A little over a decade ago as an undergraduate at Washington University in St. Louis I started a campus conservative paper called the Washington Witness. It’s still going, at least intermittently. I’ve continued to contribute the occasional piece, such as this one, since beginning to make a living out of what I used to do for fun. This primer on postwar conservatism was written four years ago; I reproduce it in light of recent discussions about teaching conservatism.

Believe it or not, Washington University once awarded academic credit for the study of conservatism. It was just for one semester, for a sophomore honors colloquium taught by visiting professor Paul V. Murphy, author of The Rebuke of History: The Southern Agrarians and American Conservative Thought. The class was not, of course, an exercise in advocacy: it was not teaching conservatism, but examining an overlooked area of American intellectual history. My impression from auditing the course was that Murphy was probably not a conservative himself. Nevertheless, he gave a fair and surprisingly broad survey of the 20th-century Right.

Scattered here and there in other courses one can find a few conservative or counterrevolutionary texts: Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, perhaps Joseph de Maistre’s St. Petersburg Dialogues. On the whole, however, a student who wishes to familiarize himself with right-of-center thought must do so on his own. But where to begin? The literature of conservatism is vast and, like any vast body of literature, is largely full of rubbish. One could read wonkish tracts and screeds by talk-radio personages all day long and never learn a thing about serious conservatism.

Even among thoughtful men and women of the Right there are real and often bitter differences of opinion as to what constitutes genuine conservatism. But the five books below come as close to being canonical as any text can: one might disagree with particular passages in these works, but each made an indisputable contribution to the formative stages of the modern Right — and each tends to be revisited whenever conservatives seek to return to their intellectual roots.

Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (1943) (pdf)

by Albert Jay Nock

In the midst of World War II, the American Right had reached its nadir. The two great causes for which individualists — few called themselves conservatives back then — had fought were lost. After the horrors of the First World War, they had fiercely opposed U.S. involvement in European wars or conflicts elsewhere, for that matter. And they battled against Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal at home. These two efforts had a common denominator: the individualist Right of the ’30s and ’40s was opposed to the aggrandizement of government and agreed with the radical journalist Randolph Bourne that “war is the health of the State.”

Albert Jay Nock was not a leader of this anti-war, anti-statist Right; he was fond of quoting Jefferson to the effect that if he could not go to heaven but with a party, he would not go at all. But Nock was in several respects the individualists’ lodestar and most articulate voice. In 1935 he had published a book called Our Enemy, the State, a comprehensive statement of the Old Right’s informal creed. The decade before he had been the editor of The Freeman, one of the most influential political weeklies of the day-smaller in circulation than The Nation or The New Republic, but more highly esteemed than either.

Collectivism was ascendant in the 1940s, with the apparent success of Communism abroad and the entrenchment of FDR’s welfare state and wartime direction of the economy at home. In politics, and also in culture, the 20^th-century had already proven to be the era of the mass man. But The Memoirs of a Superfluous Man offered an uncompromising vision of an alternative: men like Nock might be rendered “superfluous” by the 20^th century, but they could still hold on to their principles and their personalities. Nock’s book, which was really more of an outline of his intellectual development than a conventional memoir, was pessimistic in outlook, but proved enormously heartening to nascent conservatives: they did not have to accede to collectivism, endless war, and vulgarity. Orwell’s 1984 would not be published for another five years, but in substance Nock’s Memoirs showed conservatives that they could say no to Big Brother in all his forms.

In the Pacific Theater of Operations, a young infantryman named Robert Nisbet “practically memorized” the Memoirs. A draftee named Russell Kirk, stationed in Utah, similarly took the book to heart. It soon became a favorite of a prep-school senior named William F. Buckley Jr. as well. All three young men would become prominent figures in the rise of postwar American conservatism. Nock’s works would also provide inspiration for such staunch libertarians as journalist Frank Chodorov and economist Murray Rothbard.

Memoirs of a Superfluous Man itself is a peculiar book; latter-day conservatives are likely to bristle at Nock’s intermittent criticisms of marriage and organized Christianity. The author had been a married man and an Episcopal minister at one time, finding neither to his liking. The social conservatism that has become popular in the last three decades is largely absent from Nock; but a high-culture conservatism and a Jeffersonian emphasis on limited government (so limited that Nock called himself an anarchist) abound in the Memoirs‘ pages.

The Road to Serfdom (1944)

by Friedrich A. Hayek

Perhaps surprisingly, considering their devotion to the free market, the individualists of the ’30s and ’40s had, by and large, little formal economic training. They were thus at a considerable disadvantage in attempting to do battle with academic Marxists, socialists, and proponents of the mixed economy. And again, by the mid-’40s the battle seemed to have been lost altogether. The situation was even worse in Europe, where fascism and Communism alike endangered free-market economists — and so those who could fled to Great Britain and the United States.

