredom.” He found the modern age beset by “the decay of manners, the corruption of morals, the discontent of a proletarian population [and] the mass-mind that is the consequence of intellectual vulgarization.” But Kirk combined his intellectual fierceness with a placid, even jovial demeanor. Conservatism is enjoyment, he liked to say, and the pleasure Kirk took in the world (despite its flaws) inspired legions of young people to travel to hear him speak, tell ghost stories, or help him plant trees in the Michigan fields.

The moral imagination was the key to Kirk’s conservatism. He defined it as “that power of ethical perception which strides beyond the barriers of private experience and momentary events. … The moral imagination as pires to the apprehending of right order in the soul and right order in the commonwealth.” Further, the moral imagination “informs us concerning the dignity of human nature; which instructs us that we are more than naked apes. As Burke suggested in 1790, letters and learning are hollow, if deprived of the moral imagination.” Imagination creates tradition, which in turn inspires affection and loyalty toward one’s own society. “Such imagination lacking, to quote another passage from Burke, we are cast forth ‘from this world of reason, and order, and peace, and virtue, and fruitful penitence, into the antagonist worlds of madness, discord, vice, confusion and unavailing sorrow.'”

Against the moral imagination Kirk placed the “idyllic imagination” and ideology. Idyllic imagination is the temptation of the modern world; it “rejects old dogmas and old manners and rejoices in the notion of emancipation from duty and convention.” Ideology, for Kirk, is politicized religion, converting the promises of heaven to the goals of politics; the bloody 20th century was the result. Modern liberalism, based on an absolutism of “rights,” special group pleading, or a mean utilitarianism, mixes ideology with idyllic imagination, but it cannot sustain the cultural capital that society requires.

Some, including many conservatives, thought Kirk’s 18th-century pose – pictures of him even as a young man show him complete with walking-stick and watch fob – an off-putting affectation. But that missed the point. Kirk created his antique persona as a sharp contrast with the drab conformist liberalism of the 1950s, the cultural degeneracy of the 1960s and 1970s, and the political correctness of the 1980s. Likewise his prose was intentionally evocative and rhetorical rather than analytical. In fact, Kirk thought that conservatism, because of its pull on traditional human sentiments, was more suited to the postmodern age than liberalism, which had its roots in a rejection of tradition in favor of an abstract rationalism mastered by an elite class.

Much of Kirk’s conservatism has become standard Republican Party language. Elements of Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” echo Kirkian themes, for example, and National Review and other journals often cite him for support. Kirk was not the Republicans’ house philosopher, however. He never was fully comfortable, for example, with the low-regulation capitalism espoused by Republican presidents. He cautioned against those who would sell off national resources in the name of an abstract “freedom of contract,” and railed equally against the “gigantic corporation [and] the gigantic union.”

More importantly, Kirk strongly opposed the first Gulf War. He did not believe that the complex of customs, traditions, and norms we know as constitutional democracy could be packaged and exported to other cultures, especially under force. This position led some conservatives to attempt to ostracize him, but as the recent debate between Francis Fukuyama and Charles Krauthammer over the Iraq war demonstrates, Kirk’s position has some conservative support.

In this age of terror, conservatives are engaged in a period of rigorous self-examination. Russell Kirk defined for many what it was to be a conservative in the 20th century, and the questions he raised concerning order, liberty, tradition, and the failures of the liberal imagination remain at the center of the debate.

Mr. Russello is working on a book on Russell Kirk.