The Permanent Things

The phrase the permanent things comes from T. S. Eliot’s preface to his 1939 collection The Idea of a Christian Society, where he writes of “the permanent against which we contend, but which we know we cannot finally overcome.”¹ Russell Kirk took the phrase as the title of his 1969 collection Enemies of the Permanent Things and made it the central category of his mature conservative writing. In Kirk’s usage, the permanent things are the enduring goods of human existence — the moral law, family, faith, work, friendship, the experience of beauty, the obligations of place — that lie deeper than any political settlement and that political ideology, especially in its utopian forms, characteristically threatens.

Key Takeaways

• “The Permanent Things” is the phrase, drawn from T. S. Eliot, that Russell Kirk made central to American traditionalist conservatism.
• Refers to the enduring goods of human life — family, faith, work, beauty, friendship, the moral law — that political ideology cannot supply and totalising programmes tend to dissolve.
• The defence of the permanent things, not the pursuit of any political programme, is the proper end of conservative politics on the Kirkian view.

History And Context

Eliot’s original use is theological as much as political. The 1939 essays argue that the alternative to a Christian society is not a neutral society but a pagan one, and that the work of preserving the permanent things requires explicit attention because the modern social tendency is to dissolve them. The phrase was taken up in the late 1940s and 1950s by the small group of American intellectuals — Kirk, Richard Weaver, Peter Viereck, Eric Voegelin — who were rebuilding a conservative vocabulary distinct from the libertarian and the new dealing alternatives.

Kirk’s 1969 book treats the permanent things as the defining concern of conservatism, and the various ideologies of modernity — Jacobinism, Marxism, doctrinaire libertarianism, technological progressivism — as their enemies. The argument is not that these ideologies are wrong about every empirical claim they make but that they presuppose a flatter ontology of human goods than the conservative is willing to grant.

The Conservative Position

The category does specific work in conservative argument.

First, it denies that political life is the master discipline. The permanent things are not produced by politics; they are received and transmitted by families, churches, communities, schools, and workshops. Politics at its best preserves the conditions under which these can be received and transmitted; politics at its worst attempts to replace them. The conservative scepticism about the scope of political ambition flows from this distinction.

Second, it provides a criterion for distinguishing conservative from non-conservative reform. A reform that helps the permanent things — strengthens families, defends religious liberty, protects beautiful places, sustains good work — is conservative even if it requires legislative innovation. A reform that injures the permanent things, however much it advances some other political good, is not. This makes Kirkian conservatism procedurally less rigid than its caricature; the question is always whether a measure tells in favour of the permanent things or against them.

Third, it justifies the conservative emphasis on imagination and aesthetics. The permanent things are largely apprehended through imaginative encounter — with literature, with liturgy, with landscape, with the inheritance of common life — rather than through propositional argument. This is why Kirk’s conservatism gives so much weight to the literary canon and to the aesthetic environment of cities and towns, and why Roger Scruton, working in a parallel English idiom, made aesthetics central to his political philosophy. The defence of the permanent things is, partly, a defence of the conditions under which they can be perceived.

The constructive implication is a politics oriented less toward the construction of a new order than toward the preservation and repair of the inherited one. This is the disposition Oakeshott called conservative; it is what Kirk meant by the temperament of a gentleman in the older sense — a person formed by, and protective of, the inheritance.

Differing Positions

Progressive critics treat the doctrine as a polite name for resistance to needed change — that what the conservative calls “the permanent things” is in many cases a particular historical settlement that benefited some and not others. The reply is that the permanent things are not identical with any particular settlement; the family is permanent, but no particular form of the family is, and the conservative defence is of the underlying good, not of contingent arrangements.

Libertarian critics have noted that Kirk’s category is internally vague, lacking a procedure for resolving disagreements about what is and is not permanent. The reply is that practical wisdom rather than algorithmic procedure is the relevant faculty; the demand for a procedure is itself the rationalist mistake the conservative diagnoses.

Within Christian conservative thought, theological critics have argued that Eliot’s original usage was specifically Christian and that secular adoptions of the phrase risk losing the theological substance. Kirk’s later writing acknowledges this; his Catholicism deepened across his life and the permanent things in his mature usage are tacitly underwritten by a theological metaphysics.