Britain was Hayek’s initial destination, where he taught at the London School of Economics, and in 1938 he became a British subject. He was alarmed, however, by the popularity of socialism in Britain and at what he would call in preface to the 1976 edition of The Road to Serfdom “the complete misinterpretation in English ‘progressive’ circles of the character of the Nazi movement.” Beginning in 1940, in his spare time when not working on matters of pure economics, Hayek set about writing his own interpretation of the rise of totalitarianism. The project took on new urgency with the intensification of World War II. “I felt that this widespread misunderstanding of the political systems of our enemies, and soon also of our new ally, Russia, constituted a serious danger…. Also, it was already fairly obvious that England herself was likely to experiment after the war with the same kind of policies which I was convinced had contributed so much to destroy liberty elsewhere,” he wrote in 1956.

Hayek’s attempt to explain how socialism and statism more generally could lead to totalitarianism, a new serfdom, issued in The Road to Serfdom, dedicated in all sincerity “to the socialists of all parties,” whom Hayek hoped to dissuade from their ill-conceived project of planning the economy. The book met with success in Great Britain, but at first no one in the United States wanted to publish it — in part, at least, for ideological reasons. One publisher called the book, “unfit for publication by a reputable house.” Finally, at the urging Fritz Machlup, another free-market economist who had fled Europe, in this case for the United States, and University of Chicago economics and law professor Aaron Director, the book was published here by the University of Chicago Press. And The Road to Serfdom, by a then-unknown Austrian economist, written for a British audience, became a runaway American bestseller. Within a year it had gone through seven printings.

Hayek’s book is not an abstruse work of economics. It is breezily written, and it has as much to say about the deformation of human character under socialist and totalitarian regimes as about statist economic and political policies themselves — “there is literally nothing which the consistent collectivist must not be prepared to do if it serves ‘the good of the whole,’ because the ‘good of the whole’ is to him the only criterion of what ought to be done. The raison d’etat, in which collectivist ethics has found its most explicit formulation, knows no other limit than that set by expediency.”

Hayek was not, as some mistakenly think, an advocate of unbridled laissez faire. There are passages in The Road to Serfdom, particularly where his discusses social insurance, where he sounds like a social democrat. For the most rigorous defense of the free market, one must turn to Hayek’s mentor, the great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises and such works of his as Human Action, or to later students of Mises such as Murray Rothbard and his Man, Economy, and State. But for his exposition of how collectivism and State intervention in the economy can lead to totalitarianism, Hayek remains invaluable.

Ideas Have Consequences (1948)

by Richard M. Weaver

It was in part in hopes of duplicating the success of The Road to Serfdom that the University of Chicago Press published Ideas Have Consequences four years later, with a then-large publicity budget of $7,500 in support of the book. But the book was a sales disappointment, at least at first; a year after its release, Ideas Have Consequences had sold fewer than 8,000 copies, barely exhausting its first printing. In years to come, however, sales would hold steady, and the book has been in print almost without interruption for over sixty years now.

Weaver, a professor of English at the University of Chicago, considered the title Ideas Have Consequences “hopelessly banal”; his own title for the work had been The Fearful Descent, until his publisher persuaded him that their choice would sell better. Today conservatives who have never so much as opened Weaver’s book cite its title in support of any number of political initiatives and PR campaigns. But the ideas at the heart of the book are much more grand than that; while touching upon rhetoric, music, and foreign policy, Ideas Have Consequences is at root a work of metaphysics.

The book was Weaver’s attempt to come to grips with the moral failures of the West that had lead to the Second World War. He located the source of the rot in the abandonment of belief in universals, a development Weaver traced all the way back to the fourteenth century. For proposing such a thing, Weaver is sometimes the butt of ridicule from people who have not read Ideas Have Consequences; he’s a crank, they say, who blames the purported decline of Western civilization on the nominalist philosopher William of Ockham.

The case actually presented in Ideas Have Consequences is more nuanced than that. Weaver rather tries to show that there are metaphysical assumptions behind everyday concerns — he recalls, for example, Plato’s interest in the morality of music and the potential for the written word to subvert thought. Indeed, Weaver’s chapters on mass communications and journalism, on the virtual-reality machine — made not of wires and plastic, but of words and ideas — that he calls the Great Stereopticon, are profound and prophetic, more relevant today than they were when Weaver first wrote them.

Despite its grand subject matter, Ideas Have Consequences is an accessible book, in large part thanks to Weaver’s moral intensity. It’s also a short book, under 200 pages. And it’s perhaps the best short introduction there is to the most important insights of conservatism

Witness (1952)

by Whittaker Chambers

Of all the works on this list, Witness would seem, at first glance, to have aged the worst. More than any of the others, it is an artifact of the Cold War. At least, at first glance it is.

Chambers was a prominent journalist of the ’30s and ’40s, eventually becoming a senior editor at Time. Before that, however, he had been a card-carrying Communist — and a spy. When he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1948 to testify about his knowledge of Soviet espionage in the U.S., Chambers named names. One of those he named, and accused of passing classified documents to the Soviets, was Alger Hiss, an adviser to FDR at Yalta, Secretary General of the Dumbarton Oaks Conference that chartered the United Nations, and, by 1948, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Hiss denied the accusations and was later charged with perjury.

