Three Pillars of Order: Edmund Burke, Samuel Johnson, and Adam Smith

An excerpt from the collection Redeeming the Time (ISI Books, 2006), by Russell Kirk, at The Russell Kirk Center.

"Classic Kirk: a curated selection of Russell Kirk’s perennial essays

"A Note from the Editor

"In this lecture first delivered at the Heritage Foundation, Russell Kirk discusses the high intellectual achievements of the renowned British thinkers Edmund Burke, Samuel Johnson, and Adam Smith. While allowing for their differences with each other, Kirk contends that they were joined in upholding the beliefs and practices that maintained a beneficial tension of order and freedom in the commonwealth. '[P]ermit me to suggest to you, very succinctly, how these three men of the latter half of the eighteenth century explained and defended that social and moral order which endures to our own present troubled decade.'"

[Update] See Edmund Burke, "Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol", Gateway to the Great Books (10 Vol., 1963) (10 Vol., 1963) volume 7

See Samuel Johnson, Preface to The Plays of William Shakespeare (1765), edited by Samuel Johnson and George Steevens, in Gateway to the Great Books (10 Vol., 1963) (10 Vol., 1963) volume 5

See Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, in Great Books of the Western World (first edition, 52 Vol., 1952) volume 39 and (second edition, 60 Vol., 1990) volume 36.