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.