The Chambers-Hiss hearings became arguably the first critical episode of the Cold War within the United States itself, dividing the country between those who trusted Hiss — by and large, liberals and the genteel — and those who believed Chambers’s accusations. Congressman Richard Nixon first rose to prominence as a defender of Chambers and accuser of Hiss. The entire saga–which included two perjury trials for Hiss and a civil suit for libel against Chambers — presaged, as some would have it, the era of McCarthyism, not only in pitting conservatives and anti-communists against “anti-anti-communists” and liberals, but in foretelling a populist backlash against the Eastern establishment. For some Americans, the Johns Hopkins and Harvard educated Hiss represented an alien ruling class just as much as he did a foreign power. He was convicted in his second perjury trial, with liberals insisting then — and some insisting even now, despite the evidence of declassified KGB and U.S. intelligence documents — on Hiss’s innocence.

Witness tells Chambers’s side of the story, making it a crucial document in early Cold War historiography. But Witness is about much more than Soviet espionage, the Hiss trial, and Chambers’s own tormented life. Chambers cast the Cold War as a struggle between “two irreconcilable faiths,” not Communism or capitalism, but faith in man or faith in God. “The crisis for the Western world,” Chambers writes, “exists to the degree in which it is indifferent to God. It exists to the degree in which the Western world actually shares Communism’s materialist vision.” There is a religious and spiritual battle behind the geopolitical one.

The Conservative Mind (1953)

by Russell Kirk

As late as the mid-1950s, the most conservative Republicans — including Mr. Republican himself, Ohio Sen. Robert A. Taft — still preferred to be called “liberal.” That word was already well on its way toward being redefined from denoting in politics a commitment to small government to a predilection for big government, but the term retained enough cachet that politicians were reluctant to abandon it. “Conservative,” by contrast, was in circulation primarily as a pejorative, a moniker for flunkies of big business. William F. Buckley Jr., who in 1951 had shot to fame with the publication of God And Man At Yale, and who would found National Review in 1955, still called himself an individualist. The largest conservative youth organization was the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists (which later re-christened itself the Intercollegiate Studies Institute).

Russell Kirk’s book, together with Peter Viereck’s Conservatism Revisited (1949) and Clinton Rossiter’s Conservatism in America (1955), began the rehabilitation of the word. No one could mistake Kirk for a spokesman for the Ford Motor Company. The young instructor of history at Michigan State College was openly critical of industrialism in The Conservative Mind, his survey of the Anglo-American conservative intellectual heritage.

The subtitle of Kirk’s book, From Burke to Santayana (and later, in revised editions, From Burke to T.S. Eliot) suggests the scope of the author’s ambition. In an era when it was often taken for granted that America was a fundamentally liberal nation, a creation of the Enlightenment and revolution, Kirk argued that there was a persistent, if diversified, conservatism running from the English statesman Edmund Burke through the American Revolution, the Constitution, both the Federalist John Adams and the Jeffersonian John Randolph of Roanoke, through John C. Calhoun and Nathaniel Hawthorne all the way to such 20^th-century thinkers as Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer Moore, and T.S. Eliot. Furthermore, Kirk argued that this conservatism was closely akin to the English conservatism of Coleridge, Disraeli, and George Gissing.

The Conservative Mind is nothing less than monumental, and at over 500 pages covering often obscure figures, the work is not as accessible as some might like. But it is engaging, particularly for the reader who takes the time to savor its carefully wrought prose, and Kirk’s book is the fons et origo of today’s traditionalist conservatism — though it speaks hardly at all to what goes by the name of conservatism in partisan politics today. For Kirk, conservatism is above all the negation of ideology, a defense of a stable and organic society. Schemes for reforming government have relatively little place in such an order as Kirk envisions. But without a knowledge of Kirk, the political conservative is surely lost, a sucker for charismatic (or not-so-charismatic) leaders and policy prescriptions that promise to make centralization painless.

Further reading

Conservatives are woefully deficient in their knowledge of their own intellectual history. A student who reads these five books will only have covered the basics, but he will be better educated about who he is and what he believes than nine-tenths of his fellows. Above all, the knowledge he gains will be reward enough in itself, but at the lower level of practice he will be a better advocate for his beliefs and a better analyst of the world than those who are content to do but not think. Naturally enough, the liberal who is interested in understanding the modern Right as it understands itself will also profit from this course of study.

To supplement these five books, the next most essential work is George H. Nash’s The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, a thorough overview of the journalists, academics, and other men of ideas who shaped conservatism as it existed from the close of the Second World War to the 1970s. Nash relates extensive details about the five authors I’ve discussed, as well as the controversies that have roiled the Right in the last sixty years.

For a brief thematic discussion of conservatism, Robert Nisbet’s Conservatism: Dream and Reality, is second to none. Paul Gottfried’s The Conservative Movement, second edition, offers a concise and penetrating account of modern conservatism in its institutional as well as intellectual forms. The Conservative Bookshelf, published last year by Chilton Williamson Jr., a former literary editor for National Review and current books editor of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, presents short essays on fifty books of prime importance to conservatives, including the five above and such surprising (but worthy) selections as works by Edmund Wilson and the environmentalist Edward Abbey.

Filed under: Books, Conservatism, academia