11 Essential Conservative Thinkers You Won t Read in College. (But Should )

Transcription

1 11 Essential Conservative Thinkers You Won t Read in College (But Should )

2 Imagine your classroom experience introduced you to the full range of important thinkers, not just the progressive ones. Imagine you had access to great ideas and books not on the typical syllabus to guide you in your intellectual journey. Chances are you ve read something by Karl Marx or Friedrich Engels (and it s good you did). Maybe you ve even read Foucault or Chomsky. But what about leading thinkers on the right? Have you ever heard the names Frédéric Bastiat, Russell Kirk, or William F. Buckley Jr.? These make it into very few classrooms and when they do, they re often dismissed as rigid ideologues or racist bigots. But Bastiat was renowned for his defense of human rights, Kirk for his work in the genealogy of conservative thought, and Buckley for his provocative interviews with thinkers of every stripe. If you ignore thinkers on the right, you won t understand how certain core ideas like individual liberty and free enterprise shaped America. And you won t fully grasp the heated debates that dominate our culture today. This ebook introduces you to 11 essential conservative thinkers spanning three centuries and hailing from several countries. They often disagree with each other. You ll disagree with some of them too. But in getting to know them, you ll get the education you deserve.

3 Edmund Burke ( ) The father of modern conservatism This Anglo-Irish statesman offers wise counsel for confronting facile, superficially appealing programs of radical reform. In his richly persuasive answer to the extreme rationalism and utopian politics of the French revolutionaries (see his Reflections on the Revolution in France), Burke advanced a key insight: Tradition, institutions, and folkways contain crucial knowledge about wise modes of peaceful living. These gains were hard-won over centuries, and reformers sweep them away at their peril. The Burkean impulse in American conservatism continues, especially among social conservatives skeptical of the sexual revolution and nationalists worried about the transformative effects of massive, low-skill immigration. Frédéric Bastiat ( ) Defender of free markets and free people This French essayist and parliamentarian was one of the most effective exponents of classical liberalism. He brought core economic truths to the fore and offered deeply principled defenses of the rights of the human person. In his masterwork, The Law, Bastiat criticized the state worship of absolutists and reactionaries as well as the pseudo-scientific plans of socialists and revolutionaries. He exposed common economic and political fallacies (many of which are still common today) and urged political thinkers to imagine themselves as citizens, not would-be philosopher-kings, reengineering their fellow men as a gardener shapes topiary. His timeless arguments and clear and lively writing are well worth reading today.

4 Alexis de Tocqueville ( ) Making democracy safe for liberty This French aristocrat traveled to the United States in the early 1830s to explore a republic whose founding revolution had unfolded so differently from France s. His work shows how the centralization of power in the hands of the few had hollowed out civil society in France before the Revolution (The Old Regime and the Revolution) and how Americans had created a new and vibrant, faith-friendly social order (Democracy in America, which has been called at once the best book ever written about democracy and the best book ever written on America ). But Tocqueville also offered prescient warnings about how the rise of a centralized bureaucratic state could weaken that social order. This democratic despotism, he warned, would weaken liberty. Wilhelm Röpke ( ) The moral foundations of the market economy This German economist articulated the economic and moral benefits of the market economy. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, he refused to toe the Nazi line and became the first German professor fired for his ideas. He fled the Gestapo to exile, first in Turkey, then in Switzerland. A friend of Friedrich Hayek and influenced by Ludwig von Mises, Röpke advanced Austrian, free-market economics. His writings on the market economy helped shape West Germany s remarkable post World War II recovery, known as the German economic miracle. Röpke termed his own work economic humanism because he was concerned with the nature of man. He is often described as offering a third way that preserved market freedom while protecting the social capital on which ordered liberty rests.

5 Eric Voegelin ( ) Resisting the utopian temptation In The New Science of Politics, this German-born political philosopher and intellectual historian diagnosed a crucial wrong turn in modern political thought: a Gnostic rejection of the order of reality in favor of invented utopias and violently messianic politics, as seen in communist and fascist movements. Voegelin had firsthand experience with such movements: he fled the Nazi occupation of Vienna to come to the United States via Switzerland. His great lifework, the demanding Order and History, attempts to trace the connection between political structures and theological worldviews, beginning with ancient Egypt. A key insight: for Voegelin, the Hellenistic breakthrough of philosophical reason should be treated as analogous to the Jewish revelations recorded in the Old Testament. (Pope Benedict XVI would echo this idea in his famous Regensburg Lecture.) Harry V. Jaffa ( ) Philosopher of the American regime This American political philosopher was the most distinguished U.S. student of Leo Strauss. He translated that thinker s mostly critical and analytical work into concrete assessments of U.S. history and principled prescriptions that strongly influenced major strains in American conservative politics. Jaffa s most important book was on Lincoln, Crisis of the House Divided. In it he countered previous conservative thinkers, asserting that Lincoln represented a revival of Classical political philosophy. Jaffa considered the assertion of individual rights in the Declaration of Independence as the culmination of Western political thought, in continuity with medieval and ancient models. The more philosophical neoconservatives trace their intellectual lineage to Jaffa.

