Conservatism Item ID: #279The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945Product Information:
Item DescriptionThe Conservative Intellectual Movement in America was first published in 1976, and revised in 1996, George H. Nash’s celebrated history of the postwar conservative intellectual movement has become the unquestioned standard in the field. This new edition, published in commemoration of the volume’s thirtieth anniversary, includes a new preface by Nash and will continue to instruct anyone interested in how today’s conservative movement was born.
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I am a true blue conservative, but this book left me wanting more. The time period it covers is 1945-1973ish… But the conservative movement was still in its infancy during that time period. Its insights weren’t that great. It ignores a lot of the big trends.
I recommend Right Nation and Upstream.
This book is the roadmap for exploring the roots and branches of American conservative political philosophy. Oddly enough, I first read it when it came out 30 years ago, and then reread when the 30th anniversary edition came out. It still holds true. One can traces the lines of fusionism, see where Frank S Meyer and Russell Kirk were coming from, and go back to their own sources—Burke, Hayek, Weaver…and of course, the ringmaster, WFB, is always present.
I read this book in a college history class and it changed the way I thought of myself and the progress of conservatism in America. It will challenge your views of conservatism whether you are liberal or conservative since it explores a broad range of views that make up the conservative movement from the traditionalism of people like Antonin Scalia to the Libertarianism which has spawned a new political party. Conservatism isn’t a monolithic movement but a fragmented one that comes together on some issues and splits on others. If you want to understand the intellectual movement that underlies politial changes of the past 30 years, this book is for you.
What Louis Menand does for Pragmatism in THE METAPHYSICAL CLUB, Nash does for Conservatism in this superb intellectual history.
I have to make one thing quite clear, as the author does in the Introduction: This is a book about intellectuals, not about politicians and campaigns. It’s a book about the academic roots of modern American Conservatism, not to be confused with so-called neo-Conservatism or Evangelicalism. No, no, this is not a book about religion.
Nash proposes that modern American Conservatism comes from the gradual convergence of three important, critical analyses of American society after World War 2. First, the Libertarians reacted against what they believed was encroaching state control (i.e. FDR’s New Deal) on personal freedom. Second, the Southern Agrarians believed that industrial society’s ultimate goal was banal, mindless consumerism, and that traditional, hierarchical models of society should be preserved to protect what is sublime, honorable and sacred. Third, the anti-Communists reacted directly to the threat posed by new authoritarian regimes on legal [particularly property] rights. The author believes that Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, and William F. Buckley led those schools of thought, respectively. Nash suggests that the excesses of the McCarthy era (on the Right) and the late 1960s (on the Left) encouraged these great minds to come together, on common ground, to debate the fundamental issue: What’s worth saving?
How Nash tracks the debates and intellectual cross-connecting of these ideas is masterful and exhilarating work. Though originally published in 1976, the third edition includes a new final chapter, a new introduction, and extension of the original thesis into the 21st century. This is required reading for anyone wishing to better understand what it means to be American… Left, Right or Center.
This is a very good book, but readers should be aware of what is and isn’t prior to picking it up. Apparently an expanded version of the author’s PhD dissertation, this book covers the intellectual aspects of the Conservative movement from the immediate post-war period to the early 1970s. It is not a history of conservatism as a political or social movement. The author does not cover the last 30 years, though there is an appendix chapter added in the late 80s or early 90s which is surprisingly dated. Within these limits, this is a fine book. Nash does a very good job of showing the diversity of conservative intellectuals, describing the libertarian, conservative Catholic, traditional elitist, and backward looking romanticism that came to make up important features of the modern conservative movement. He is quite good in describing the broad variety of important conservative writers, the interactions between the different strains of the movement, how they developed institutions like the National Review to support the movement, and provides some information about their broader impact. This book is very well written with particularly good combinations of relevant quotations from primary sources and the author’s descriptions. The scholarship is excellent, based both on a careful reading of a large volume of literature and quite a few interviews.
There are some significant limitations. Despite Nash’s serious effort to give a broad view of the conservative movement, this is something of a National Review version of the conservative movement. There is no treatment of fundamentalist conservatism or its theological underpinnings. Also symptomatic of the limitations of Nash’s approach is the treatment of Ayn Rand. The latter is discussed only in the context of the reception of her writings by figures that Nash considers central to the movement. Rand may not have had very good ideas (one critic, cruelly but accurately referred to her as a pseudo-philosopher) but she did have ideas and has been influential. Its likely that more people have come to the libertarian version of conservatism via the Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged than through the pages of the National Review. Nash’s view of the mainstream of the movement tends to ignore popular but important figures like Rand.
Another problem with Nash’s narration is that he often fails to provide context for the writings under discussion. Nash is generally sympathetic to the conservative movement and many of the writers he discusses. This is generally good because he takes them seriously and writes insightfully about their work. There are times, however, when some critical distance would be useful. For example, it would be worth mentioning that the Spanish “christian social order” much admired by L. Brent Bozell was Franco’s regime, or that J. James Kilpatrick’s “able polemic” of 1957 was an effort to defend Jim Crow, or that the influential Richard Weaver’s inspirational view of the antebellum American South was a romantic delusion.