Fascinating Coverage of Key Players and Ideas
Intercollegiate Studies Institute • 1996 • 467 pages • $24.95
“We see so far because we stand on the shoulders of giants.” In a nutshell, this is the major lesson to be learned from The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America: Since 1945 by George Nash. First published 20 years ago, this tome breathes life into those “giants of conservatism” and the battles they waged not only against the dark forces of leftism, but at times against one another.
That the internecine struggles of conservatism occupy a large part of this book should come as no surprise, given that conservatism was less a coherent movement than a coalition of three movements: libertarianism, traditionalism, and anti-communism. The Second World War had just finished giving each of them a pounding. To fight the war, governmental powers were swollen to unprecedented levels utterly inconsistently with libertarian notions of limited government; the ghastly carnage of that conflict shook the faith of many in the superiority of the Western tradition; and diplomatic intrigues plus the power vacuum caused by Germany’s defeat left Stalin’s Soviets the most powerful force in Europe.
Yet some thinkers saw these events not as a death knell, but rather as a wake-up call. The insight that the rise of totalitarianism was the logical conclusion of seemingly benign accretions of state power was the core message of Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. Like the first crocus when the snow still covers the ground, this book was a harbinger of future events. These included the founding of institutions as well as the proliferation of scholarship aimed at furthering the cause of freedom. Indeed, the Foundation for Economic Education and The Freeman loom large in this story and Nash devotes several pages to their early days. The contributions of Mises, Hazlitt, Rothbard, Ropke, and Friedman, among others, also receive their due.
If libertarians blamed the rise of big government for most ills of the twentieth century, traditionalists found greater fault in the realm of ideas. Richard Weaver, in his book Ideas Have Consequences, drew a straight line from William of Occam’s fourteenth-century denial of the existence of universals to the twentieth century’s moral relativism and denial of ultimate truth. Eric Voegelin, Leo Strauss, and Russell Kirk were other major contributors to this strand of conservative thought. While these thinkers berated libertarians for failing to venture beyond the realm of economics, the libertarians responded by accusing traditionalists of not standing for anything in a principled way. Frank Meyer sought to find common ground between traditionalist and libertarian camps by emphasizing “reason operating within tradition.” Despite Meyer’s efforts, however, the insistence of many traditionalists on using the state as a vehicle for the promotion of virtue kept them at odds with libertarians.
The third element of the amalgam known as conservatism were the cold warriors. The threat that communism posed to both limited government and traditional values was particularly obvious to those who had witnessed its depravity from the inside. It was from the ranks of those who could not answer in the negative the second half of the question, “are you now or have you ever been a communist?,” such as Whittaker Chambers and James Burnham, that sprung the fiercest anti-communists. The conflict between the cold warriors and the libertarians arose over whether it was appropriate to jettison many American freedoms in order to preserve the rest from communism. Many libertarians correctly pointed out that this was a false dilemma. Fortunately, history proved them correct.
The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America: Since 1945 covers all this and much more. I found it a fascinating story and a great way for anyone taking an interest in conservative or libertarian ideas to get to know the key players. Political junkies be forewarned, however. You will find very little politics here: mainly discussions of the controversy over Senator Joseph McCarthy, the Warren Court’s landmark decisions, and the states’ rights aspects of the civil rights movement. This book’s forte is ideas—their origins, connections, and consequences.
Having read the first edition of this book 20 years ago, I got even more out of it the second time around. However, a major disappointment was finding that to deal with the important events of those two decades, the author could muster no more than a 13-page epilogue. While he manages to fit a lot into those 13 pages, including the blossoming of right-wing think tanks, the impact of neoconservatism on the movement and the paleoconservative response, and the rise of the Religious Right, his discussion of paleolibertarianism was skimpy. He also all but ignores the impact of talk radio, an end run around the liberal-dominated news media that, while not originating new conservative ideas, played a major role in disseminating them. These lacunae notwithstanding, this book remains an authoritative source of information of those who have done so much to put liberalism on the defensive.