6 Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn ( ) Radical critic of leftism Dazzlingly erudite, this Austrian-born aristocrat was a scholar, teacher, lecturer, and writer. In his National Review column, his books, and his lectures all over the United States, he showcased a classical liberal distrust of intrusive government along with a European traditionalist s love for the distinctive, historic, and hierarchical. In his influential book Leftism: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Marcuse, he traces the political right and left further back than their traditional origin in the French Revolution. For him, each is grounded in a profound human instinct: the right, in the impulse toward independence, diversity, and competition; the left, in the herd instinct seeking conformity, equality, and safety. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that Nazism was a right-wing movement, Kuehnelt-Leddihn showed that it stood together with communism on the left. Frank Meyer ( ) The fusionist In most nations, religious defenders of traditional morality and advocates of free markets and small government end up in opposing political parties. Tensions between these groups are rising in GOP circles today. But the fact that they ever formed a coalition in the first place can partly be traced to the work of Frank Meyer, an ex-communist convert to classical liberalism who became one of the most influential editors of National Review. President Ronald Reagan credited Meyer with fashioning a vigorous new synthesis of traditional and libertarian thought. That synthesis, often called fusionism, became the foundation for modern American conservatism. In his landmark book In Defense of Freedom, Meyer argued that the modern secular state was the enemy of religious liberty, personal virtue, and economic dynamism. Bible readers and Ayn Rand fans alike should see the dignity of the human person as the starting point of decent politics.

7 Russell Kirk ( ) Conservatism s genealogist Russell Kirk served the newly birthed post World War II conservative movement as its genealogist. At a time when self-satisfied liberals dismissed conservatism as a set of irrational impulses, Kirk proved them wrong. In his landmark work The Conservative Mind, Kirk traced a coherent tradition of conservative thought in the Anglo-American world, beginning with Edmund Burke and continuing through the cultural criticism of T. S. Eliot. Kirk s The Roots of American Order went further back, tracing the key principles of the ordered liberty Americans cherish to the ancient world, biblical revelation, medieval syntheses of faith and reason, and Reformation polemics. In The Politics of Prudence, Kirk rebuked neoconservatives for falsely imagining that American liberty could be imposed on foreign countries that lacked the deep roots of order he had unearthed in the rest of his work. William F. Buckley Jr. ( ) The man who built a movement Buckley was the organizational genius who knitted together the disparate strands of antileftist thought and activism into a thriving conservative movement after World War II. His first book, God and Man at Yale, announced him as a rising star with its critique of the (by today s standards quite mild) leftist and atheist bias of Ivy League educators. He went on to found National Review, serve as the first president of the group that became the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, write a widely syndicated column, and conduct erudite television interviews on Firing Line, a program that ran for decades. Intelligent, quick-witted, and charming, Buckley helped introduce serious conservative ideas to a mainstream audience while working tirelessly behind the scenes to build a conservative movement.

8 Patrick J. Buchanan (1938 ) Conservative populist In his three campaigns for the presidency (the last as the Reform Party candidate), Buchanan laid the groundwork for Donald Trump s insurgent candidacy. For three decades, Buchanan has been the most cogent voice for responsible populism in the conservative movement. A senior adviser to Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, Buchanan embodied the Cold War anticommunism and social conservatism that formed a key part of the Republican coalition, as millions of working-class Americans moved away from their traditional Democratic Party affiliation. Buchanan protested how little social conservatives seemed to be getting in terms of substantive policy for their unwavering support. A longtime columnist and television personality, Buchanan focused much of his later writing (such as The Death of the West) on the transformative cultural and political effects that mass, low-skill immigration is exerting on America. That issue became central to Donald Trump s campaign, as did the skepticism Buchanan brought to neoconservative efforts to export American values via military intervention.